On Wednesday’s programme Paul Lewis and guests will invite your calls on saving and investing.
It has been a poor year for savers with many having to choose between low interest rates or locking their money away in longer term products.
In November the consumer prices index (CPI) rose to 1.9%, up from 1.5 per cent in October, further eroding the value of savings.
If you want to shape up your savings or consider new investments, why not put your question to the team?
Is your account paying the best rate of interest?
Have you taken advantage of your annual ISA allowance?
What about bonds or gilts?
Perhaps you would like to invest a regular amount each month.
Or maybe you are interested in putting some money into the stock market, how do you decide if you are comfortable with the risk that involves?
Whatever your question Paul Lewis will be joined by:
* Graham Hooper, head of marketing, Bestinvest* Clare Francis, site editor, Moneysupermarket* Justin Urquhart Stewart, managing director, Seven Investment Management

Finance Behavior
Payday Loans
Cameroun
Paul Ash
Hair Salon Winnipeg

A fundamentally important ingredient used by the search engines is the analysis of incoming links. While the science is quite sophisticated, the basic idea is this - if a web site is important and popular, it will have more links leading to it. The fewer outside links, the less important it is deemed to be - at least for this particular search variable.

The most basic links are those found on the search engines themselves. They will link to content and information on your site based on the keywords and updated information. Most search engines will allow you to submit your site directly to speed up the process and a few will even rank your site in exchange for a small fee. If you're in a rush to get things moving, consider these options, but otherwise stick to the free listings.

As well, there are a number of services available for generating links. A "link exchange" is a membership type program that puts your link on the web sites of other members and vise versa. This builds the number of external links and helps all the members equally. Some of these services will provide the links automatically (something like the Google system) and some will even regularly update and rotate links to enhance the effect. The better services will also allow you to choose links by category in order to keep your external links relevant. There's more details about linking strategies on my web site at http://themoneytreeguide.com You can also find a number of great resources there to help you optimize your link strategy.

Some link services are free and require you to put links on your site, too. Others offer a "one way link" service where you can pay to have others link to your site without having to put them on your own site. Although this is a highly recommended option, it can be a bit pricey, so start small and work your way up once you start generating income. The advantage is that by paying for one way links you get quality site placement, highly ranked sites and relevant links. The bigger search engines now recognize the link exchanges and will discount their impact on your ranking - one way links don't have this problem.

Brian Metcalfe

Once very simple (only Yahoo was worth submitting), the science of submitting sites to directories has become increasingly complex. There are numerous softwares, sites and services that take care of (or promise) submitting your site to the millions of directories existing today.

Unfortunately, the promise of "Be listed in 10,000 directories with one click" is blatantly false. If you want to be listed in PageRank Zero directories, an invitation to being banned, go ahead. And do not forget to give them a real email, for them to spam you forever.

Real, valuable directories do not accept automatic submissions for 2 good reasons:

- they need quality data that no software provides or guarantees.

- they need a human with a credit card, to whom sell something

Thus, they all have Humanity Tests, like the annoying captchas, or an email that must be read and acted upon.

The directories use different methods to admit new sites: Some require payment, some request a link exchange, that can equal better search engine (SE) ranking. Some require an easy-to-spam email address. A few accept your data for free without compensation: those who need quality links to improve themselves.

This is a classification of directories, according to their admission requirements:

-Really Free -Paid -Legitimate, but Request link exchange -Cheaters

Cheating Directories

So far, I list 8 types of Cheaters:

1-Says free and is not: After a long form-filling process, they deceitfully demand ransom for your time.

2-Requests link exchange and does not comply: they demand your publishing first, and they promise a reciprocal link that never comes.

In our experience, 70% of those who request a link do not reciprocate after 2 weeks.

3-Home page with high PageRank, indexing pages with zero PageRank: this is not necessary cheating, unless the PageRank is manipulated to flow somewhere else. Most directories start from zero, get PageRank 3 in the home after the first spidering, and do not pass PageRank to their inner directories until they climb to 5-6 in the home page. However, if links to other pages are regularly incorporated in the home page before and more prominently (H1, H2, Bold) than the client listings, the PageRank flows to the privileged pages.

4-Adds no-follow attribute to your links: this is a dirty trick. Check for the code in the source HTML

5. Adds exclusions to the listings in the robots.txt file

6. Gives no or low priority in the Google sitemap (usually, but not always, sitemap.xml). Please notice that Google Sitemap allows sitemaps with other names, and only the webmaster knows which is the good one. So, it .is easy to give low weight to the non-paying links.

7-Insert Javascript in the code that you need to publish: popups, redirects, Trojans

8-Delay 4-5 years publication for no reason: I am talking about Dmoz.org, of course.

The Ideal directories have:

-Fast navigation: fnding the right category is the most time-consuming part of submission to directories.

-No hindrances (some captchas are 10 characters long, have non-letter characters, and are almost illegible because of strange fonts, or low background contrast. What is wrong with only one character?

-Accept triangulation: Reciprocal links are no longer automatically accepted by Google as a sign of quality. Link triangulation or quadrangulation are better.

-Instant publication: ideally, a script checks your link, tests the reciprocal and publishes it.

-SEO-friendly: the directory shall publish your link in a spiderable location, with no restrictions.

-Thematic: there is no more room in the Web for generic directories. Who needs a better Yahoo or Google Directory? Instead, the web will always welcome a new thematic directory, complete and with specific tools for better quality results.

-Good PageRank

-Large number of indexed incoming links

-Listed sites receive some advantage: traffic or better ranking

Good Submission Tools:

The good submission tools, either desktop or web based, should have:

- good directory listing, attending the criteria defined above

- directory selection feature, allowing the site owner to submit only to those directories that fit his/her preferences and budget.

- semi-automated form-filling

- listing detection spider or checker

- tracking and reporting feature

Instructed Operator

An operator able to submit successfully to directories should be aware of the above items, plus have some knowledge of Web editing and FTP. He needs to be realiable, because you will give him access to your site user/password for the link exchange. In some cases, he will need a disposable email account with the same domain as is promoted.

Even with a good submission tool, expect to spend 2 full-time weeks submitting to 1000 selected directories (one every 4 minutes), with link exchanges. If you have cheap offshore labor that could amount to $300, plus $100 for one decent submitting tool.

Provided all these aspects are taken into account, submitting to directories is still the best way to obtain incoming links to any site. Combined with appropriate SEO, (almost) every time it results in better SE ranking.

by Juan Tello

Labels: Website Traffic

The very thought of getting the paperwork for taxes sends shivers up my spine, and the pain get all the more acute as the deadline of April 15th approaches. Mixed with the financial burden it entails, the month of April has always been a challenging one for me ( and for everyone else ,I suppose).

And in my confused state of mind I tend to forget that I can considerably reduce this tax burden if I keep some things in mind. On the way, I have learnt a few tricks about saving taxes. The most important is the personal money I spend on my business. Due to many reasons, I often meet certain business expenses by paying through my credit card. In the end when I prepare my tax papers, these cards are often taken as revenue. I don't have to tell you, that we have to pay taxes on what we earn. Therefore I end up paying for something, which I have not really earned.

Step one is to calculate all the money you have put into the business and carefully avoid making it a part of gross revenue. If you are running a small business, it is worth your while looking at a Pension Plan. Now, this has a two-fold benefit. One, your employees love it and two it saves tax. If you spend on a Pension Plan for your employees you are entitled for a tax credit of $500. This is quite a lot, when you consider that, the scheme provides for credit on your tax liability and not a deduction from your gross revenues. In effect, you pay $500 less tax. This is what I call eating your cake and having it too!

Each year the government comes out with some welfare scheme or other such program, for contribution to charitable institutions. If you are a regular contributor to any of these, you can claim some tax relief, this will be deductible from your gross income. Have you purchased a SUV during the past financial year? If it is over 6000 pounds you can avail yourself of a $25000 deduction, while on the balance amount you can claim depreciation. If it is non-SUV truck, you are not restricted to $25000 deduction. I am sure you have worked out the savings by now.

There are a host of other tax savings by way of deductions, exemptions and most importantly credit. Some states do not levy income tax, in which case you should try and save through the sales tax route. Costs on discrimination lawsuits can be taken advantage of by those involved in such cases.

It is sometimes tedious to work out all the deductions tempting us give up and pay up. But let me assure you that there are so many ways to save your money when you file your taxes, with so much money to save that it is worth your time. Especially when you consider that almost the same laws are applicable year after year. The first time may be the only time you spend your time, rest of the years you will know when and where to save.

by Andrew Jamaz

In order to create a successful web site you must have traffic or visitors to your site. Without traffic your perfect site is useless; it might as well not even exist.

Moreover, because traffic is an essential element of any successful site, many novice webmasters make the mistake of believing all traffic is created equal.

Huge mistake.

For if traffic is King; targeted traffic is God. All traffic is good, but there is a great distinction between ordinary traffic and targeted traffic. Someone clicking on a link to your site who is looking for the exact information or product you have displayed is said to be a targeted visitor. These are the kinds of visitors or traffic you must try to obtain in your marketing and link building.

Why?

Because targeted traffic is often the key to building a successful site on the web. Targeted traffic will greatly increase your sales conversions, bring back repeat visitors and help your site gain a prominent online presence.

So here are 10 targeted traffic building steps you can take:

1. Google Is God!

Only half-kidding but at least where targeted traffic is concerned, Google is still the all important being you should be worshipping online. Don't ignore the other two major demigods Yahoo! and MSN, but Google will deliver most of your traffic. Your website stats will point this out to you daily, so you must optimize your site for Google.

As a general rule make your pages Google friendly by only using one topic per page, include your keywords in the title, meta description and url for that page. It would also be helpful to have your main keywords in the first headline on the page and most experienced webmasters try to place their keywords in the first 90 words and in the last 25 words. Sprinkle your keywords and variations throughout the copy but don't keyword spam, just let the engines know this is what your page is about.

2. Target The Right Keywords

You must target the right keywords in order to get useful traffic to your site. You must first check the number of searches and amount of competition for your chosen keywords. You can use software like Keyword Elite or sites like www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ which will give you the Overture and WordTracker monthly stats to help you pick the right keywords for your site. Instead of picking highly competitive keywords, take the middle road and milk the 'long tail keywords'!

Most webmasters create a master keyword list for their site then branch off into sub-categories from this master list. For example, if you have a site on laptops your sub-keyword categories could be laptop accessories, laptop batteries and so on. Similar, most webmasters only develop their sites in a simple hierarchy with the homepage as the center with their major keywords as separate pages and then sub-categories branching out from these. Your webpages should not be more than three clicks away from your homepage as this will really displease the search engine gods!

3. Have Relevant Content

Perhaps what will appease the SE gods the most is relevant content. Your content has to be relevant to the topic of your site. Keep everything on topic and within the scope of your site.

Relevant, helpful content will also be the biggest magnet for targeted traffic. Surfers are usually looking for information, give them what they want and your site will reap the rewards. Original high quality relevant content will draw in targeted traffic to your site so make sure your have some good content to satisfy your visitors and the search engines.

4. Let The Search Engines Find You

Instead of submitting your site to the search engines, let them find your site. One of the best ways to do this is by placing your links on high traffic/spidered sites: on online forums matching your site's content, on social networks such as MySpace, YouTube, Squidoo... and on articles directories like Ezinearticles, Goarticles, and Ideamarketers. The search engines will follow these links and index your site before you even know it.

5. Use Traffic Modules

One of the most effective ways to bring in targeted traffic is to create traffic modules: whole areas of your site devoted to one sub-topic. For example, if you have a general site on cars, you could develop a whole section on a car-buying guide. Another section could be on car accessories, link all these pages together into a neat traffic cluster on your site. The search engines will love these closely grouped pages and reward you with lots of targeted traffic.

6. Use Articles

Don't forget article marketing, just because it has become extremely popular doesn't mean it has become any less effective. Writing short helpful informative articles on your site's topic is still one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your site. Place your links with your targeted keyword anchor text in the resource box.

Article marketing is an invaluable source not only of targeted traffic but also one-way links to your site. These links will help increase your rankings, especially in Google which considers each link as a democratic vote for your site and ranks each page with a PageRank PR 0-10.

Articles are also extremely important for pre-selling to your potential customers. These articles warm or soften up your prospective buyers to your sales pitch before they even reach your site.

7. Build Opt-in Lists

Most marketers and webmasters use opt-in lists to bring targeted visitors back to their sites. Instead of just receiving that visitor once, you can get repeat visits by using a simple follow-up system with an autoresponder. Studies have consistently shown it might take 6 or 7 follow-ups before a potential customer buys.

Building a subscriber list will also be helpful in creating a web community around your site. These community members may become your most targeted of all your visitors. Likewise, you should have a bookmark feature on all your pages, any repeat visitor is a targeted visitor!

8. Have Blogs & RSS Feeds

Make sure you have a blog and RSS feed attached to your site. This will not only bring in targeted traffic but your visitors can also subscribe to your RSS feed. This will bring targeted visitors back to your site. Use a free site like Google's own www.blogger.com or better yet create your own blog using free software such as WordPress.

9. Use Social Media

Build links and contacts in all the important social media networks such as MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. These social networks are a great source of very targeted traffic.

10. Use Multimedia

Perhaps the biggest opportunity to build targeted traffic is using video and audio media on your site. These will help personalize your message or content and build trust with your visitors. Video clips also have a great viral potential which will bring in traffic.

Sites such as YouTube, Google Video can help you get your message or content in front of millions of eyes overnight. Savvy marketers are already exploiting the traffic potential of this new multimedia trend overtaking the web, why should they have all the fun? You too, can take advantage of these free media sites and pull in targeted traffic to your site.

Of course, there are many more ways of getting targeted traffic to your site. But just using one or two of these techniques should increase your targeted traffic in the coming months. Appease the traffic gods by putting these steps into practice and see for yourself.

by Titus Hoskins

If you even remotely interested in the search engine optimization industry and want to start up your own blog, website, or another product that may generate revenue for you, now is the time to take initiative to start up your own article, revenue generating website. Many people do it all across the world and you do not have to be the exception. There is one simple step to become the number one spot on Google's search engine, and that step is by submitting articles.

You may ask yourself at this point how it would be possible for one to simply submit articles and get paid for it. That is a very good question and is asked by many people who do not fully understand Google's model for all of its customers yet. There is a process that you must follow, however, in order for your articles to generate revenue for you all day long. That process may come easily for some, although for most people it takes a little bit of effort.

The first thing that you must realize when dealing with Google's Adsense is that your articles are the main focus of the ads that they put on your website. Whether you know it or not, Google generates ads for your website so that more traffic will be attracted to their ads that they place on your website. In a sense, you can think of Google's Adsense as a sort of advertising for Google itself. Yes, once you start your own website and place Google ads all across it, you will be starting to generate revenue once someone starts clicking the ads that Google wants your website to display. However, this is not to say that you should click your own ads; that technique will only get you banned from Google itself and you'll be out all the money that you could have made with the help of Google.

After you have made a website with articles splashed all over it, the next thing that you must do on a weekly, if not daily basis is to add more articles to your website. As mentioned, the articles are the main focus of how Google decides to place ads on your website. What logically follows is that the more articles you have on your website the better. If you have many articles then Google will deem it necessary to place lots of ads on your website. However, the opposite is also true. If you are not very motivated and do not submit that many articles within a day or week, Google won't give you very many ads.

So the key to getting the number one spot on Google is to submit articles on a daily basis. If you cannot do all this work by yourself, you may consider getting a partner or even hiring the work to be done. Both of those things will cost money in the long run and you need to make sure that the costs do not outshine the revenue generated from Google. But that is a whole other story altogether. The absolute rule that you must follow in order to get the number one spot on Google is to submit articles on a daily basis and make sure that they are what Google wants for its ads!

by Jane Scaplen

feed aggregators are a dime a dozen these days, but Yahoo! Pipes can filter and process feeds in lots of fun and useful ways, no programming required. Today we'll make a master feed of all your online activity using Pipes.

Being the sort of guy who likes to use keyboard shortcuts rather than having to reach for the mouse all the time, I felt a bit hostile once I got my new Macbook Pro. I knew how to do task X or Y on Windows with a few keystrokes, but having moved to Mac OS X (read 10 not X, as I made the mistake!), I found myself feeling annoyed that I didn’t know my way around the OS smoothly. So I searched the Internet to find out about some of the more obscure shortcuts. Below I’ve listed and explained some shortcuts that a new Mac user, especially those coming from a Windows environment, may not be aware of. It’s definitely made my life easier, hopefully you’re a new mac user, these will be of use.

1. Forward Delete
On a Windows computer, the Backspace key deletes from right to left, where as the Delete key is used to delete from left to right (i.e. forward delete). But on a mac, there is no delete key (at least not the MBP). So at first I found myself clicking everywhere on emails to delete! So the solution: Fn+Delete. Simple!

2. Expose with F9
I found it annoying that I had to click Fn+F9 to bring Expose up. If I clicked F9, it would change the keyboard light intensity. So, the hardware F9 and the sofware F9 have to be swapped. This is how: Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse, click the Keyboard tab and check the box that says “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features”. Now when you press F9, it will bring Expose and when you press Fn+F9 it will change the keyboard light intensity. This is the same for the other keys like volume and display brightness. For example, the volume increase is situated on F5, which is used as the refresh button in browsers in Windows. By ticking the box mentioned above, you can use F5 to refresh you browser now!

3. Right Click

Windows users love their right click button! It just doesn’t make sense to have a computer without it! Well… Macs don’t! They have what is called a contextual menu, and it is evoked by control clicking. Now there’s two things you can do: First one works in Firefox (I couldn’t get it to work in other programs or in Finder). All you do is click and hold and very soon the contextual menu appeares. You can do that anywhere: links, tabs, bookmarks, etc. Other method, which works everywhere is done as follows. First, go to System Preference > Keyboard and Mouse. Go to the Trackpad tab (assuming MBP) and click the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click”. Now if you two-finger-click on the trackpad, the right click menu appears! So convenient, specially when combined with two finger scrolling.

4. Tab key
Again, whenever I faced a dialog box with buttons, I used the tab key to navigate between the buttons. On a webpage, this was also true. On a mac, you’ll probably get confused, as the tab key doesn’t do that! Again, head over to System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse, then go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and click the radio button at the end saying “All controls”. Now you can use tab to move around just like windows! Still one thing left… say you have the shutdown dialog box and you use the tab key to navigate to Sleep, if you press Enter, it will shutdown, even though the blue highlight is around the Sleep button. You have to press the Spacebar instead! Confusing at first!

5. Shutdown shortcut
Speaking of the shutdown dialog, you can bring it up using Control+eject. In Windows I used Win Key+U, then U again.

6. Maximise button and what it does
So you press the green maximise button, but it doesn’t maximise? Well, the button only maximises as much is neccessary. So, say you are reading a PDF document. If you zoom in on your document and then press maximise, you will see that the window will become large enough to hold the whole document. And if you zoom out and press the green button again, it will shrink to fit it. Again, different to Windows and needs some getting used to!

7. Alternative to minmise
We saw what the maximise button does, what about the minimise button? Well, it “sucks” (as I like to call it) the document to the dock. What is the point of minimising? To clear your screen, to get rid of clutter. So, you can try these two alternatives depending on the need. Either press F11 to see the desktop, or press Command+H to hide the current window, which is what I tend to do.

8. Moving menu bar icons
In Windows you can’t move the task bar icons (or I don’t know how), but on Mac, you can Command click them and move them around. Neat!

9. No Ctrl+Al+Delete ?
I always clicked that well known combination to see my RAM and network usage and see what applications are running. On the Mac, go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. Also, you can click Option+Command+Esc to bring up the Force Quit menu, if you need to quit any application that is not responding.

10. Cool shortcut combo
To finish off, I’l give a cool (relatively) shortcut combination. Clicking Control+Option+Command+8 will turn the screen in some sort of high contrast mode, but more like an X-ray screen! Try it, it’s fun!

Hopefully, at least there has been one tip that has been useful to you. Please share other tips and tricks that you know in the comments. It is always interesting to learn new things.