If you are starting an e-commerce business or a brick and mortar store, you will likely need transaction processing services.  Many providers exist so the actual process of securing a provider and understanding how things work might be a little confusing.

• If you want to gain a better understanding of transaction processing, here’s a good entrepreneur’s guide to merchant accounts.

• If you are only interested in obtaining a provider at a good rate, we suggest you go to TransFS. It’s a comparison shopping marketplace for small businesses.

There are several different tasks an accounting firm or auditor performs for a company. Typically, accounting firms or auditors review a company’s financial statements on an annual basis. The three types of review are as follows: (i) Audited, (ii) Reviewed and (iii) Compilations.

First it’s important to note that the quicker your website is up and running, the better. By having your website up sooner vs. later, you are giving google, yahoo, miscroft and other search engines the chance to start indexing your website as soon as possible. Even if your website is not perfect, you will be better off in the long run.  Several factors that affect your search ranking include:

• Content

• Meta Tags

• Keyword Tags

• Links - incoming and outgoing

1. Content

• Subject Focus - If your website is only about chocolate chip cookies, you likely will have a good chance of being ranked higher when a user searches for chococlate chip cookies because most of your content will all be related in some fashion to chocolate chip cookies. 

• Unqiue Content - People want to get unique perspectives and learn from various sources - all with different opinions.  it’s important to try and generate fresh and new content.  It will help you establish loyalty with your visitors. 

2. Tags

• Title Tags - a title tag describes the content for a given page. A title tag should contain the keywords for the given page. You should strive to keep title tags to ten words or less.

• Meta Tags

  • Description - approxiately 200 characters (be careful - 200 characters NOT words).

  • Keywords - This should be approxiately 30 words and be the words you think best represent the content on the page as well as the terms that search engine users may search on.

3. Keywords

• Aggregate Keyword Density - be careful not to overuse keywords in the body text of your pages. The percentage of keywords / total words should typically be 5% - 20%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. We will be posting another article soon on this topic.

• Individual Keyword Density - again, be careful not to overuse each keyword in the body text of your pages. The percentage of each keyword / total words should typically be 1% - 6%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. Again, we will be posting another article soon on this topic.

4. Links

There are two types of links - inbound links and outbound links.

• Inbound Links (aka Incoming Links, Backlinks) - These are links from other websites to your website.

  • From Trusted Sources - Search engines value inbound links fairly highly because they are hard to fake, especially inbound links from trusted and popular websites.  Some examples of highly trusted websites include Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Be careful of link farms though. These could actually hurt your traffic.

  • Anchor Text - visible hyperlinked text on a page.  This should be on descriptive and relevant to the link. For example, if you are linking to a link about SEO Optimization Factors, a potential anchor text option would be:

    • “You should try to learn more about SEO optimization so you can drive website traffic.” In this example, the “SEO optimization” is the anchor text.

  • Link Stability - Once again, links farms are bad and generally create turnover in links. By having a stable base of links, it helps to validate that your website isn’t just linking to link.

• Outbound Links - These are links from your website to other websites.

  • Link Stability - By having a stable base of outgoing links from your website, it can help your ranking. You should avoid linking to link farms because this will hurt your website in search rankings. And, make sure you test your outgoing links to make sure they are still active.  Users will get annoyed with clicking a link and having it not work. 

5. Trust

A trusted website lets search engines know that the content it is crawling is of high quality. Once again, this is something that is hard to fake. Therefore, websites that are highly trusted such as Yahooor Google are able to simply setup a new page for some keyword and be ranked within a few days. Not sure about you, but I’m not that lucky. It takes a lot of time and investment to build upyour website traffic.

An employment agreement is a formal employment agreement that addresses key terms and conditions of a person’s employment. It’s also commonly referred to as a senior management agreement or SMA. The following issues are usually addressed in an employment agreement:

An engagement letter is a combination of items - it’s a proposal, contract and listing of services to be provided. It basically formalizes the relationships between a customer and service provider (such as consultant). Key items included in an engagement letter include the work to be performed, key project deliverables (e.g., presentation, written work) and timing / structure of any payments.