Most of the people I talk to are finding it very difficult to make ends meet. It wasn’t too long ago when a family could be supported by just the father working outside the home. Then about thirty years ago it started being necessary for the mother to work also.

Now a days it is necessary for for both parents to work outside the home plus earn some extra money on the side. The purchasing power of workers is decreasing at a fast rate. The reality is it just is not possible for most people to support the lifestyle they desire by working for someone else.

This is why it is becoming necessary for everyone to look into a home based business. Why don’t you work for yourself instead of making someone else rich. There are literally thousands of businesses you can start at home. The following ideas are just a few to get your juices flowing.

One very popular and lucrative home based business involves using the internet for an online business. There are many possible ways to make money online including selling products or selling other people’s information. Another way a lot of people are making an online income is with an Amazon or Ebay store.

Another great online business idea is to write articles or posts for other webmasters. If you like to write you can do very well with this model. The opportunities are endless on the web and it is only going to get better.

If you aren’t interested in working online then there are many more traditional businesses you can start at home. More and more parents are working now and this is putting a strain on caring for the children. There is always a need for young child care or you could start a business caring for children after school until their parents get off work.

If you can repair things around the house you could always start a handy man or handy woman business. Another area people spend money in is their pets. A woman near my home has created an entire business around a pet hotel for people vacationing. The path to be successful work at home job lies in seeing a need and filling it.

There is one more work at home business that the right type of person can make a lot of money with. People have been building great incomes in network marketing for decades. The most important aspect of an MLM business is to get good people signed up in the organization under you.

The reality to remember with MLM is nobody gets rich hawking products door to door. The big money is made by bringing people into the plan and building your organization that way. If you can create a good down line with hard workers you can really take off with this business model.

The harsh reality is the economy is evolving and we have to evolve along with it. The old days of finding a position with a corporation and retiring after 30 years with a big pension are gone. As time goes we will all have to find ways to make our own money instead of relying on a pay check. Start today to look into some of the ideas above and start your own business at home.

Fundamentally, SEO is the study of how Search Engines organise sites on their organic search lists. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. All the rest have naturally been put into position. The Search Engines look at a site’s relevancy and value when establishing its position in the hierarchy.

Naturally our target is the top of the first page! We’re unlikely to get noticed if we’re number 8 on the tenth page! We can’t know for sure about all the criteria Google and the like use to rank us. They keep it a closely guarded secret!

Because of this, much technical expertise has developed around the subject. On the one side you have SE’s like Google deliberately filing technology patents in many different areas. This makes determining their ratings methods more complex. Then to challenge that on the other hand is a growing SEO (optimisation) sector. Optimisation specialists test, quantify and evaluate a myriad of indicators that affect a site’s ratings.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. Geography and demography are also factors that influence page ranking. To understand factors relating to off-page, please see our additional editorial.

SE ‘On Page’ Optimisation

It’s possible to change the pages of your website to make them ‘friendly’ to the Search Engines. It’s not too complex – it just requires setting your website up the right way. For instance: Utilising H1 and H2 Header Tags, Internal Linking, Keywords and Meta Tags.

That might sound like gobbledy-gook, but don’t be alarmed! Actually, though on page work is straightforward it probably accounts for little. In fact, it is widely believed that it has very little effect at all anymore. Search Engines used to credit on page factors in the past. That’s not how it is now though.

If a site has a lot of in-bound back-links though, on-page factors can still be beneficial. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

A Bit of Advice… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

And Yet – The phrase ‘Southampton Car Insurance’ only brings in three hundred thousand. (Presuming that was my market). Though still large, this is a much more manageable figure.

The extended phrase makes all the difference. Trying to get a ranking for CAR INSURANCE would take a huge amount of time and money. My competition would be the huge corporations. Not the best way to do things at all!

It’s far better to choose phrases that are more specific to our offering. In SEO terms, they’re referred to as Long Tail Searches, as they include several relevant words. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. They’re usually around three or four.

We like to start Search Engine Optimisation using terms that yield less than 500K. However, if the websites at the top of the listings aren’t well optimised, we may stretch to a higher count. We’ll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll hit the popular phrases in three to twelve months. This is a nicely targeted approach. We’re looking for people who want to buy, so we use terms with a commercial intention!

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. The SE’s respond well to this. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. It’s worth driving specific search terms to these pages – they often have links to lots of other product pages. The home page shouldn’t be the only one to receive back-links. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.