Serps – a Briefing on Executive Retirement Benefits
Upper Saddle River, N.J. – July 18, 2006 – There continues to be a barrage of media reports concerning new excesses relating to executive compensation. Recent revelations have concerned back dating of stock option grants, grossing up bonus payments to cover related taxes, and extremely lucrative retirement benefits .
A Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan (SERP) is a type of retirement plan that is extremely common, and has long been used to replace retirement benefits which would otherwise be reduced because of ERISA limitations. SERPs typically take the form of a predetermined level of post-retirement income replacement. The percentage of income that is guaranteed has been increasing, and it is not uncommon to see 80% or more. Although most plans contain a carve out for Social Security and other company-provided retirement benefits, the benefit is typically not tied to performance.
In the case of for-profit, publicly-traded companies, many organizations already have other forms of Long-Term Incentives (LTIs) that have the potential of providing extra funds to enhance retirement benefits without the need for SERPs. Privately-owned, for-profits tend to utilize fewer equity-based plans, but still offer other opportunities for capital accumulation that can assist with post-retirement income. Although these may take the form of SERPs which are time based, many companies have also adopted some form of performance based LTI, most commonly referred to as phantom stock plans.
Phantom stock plans typically provide participants an opportunity to share in the upside growth of the company. These may pay out at the end of a fixed performance period (3-5 years), or be career-based and paid at retirement. They typically provide motivational value to achieve desired growth and profitability objectives, while defusing criticism that the plan is a “give away” based on longevity only.
In the not-for-profit (NFP) world, the use of variable compensation is rapidly growing as an important component of overall compensation. There is a pronounced move towards the adoption of true formula-based incentive plans, with defined goals and objectives. While the belief has been that not-for-profits have no “profits” to share, this perception has long since been replaced with the recognition that there are definable and measurable goals, and that if achieved, will advance the organization’s mission and also trigger the payment of variable compensation. Similarly, the achievement of longer-term goals can also be used to fund enhanced retirement benefits, that can replace or at least supplement the typical SERP.
Paul R. Dorf, Ph.D., APD
http://www.articlesbase.com/human-resources-articles/serps-a-briefing-on-executive-retirement-benefits-113383.html
6 Important Tips for Beginners Search Engine Management (sem)
Search Engine Management, or “SEM” is defined as the process of building and marketing a web site with the end goal of improving it’s position in the search engine results. This process includes a few key techniques:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the process of building a site that is “search engine friendly”. Pages that are optimized for search engines will provide content that is highly relevant to it’s targeted keywords and make it more appealing to both the search engines and the users.
Advertising or Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click advertising is used within the search engine’s results as a way for advertisers to get their website on the first page of the search results on a cost per click basis. This is done in 2 ways, with search results and with content results. The search results return PPC links for a specific search, and content results provide links within sites that contain content relevant to the advertiser’s website. You bid on the top spots against other advertisers.
Link Building:
Link building is used to improve both visibility and the apparent quality of your site to the search engines. Having a link to your site on sites that have content highly relevant to the content on your site gives the search engines the impression that your site is more important to that particular topic.
1. Choose the Right Domain Name
Any good website starts with a good domain name. Picking the right domain name that is both easy to remember and related to your site and top keywords is very important. It is also very common to chose a business or organization name for your domain. Your domain name should have a few key characteristics:
- Try to include one or more of your top 5 Top Keywords
- Make your domain unique
- Go for Dot-com domains if possible unless another extension suits your brand
- Make it Easy to Type
- Make it Easy to Remember
- Keep the Domain Name as Short as Possible
- Relate it to your product and/or brand
- Avoid Copyright Infringement
- Avoid Hyphens and Numbers
As you do your research (Point #2), you will find numerous blogs and sites that discuss choosing the right domain names.
2. Do Plenty of Expert Research Before Getting Started
In order to create effective sites for SEO and to get the most out of your PPC dollars, you will need to learn as much as you can about both topics prior to getting started.
The SEM experts online provide literally thousands of websites out there that can tell you all you need to know about SEO. You can learn a lot from what other people have put on the web for free, before moving onto other other avenues. What’s right for you may not be what’s right for others. Here are a few links to get you started.
seobook.com
webconfs.com
There are also several references that can be purchased online, but until you really know what you want, I would suggest that you should stick to the free stuff.
3. The Search Engines Themselves Provide a Wealth of Information
Google in particular provides a great deal of information from webmasters on their support site.
google.com/support/webmasters/
Reading through these pages will allow you to find some key dos and dont’s for search engine optimization. It also
introduces you to Google webmaster tools which has been provided for you to track your site’s performance with Google and offers helpful hints, specific to your site.
4. Build a Home Page That is Full of Your Top Keywords
One of the most important factors for search engine engine optimization is “Keyword Density”. Keyword density is defined as
the amount of times a keyword shows up in the text of your site or home page. This metric is used by the search engines to
rank your site’s relevance to the keywords input by the user. The more times your top keywords appear on your site, the more
relevant your site will seem to the search engines for those keywords. There are several tools on the web that will allow you to check your site’s keyword density. Here is a link to a simple one that I have used.
webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php
5. Go Slow on Pay Per click Advertising
Over the past few years, the top PPC providers have changed the way they look at advertising. Google in particular has added a relevance factor into their algorithms that new gives you a quality score for each keyword you add to your campaign. This quality score takes into account the content of your landing page and the content of your advertisement. This has been done in the hopes that the user is provided with more relevant ads for their keywords. If your site is not highly relevant to the keywords you have chosen, or your advertisement does not appear to be relevant, your minimum bid is raised significantly. This can prove to be somewhat frustrating to the advertisers at first, but once you get going and learn how to manage your ads and bids, you will be able to create relevant ads and reasonable bids for your keywords.
It’s best to start slow with PPC advertising. Set yourself a budget and work within that budget. Try a few different landing pages and different ad content to see what happens. Don’t get caught up in it if you see a lack of clicks and keep increasing your bid to gain position on your competitors. You should have an idea of what each click will be worth to you; Stay within that range.
6. Link Building
There are several ways to go about link building for your site. Some of them, like paid links are not recommended and the search engines frown on this form of link building. You can use link exchanges to build links to your site, but building a huge cache of links on your site can turn out to be cumbersome and some say that the search engines don’t put as much weight on these types of links. The best way to build links is through providing relevant linkable content for your site viewers. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
- Create lists of top 5, top 10 or top 100 somethings that relate to your site content
- Perform surveys relating to your content
- Write and syndicate articles
- Create a blog
- Use Social Networks like Facebook and Myspace to promote your site
Hopefully these few beginners tips to SEM will start you on your way to #1 placement in the search engine results.
Duane McLennan
http://www.articlesbase.com/sem-articles/6-important-tips-for-beginners-search-engine-management-sem-571224.html
Do It Yourself SEO: Ten Search Engine Optimization Tips (Part 1)
Using a professional search engine optimization service can sometimes be expensive. However, if your budget is tight and you have a basic understanding of web page construction it is possible to optimize your own website without hiring an SEO specialist. For those who would like to give it a try, here are ten “Do it yourself” search engine optimization tips:
1. Think about SEO right from the start
Many people plan, design and build their websites without giving any thought as to whether their site is search engine friendly or whether it will be capable of attracting traffic in organic search engine results. At the last minute, after most of the site has been built, they try to optimize their site, not realizing that this work should have done throughout the planning and building process.
It is far better to think about search engine optimization at the very beginning of the process. For example, if it is at all possible, choose a domain name that will allow you to include your most important keyword or search term in your URL. If you are selling bicycles then you would do well have to a domain name like www.xyzbicycles.com . And don’t stop with the domain name; include your keywords in your file names as well. For example, a sub-page of this hypothetical site might be www.xyzbicycles.com/road-bikes.html
2. Design your site with both search engines and users in mind
Your site should be easy for your human readers to understand, but it should also be easy for search engine robots as well. If you want to see what a search engine robot will “see” then view your site in a notepad document or use the html view of the popular web editing programs.
If you have used gif images to render your headlines or other important text, then this text will not be picked up by the search engine robots. In addition, if you have designed a site that is entirely in a flash format, you will not be providing the search engine spiders with much “food,” or searchable text.
Furthermore, if you have long strings of java script and complex style instructions in the head section of your html page it is better to put the java script in an external file and the style instructions in a separate CSS (cascading style sheet) file, in order to give prominence to the actual text of your web page.
3. Write individual title tags for each and every page of your website
From the standpoint of search engine optimization, the single most important sentence on any web page is the title tag. The title tag gives the search engine a good indication as to what your page is all about. Incorporate your main keywords or search phrases into your title tag, and keep them at the very front of the sentence. These keywords are more important than your company name (unless it is Coca Cola!). So our XYZ Bicycle Company might have a title tag that looks like this Bicycles: Racing Bikes, Mountain Bikes, Road Bikes, Bicycle Accessories from XYZ Bicycles.
The title tags of each of the sub-pages of the site should reflect the main content of those pages. Never use the same title tag for all the pages of the site.
4. Write a concise description tag for each of your web pages
Just as the title tag is the most important sentence or phrase on any page, the description tag is the most important paragraph on any page. Summarize the gist of your page in two or three pages, again incorporating the keywords and search phrases for which you think people will use when searching for your site. A description tag for the home page of the XYZ Bicycle Company could look like this: “The EXZ Bicycle Company manufactures mountain bikes, racing bicycles, road bikes and bicycle accessories. Our bicycles are distributed and sold around the world. “
5. Put your keywords into headers and headlines on your page
Your human readers and search engines alike need prominent headlines in order to understand what your page is all about. While a human reader only needs to see the headline in a large bold text, search engines distinguish the headlines, which they regard as important indicators of the page, by noting which phrases are encased in header tags such as , , , etc. H1 is considered most important and your first headline should be labeled with this tag. If the header tags make your copy look too big, then you can change the size of the headers by creating style instructions that will render the headlines into sizes that are consistent with the look and feel of your site.
In part two of this series I will give the remaining five tips for do-it-yourself search engine optimization.
Donald Nelson
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/do-it-yourself-seo-ten-search-engine-optimization-tips-part-1-80688.html
Discover How to Use Internet Marketing Online Advertising Ppc Search Engine to Boost your Sales & Earn Big Money on the Internet at Home!
The internet marketing online advertising Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine is one of the most reputable ways to make money online at home. You’ll discover how to use the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine strategy to boost your sales and earn big money on the internet at home.
READ THIS: If you are looking for the most effective reputable ways to make money online from home. This is a real home based business opportunity for internet entrepreneurs to earn big money online at home.
Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is by far the most affordable form of advertising available. Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is a flourishing business that by 2008 is expected to reach $8 billion. Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is about producing leads. Creating leads will help potential buyers find the specific website that will provide them with the product or service they need.
However, Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising does not end there. It is important to understand that although Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising generates leads, it is also important for users to find high relevant information at the website they are directed to. Information is a valuable asset in Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising that is often left unchecked by many websites. Keep in mind that users are more likely to purchase products or services from a company that provided them with the necessary information they needed in the first place.
Also, my experiences show that normal users are looking for the information on the internet rather than buying any products or services. Don’t get me wrong! I am trying to say that you have to provide high quality & relevant information wrapping around the quality products and services. Once people find the information they are looking for, they might make a purchase on your website.
You’ll discover why you have to use the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine strategy to boost your sales & earn big money on the internet at home below.
One of the MAJOR benefits of Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is that it drives qualified & laser-targeted traffic to a specific website. Users that click on a PPC ad are those in search of a particular product or service. This helps eliminate unnecessary clicks from non-prospective buyers that only produce expenditures not profits. Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is also the fastest way to get a reasonable return on investment and it is one of the most effective reputable ways to make money online.
A bidding process is used to establish the price of a specific keyword. Typically, the budget for Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising may be a $100 to $100,000 depending on the number of keywords used. These prices can skyrocket in just minutes as more and more sites bid for the same keyword thus causing the prices to jack up.
PPC ads are placed alongside search engine results to which they are relevant. The highest bids for a specific keyword or phrase gets top billing on the search engine results page. Getting top placement provides greater odds for a PPC ad to get clicked by a qualified searcher.
Personally, the effective keyword research is one of the major key successes in the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine. You have to learn how to do your own keyword research effective and find more niche keywords. I highly recommend you to start learning and discovering your own keyword research tool at http://www.zKeywordTool.com
There are the significant elements of internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising you MUST know. You’ll find the elements of how to use effectively the online advertising PPC here.
Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising involves three basic elements; constant monitoring, response analysis and refinement as the essential factors involved in the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising. Proper management of Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising can result in big profits for a website.
Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising makes it possible for websites to monitor the productivity of each PPC ad they place. This gives a website the make money home based opportunity to turn off any PPC ad that is not performing at its best. Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising provides the most economical way for a site to advertise on the World Wide Web.
The cost entailed in Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is dictated by the clicks made on a particular PPC ad. The number of clicks made on a PPC ad is subtracted from the initial amount paid by the business to a search engine company. To minimize cost and maximize return on investment, a business will have to regularly monitor its internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising campaign.
You’ll discover how to use effectively internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising below.
Many home based online businesses are unable to get the most out of their internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising campaign. The internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising involves a lot more than just bidding on the highest keywords. Information is a main concern of many online users.
Providing online users, with hard-to-find, high relevant & quality information they need, will help bring about a more long-term relationship with an online user that will more likely result in a sale.
Information provided to online users may be in the form of a newsletter or e-zine that online users would likely sign up for. Sign-ups may be enough to cover the expenses of an internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising campaign.
Sign-ups also help generate leads for websites as they build opt in list from qualified online searchers who clicked their PPC ad. Getting personal information from qualified online searchers can be done in a variety of ways such as offering freebies for surveys or signing up for newsletters.
The internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising is a continuous process that requires hands on supervision and a thorough understanding of Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engines. Businesses may opt to hire the services of a professional or do Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising with in-house experts. Whatever course of action is selected, a business is sure to get a huge return on investment with Internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine advertising.
Finally, I am sure that the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine is one of the most effective and reputable ways to make money online. You’ll earn big money on the internet at home if you know appropriately how to build highly PPC campaigns for your long-term home based online business. The online advertising PPC is a real home based business opportunity and required strategy for people who are looking for earning big money on the internet at home.
Learn more about the internet marketing online advertising PPC search engine and start earning big money on the internet at home now. You’ll discover great articles, news, tips, techniques and secrets of how to build highly profitable ppc campaigns.
zmilliondollars
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-business-articles/discover-how-to-use-internet-marketing-online-advertising-ppc-search-engine-to-boost-your-sales-earn-big-money-on-the-internet-at-home-121071.html
Knowing Black Hat SEO
1. Cloaking
When website or web pages are set up to display different content for a search engine spider versus a human user. Cloaking delivers one version of a page to an Internet user and a different version to a search engine. The cloaked page is packed with keywords and phrases that the website wants to be highly rank for so.
It is done by cloaking programs that compare the IP address of the requesting party to a database of known IP addresses from specific search engine spiders. If the IP address matches one on the list, it serves a page that was specifically written for the search engines.
There are good reasons for cloaking as well, such as targeted advertising, but if you are trying to manipulate your rankings in the search engines then your site could be penalized or banned.
2. Spamming (Keyword Stuffing)
“Stuffing” long lists of keywords into the content and the code on a page that makes the page unreadable.
Ever seen a web page with a very awkwardly written first paragraph where a certain word is repeated ad nauseam? Here’s an example:
“We sell the best father’s day gifts for father’s day. If you like to celebrate father’s day we can help with the best father’s day gifts for father’s day.”
It’s obvious that the page is trying to rank well for “father’s day gifts.” This is keyword spamming or stuffing but it is just the tip of the SEO iceberg; there is probably keyword stuffing happening in the code: in the meta tags, invisible text, alt tags, title tags, comment tags, etc. If the word or phrase is repeated too often Google can place a filter to reduce the site’s rankings or simply ban the site. Keyword density can be tricky but, as a general rule, Big Oak shoots for 3% to 12% of all text on a page to be our targeted keywords.
3. Hidden Text
If text or links are invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders then they are considered hidden.In the past people would simply make the text too small to read by using a 1 point font or make it the same color as the background. Now that search engines have built in algorithms to combat that, spammers are using cascading style sheets (CSS) to hide text or using tags set to not display text on the page. It is boils down to this: it is considered hidden if the text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders.Search engines can easily spot this today so it is best to avoid it altogether.
4. Doorway Pages
Pages that solely exist to rank well in the search engines. Sometimes these pages are ugly, containing paragraph after paragraph of meaningless text. Most the time doorway pages are orphaned pages meaning they are not part of the site’s regular navigation.
A black hat SEO firm may use software to generated doorway pages. They plug a few keywords in and the software proceeds to generate pages where much of the content is duplicated from other pages on the site except they swap out the keywords.
5. Redirect Pages
Keyword-stuffed landing pages that quickly redirect to the real page. These pages don’t necessarily contain content that any human would be interested in. They are meant to show up high in search engine results pages (SERPS). When you click on one of these pages from the results, you are redirected to another page–usually a high-pressure sales page. In other words, the page you click to see is not the page you actually get to read.
Sneaky redirection pages are set up in groups. They target similar and related keywords or phrases. The only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a false sense of related linking. The redirect can be automatic, done with a meta refresh command or through other means such as mouse moving while on the redirect page.
6. Duplicate Content or Websites
Setting up multiple websites with the same content or having several pages on a site with essentially the same information but different keywords inserted here and there. You see the duplicate content method a lot with travel-oriented sites. A “template script” is written then regional terms, such as state or city names, are swapped out on each page.
Of course, someone may have copied the content on your site and put it on their site. The search engines do not make any distinction on who had the content first. Make sure no other site is using your content. You can do this by performing a search using some of your text with quotation marks (“) around it. If you do find someone is using your original copy visit here to learn more about copyright infringement: http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
7. Code swapping
Submitting a text-only version of a web page to the search engines in an effort to gain high rankings for that page. Once the desired positions within the search engines are achieved the search-engine friendly text page is swapped out for a content page designed for human visitors. This will only work for a limited time as the search engine spiders will eventually return to that page and find its content has changed.
8. Linking to Unrelated Sites or Bad Neighborhoods
Link campaigns are good thing when done correctly; we would say they are a necessity in today’s SEO world. But linking to bad neighborhoods is a sure way to lose your ranking. If you aren’t careful about who you are linking to you can easily disappear overnight. Basically, while you may be ethical and do everything right, linking to someone who isn’t can be considered guilt by association. Always verify your links to other sites. Make sure they have page rank and are indexed by Google. Avoid linking to any sites that use spamming techniques to increase their search engine rankings. Regularly checking outbound links from your site and removing any offenders is a good idea.
A few site types to avoid:
1. Free-for-all link farms
2. Adult sites
3. Gambling sites
9. Link Farms
Typically a network of sites that are all interlinked to one another and have no other benefit but to try to boost the link popularity of the sites. Link farms are mostly used to try to increase the Google PageRank of a site.
Well after everyone saw the Black Hat techniques everyone also should see What does Google say?
“Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users,” Google says, and they list some bullet points on avoiding being banned.
1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
2. Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.
4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
6. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
All the best,
MES
Miskandar Eko Sembodo
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/knowing-black-hat-seo-80744.html
Social Networking – a Great Way to Build Quality Backlinks for Free
A few months ago I decided to check the status of my campaign to get a PR 3 ranking in 90 days by generating thousands of backlinks. I entered my url into the backlink checker and to my surprise, the majority of my backlinks were generated by social networking sites. That was not what I was expecting, to tell you the truth I thought that my article marketing efforts was going to yield me the best efforts, but that was not the case. Social networking and Social bookmarking sites was responsible for 40% of my total backlinks.
In the past my best backlink tool was the use of article marketing. I generated backlinks using article marketing by submitting 3 articles to a minimum of 50 directories every week. Using this strategy I was able to triple my backlinks because many of the articles that I submitted was picked by other directories or website owners looking for content for their websites. The process of generating backlinks while using article marketing generally takes few months. Lately with the use of a social bookmarking software, I am able to generate hundreds of backlinks daily.
The social bookmarking software I am talking about is able to post to hundreds of social networking and social bookmarking websites like Digg, Facebook, Sphinn with just one click. Being able to submit to so many high PR ranking social networks is like having the best of both worlds. One benefit is that you will receive high quality backlinks and the other hand you will also generate more traffic to your website. I use these social networks to announce every time I submit a new blog post or article to the directories.
In addition to the obvious possibilities of traffic generation and backlink building, there are other advantages to social networking websites. If you are lucky enough to have your article or blog post make the front page of some of these social networks, you just might need a new server. There have been many stories of servers crashing due to too much traffic from social networks such as Digg, Sphinn and Stumble Upon.
It took me a while to learn how to take advantage of these social networking websites, but I am glad I took time out to catch up with the rest of the world. Web 2.0 strategies has introduced internet marketing to whole new masses of people, adding these strategies to my backlink building arsenal has created better results with less time.
Marc Marseille
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/social-networking-a-great-way-to-build-quality-backlinks-for-free-671103.html