1 Quick Lesson on Payment Gateways

What is a payment gateway and how does it work?
When your e-commerce customer has "filled his or her shopping cart" and clicked the button that reads "Proceed to checkout" or "Submit order," your shopping cart software will calculate his or her total spent, including any extra fees, discounts, credits, and taxes. The resultant total is what s/he needs to pay you... but how? The usual means are either a credit card or debit card (which includes PayPal as well as bank-issued, Visa-branded or MasterCard-branded cards). Now you need to verify that the customer possesses this card, is in good standing with the issuer, and, in the case of a debit card, has sufficient funds to cover the transaction or, in the case of a credit card, has sufficient credit.
The payment gateway is an application that processes this credit card or debit card information. This software communicates with a payment processor, who handles the actual work of notifying the debit or credit card issuer and authorizes the payment, and sends through the information to the card issuer to deduct that amount from the cardholder's balance or charge his/her account. In its function, it is very like the credit card terminal you'll find in most bricks-and-mortar stores, where the customer swipes his/her card through the machine and, if it's a debit card, punches in a PIN.
The information transmitted to the payment gateway will have been encrypted via a Secure Socket Layer (commonly "SSL") encryption. The customer's information will have been entered through HTTPS protocol, also secure.
There is also something known as Virtual Payer Authentication (VPA), of which "Verified by VISA" may be the best-known brand. This adds yet another layer of security for the merchant. A new product, 3-D Secure, also looms as further help in confirming the identity of the customer for the merchant, since merchant and customer are not face to face and may in fact be separated by a continent or even be in different countries.
The total verification process takes only a few seconds. (Remember the old days, before e-commerce, when even an in-store transaction involving a credit card could take several minutes to verify?) Once the credit card or debit card usage has been verified, the transaction is completed and the customer is free to navigate away from the website, secure that his/her merchandise will ship shortly and that his/her credit card details are safe.
As for the merchant, she or he just rung up another sale... painlessly. Yes!

For more info on choosing which shopping cart would work best for your ecommerce business, visit: http://www.1AutomationWiz.com

Step by Step Guide to Attracting Inbound Links by Becoming an Authority

There is no better way to develop link popularity then by using step-by-step methods or guidance to attract inbound links than by becoming an authority within your niche. If you are using article writing as your primary means to attract links and subscribers this is easy to do. I personally submit 15 to 20 articles per day on several niche categories which in my market. Several of those categories I hold the number one authority position because I have submitted the most articles on that niche topic.

Once you have achieved this your readers and the market will see you as an expert in your niche or feel. If you are able to provide them with article content that solves a problem they are experiencing more than likely they will link to it from their blog or website, listed in a social bookmarking site or better yet send out a re-tweet through twitter. Each of these methods will attract a large amount of inbound links.

So how exactly do I do this? What are my methods to becoming an authority in each of my target niches?

Follow these steps:

1. Keyword research. Find out what words and phrases your niche audiences using when conducting searches on the top search engines like Google. By using the Google keyword tool you can easily find this information out. Strive to develop a list of 10 to 20 keywords and phrases in each of the categories you are targeting.

2. Article writing. By submitting keyword optimized articles to the top article directories online you can attract a large amount of inbound links and eventually link popularity. By looking at how many articles have been submitted by the top author within the categories you want to submit articles for you will know what topics to write on. Now the obvious takes over; writing more articles on that category than the top person. The easiest thing to do is find those categories within your niche with the lowest number of articles submitted. Focus your articles than around that topic and make sure that you are using the key words and phrases you developed in number one above when writing your titles and article content. Also make sure that you are writing about methods to solve a problem that your target market is experiencing. This is the information more than likely your readers will find it interesting and link to from their websites and blogs which will give you inbound links. Once you submitted enough of articles to claim the top spot in a category make sure you take advantage of that and list yourself as the number one author index category on whatever article directory it is. This will give you added the influence over your audience.

If you are out to attract prospective customers and develop your online presence and exposure, you owe it to yourself and the financial future of your business to learn everything you can about Internet marketing.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just finished my brand-new step-by-step guide to developing Internet marketing business success, "27 Habits of Internet Marketing Super Stars"

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For more information on this topic and author go to http://www.DrDaveHaleOnline.com

Internal Links - On Page SEO - How to Do it Right

One of the main reasons we do on page SEO is to communicate with the search engines. If you think of the code on your website page as being a conversation with Google, you can instruct the search engine to do what you want when it comes to indexing your website.

Internal linking is one important bit of conversation you can have with the search engine that will tell it exactly what keyword phrase you would like to be ranked for and which pages in your website are the most important. Here are a few guides to go by when creating your internal links.

Every page on your site should have a link to your main domain name. Linking to your main domain will tell Google that it is a very important page in the whole scheme of things.
Avoid naming your main page links as "home". Make the anchor text of the link your keyword. This will let the spiders crawling your site know that the keyword is important to the website because it is linked on every page.
Every page should also have a link to your Sitemap. This will ensure that the spider crawls through, and indexes, every page on your website. If you do not want the search engines to index a certain page, do not include it in your Sitemap.
When linking to your main domain name. Do not add extensions to it that are not necessary. ie: index.html.
If you use the www. in front of your domain name, make sure you do for ALL of your linking. Do not make some links with and some links without. The search engines see those as two separate destinations and you will not only water down the effect of the internal links, you will also create duplicate content in the search engine's eyes.
Create some deep links within your pages. Deep linking is when you link to any page within the site that is not the main page. Make these pages anchor text links to the appropriate related keywords.
If you follow these guides and create an internal linking system within your website, the search engines will not only index all of your pages, they will be indexed the way you want them to be. By having conversations with search spiders through your code, you will rank much higher in the SERP for your specific keyword phrases and get better performance from your website.

3 Important Things to Do For a Successful Dropshipping Business

The dropshipping business is becoming more popular as a convenient way to make money. It is a very fast-growing online business. The main reason for its immense popularity is the fact that you do not need a large amount of money in order to be able to start a dropshipping business. Below are three important things you can do to help you succeed in your online drop shipping business.

1. Find an authentic wholesale dropshipping company.

Perhaps this is the most crucial step in starting your dropshipping business. Make sure you are dealing with a genuine wholesale dropshipper. SaleHoo is a trusted source of authentic dropshippers, so make use of SaleHoo to find a reliable one. Do not automatically select the first one you find. Talk to as many drop shippers as you can and compare their prices and services. Review the feedbacks given by their customers so that you will have a good idea of their actual performance. Choose the one that can give you the best prices as well as good customer service.

2. Build your website

eBay is a very convenient auction site to use and it is easy to sell your products on this site. However, you will be competing with many other sellers. You can sell on eBay if you want to. If you prefer, you may also choose to have your own website.

If you decide not to sell on eBay, you will have to build your own website. You can do this on your own. You can also hire a professional to design one for you. Your website should be attractive and well designed. It should have a name that is catchy, easy to remember, and tells about the products you sell. The layout should be good so that people will find it easy to navigate and find the items they want.

3. Market your selling site.

You cannot expect people to easily find you on the internet. It is necessary for you to market your site or your products. Even if you are selling on eBay, you must find ways to steer people to your auction or your selling site. Tell your friends and relatives about your site. Market your site by using email advertising, blogs, or forums. Social networking sites are very popular and they can also be used to advertise your site. Post informative articles and helpful tips on your site to attract more people to visit your site.

By making sure you do these things, you will able to develop a successful online drop shipping business.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michelle_Samual_Williams

The Use of SEO in the Web Marketing

Our lives have become very complicated. They are so much inter-connected now. The latest media channel - the internet - is playing an important role in this regard. It has taken the central role in bringing many new services to us. This also includes the service of web marketing. Many of the web businesses rely heavily on a SEO company to promote their products.

There are many ways to use SEO Services. They are highly useful in bringing the website in the search rankings of the search engines, like Google or Yahoo search rankings. Good rankings mean that there is a good chance of getting better traffic for the website. This, in turn, results in better sales and revenue generation.

Many companies offer these services. Some of them are highly competitive and they offer great advantages. It is a good idea to utilize the best SEO for a company in order to get good visible results. The best companies for this purpose can be searched on the internet. They can help in increasing the internet traffic and the ranking of a website.

There is a huge demand for the search engine optimization services. They have become the backbone of the entire online business. But, not all the companies can provide these services with satisfaction. Some of them are busy in minting money from the simple and unsuspecting customers who contact them online. Many of these companies don't have trained staff or experts who can help in delivering results.

On the other hand, a trained SEO expert will help in bringing the website among the top results of the search engines. He can utilize many aspects of the SEO to deliver this kind of results. Normally, he utilizes the white hat techniques and avoids the black hat techniques as it is a method unapproved by the search engines.

I have been writing articles for last few months and found it an interesting activity. I love to think about different hot topics and write about them.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Muqtada_Khalid