Sunday, September 30, 2007

Travel Insurance And Other Valuable Travel Tips

If you are a frequent traveler, you must know by now how important it is to get travel insurance before any trip. In the same vein, you must already be aware of the various types of policies made available to travel insurance clients.

Many individuals take travel insurance for granted, but their importance is only made evident when the need for claims arises! One should always make it a point to check the policy through before choosing any type of travel insurance.

Additionally, not all travel insurance policies are the same one company's policy clauses may vary greatly from those of another company. You'll soon find out that price and coverage are not the only considerations when choosing a travel insurance policy.

It's essential to inform at least two people you trust about your travel plans and tentative itineraries. They should also know about the places you plan to stay in and departure and arrival dates.

Apart from travel insurance, there are a lot of other things to take care of. One of them is being prepared with your finances. Since it's never safe to take along a large amount of cash these days, make sure that you have adequate travelers checks before you depart. Keep in mind, though, that these should only be signed right before you use them and not any earlier. This is a mistake commonly made by most first-time travelers.

Another very important matter that is often overlooked is ensuring that all the required visas have been acquired. Many travelers go through unnecessary inconveniences just because the visas they need are either missing or expired. Make sure, too, that your passport won't expire while you're traveling.

You can get a checklist of all the important concerns related to travel from a reliable travel insurance company. Don't forget to secure photocopies of your passport, visas, airline tickets, vaccination records, and itineraries. Keep a set at home, another on your carry-on, and another in your suitcase.

This way, when your important documents get lost or stolen, you won't find it too difficult to ask for help from authorities. Travel insurance can provide you with a checklist of items you need to take care of, at no extra charge.

If you think that travel insurance only covers you in case of an accident, think again. Travel insurance can also cover some types of medical expenses, delayed or lost baggage, cancellation of flights, missed flights, flight delays, important personal effects, and even hijacks.

Some even cover collision or damage expenses for rented cars and emergency evacuation damages. What's important is that you first look into all these and decide which items are important to you, or if there are any travel insurance aspects you could do away with.

Travel insurance companies would be more than happy to answer any questions that you may have regarding coverage. If you're not too keen on talking with an agent personally, you could first surf the Internet and compare various travel insurance packages.

A simple search can be very advantageous if any untoward incident does happen during your trip. Although no one wants these things to happen, it's always better to be armed with comprehensive travel insurance.
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By: Wade Robins

You can also find more info on Travel Insurance Tips and Travel Medical Insurance. travelinsurance-help.com is a comprehensive resource to get information about Travel Insurance.

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Internet Search And Seo

Internet Search

For the last decade the Internet has emerged itself into an integral part of our everyday life. What previously was mostly a network of research institutions has become an unprecedented medium for commercial and social use. With the number of web pages now exceeding 12 billion it is extremely difficult to find information without using search engines.

Search engines appeared almost immediately once the WWW was born. A pioneering search engine called Archie was created in the University of Montreal in 1990 and was used to search files located on public FTP sites. The first search engine created to crawl and index text files on the web, World Wide Web Wanderer or Wandex, was introduced in 1993 in MIT and worked on principals similar to those used by the modern web search engines.

However it was not until late 90s when search engines have become the major tool to find information on the Internet. Before Internet directories such as Yahoo! or BestOfTheWeb were used to locate web pages. But it didn't take long for web users to recognize the usefulness of the Internet search, once indexing and ranking algorithms have reached a state where search engines were able to quickly return highly relevant results

Search Results Relevancy

It is all about the relevancy of results. In their infancy search engines were utterly vulnerable to abuse. Originally search engines used to index file names and later meta-tags. It doesn't take much to stuff file names and meta-tags with popular keywords which are irrelevant to the document's content. When a user queried a search engine with a keyword he received results that couldn't satisfy him. That is why Internet directories with pages classified into directories by human reviewers were far more useful than the search engines of those days.

The problem of relevancy has become increasingly important with the growing commercial use of the Web. The profits of commercial websites depend on their exposure and if there is anything that can help improve the exposure in search results - it must be done. And the first attempts to influence the search results by using popular but not relevant keywords to drive more traffic were made.

With their increasing computational and storage capacity search engine have become able to index the entire content of a page. But it was still possible to abuse search results by using excessive keyword stuffing, hidden keyword-rich text or many other spammy techniques. Basing solely on the page content it was impossible to ensure the relevancy of search results and more advanced ranking algorithms were introduced.

Search Engine Optimization

But even modern sophisticated search engine algorithms are not perfect and can't guarantee 100% relevancy. There still exist many loopholes that can be exploited to manipulate search results. Search results manipulation is not necessarily an unethical conduct. Consider three biggest travel websites: http://Travelocity.com, http://Expedia.com and http://Priceline.com. They provide booking service of a similar quality and are equally relevant for keywords like 'vacation' or 'airline tickets'. But nevertheless they rank differently in search results, and it is natural for a lower ranked site to try improving its position by using search engine optimization techniques.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is about defining what factors influence the placement of a page in search results and adjusting these factors to obtain a higher position. To optimize the relevance of a page you have to adjust keyword frequency and proximity, add keywords into headings and bold text. It must look natural though - excessive keyword stuffing might have negative effects. To increase the popularity of a page you must obtain incoming links with targeted keywords in the anchor text, and make sure that links come from authoritative pages but not from irrelevant link farms.

Search engine optimization is an extremely dynamic field. Once a loophole in ranking algorithms becomes known and widely used, search engines change their algorithms to neutralize its effect. Every algorithm update can drastically affect positions and traffic of websites utilizing aggressive crash and burn optimization strategies. Such strategies are based on the most recently discovered loopholes and tricks and are able to put your pages into top positions quite quickly. Their effect however lasts only to the next algorithm update.

Another far more time-consuming approach is the creation of websites with high quality content following so-called Google quality guidelines. This approach emphasizes the website's value for users and persuades against using tricks to manipulate search results. In short - good websites eventually will rank high. But it takes years and tons of effort to make a site popular this way. Some sites are by their nature difficult to promote this way. For example few grocery stores can afford turning their websites into top Internet grocery portals; it just wouldn't be worth the effort.

SEO alone can't guarantee a lasting effect. Not using SEO at all requires too much effort to promote a site. The wise way to make a website popular is make sure that it is useful for users, obtain quality incoming links and do not forget to fine tune your pages focusing the targeted keywords. Follow the famous Brett Tabke's Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - after four years it is still a valid approach.
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By: Oleg Ishenko -

Oleg Ishenko, Berlin, Germany. BSc in Telecommunications Industry Business Management. Master student in Humboldt University Berlin. MCSE and MCDBA certifications. Get more useful information at our Comprehensive SEO and Online Marketing Research

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