Category Archives: MyOrbit Blogs

UK HMRC at melting point with over £40 billion uncollected tax

This audio interview reveals a very difficult situation within the UK HMRC, which has the responsibility to collect taxes, with £40 billion uncollected tax due to bad software systems and under-staffing.

UK HMRC at melting point

There are a million pieces of unanswered post. It will be taking 3 months to answer them, which itself might increase the problem further if a person has to pay back taxes with interest.

The UK HMRC contact centers are severely under-staffed, and that fact comes out from numerous press reports of people having to wait for a long time just to be able to speak to a tax officer to understand any discrepency in the tax numbers they have with them vs what HMRC is asking from them.

The average tax payment due is about £1400 and about 1.4 million people will receive letters from HMRC by Christmas.

So if you are in the UK and frustrated with not having any response from the HMRC, now you understand that many others are facing the same, and that the staff at HMRC are stretched to the limits already.

As long as you keep the communication from your side intact, it should be okay.

Search Engine Marketing update: Google Instant

Hello Folks, you may have started seeing the latest update in Google search engine. Its called Google Instant.

Since many companies and professionals have used MyOrbit services for their online business, I wanted to share this with you. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/sep/09/google-instant-effect-on-seo

What is clear is that Google wants to offer long-tail keywords to users as early as possible in the search process.

For example, along with the keyword: “Hair Transplant Surgery Cost”, people will also see options like: “how much does hair transplant surgery cost”, and the latter phrase will now receive many clicks too, even though its hardly a keyword in today’s internet marketing book.

Earlier such a longer sentence or question would have received very few direct clicks because people won’t type long text, but people can surely select longer text if its offered as a drop-down like it is being done now, thereby generating more exposure/visits to web content built on long tail keywords than today.

In addition, Google has been working hard to improve “personalization”, which means they want to show you things relevant to your search profile based on past searches, geography, etc.

What does it mean for website owners and SEO? I believe websites that cover their topic thoroughly using all possible keywords and their natural expressions will ultimately come out winners.

We will study this further to see how Google Instant can be used for our work, and will share the learning with you. Meanwhile all basic SEO work should continue because that is essential to get started in the search engine indexing game.

Best Wishes,
Shankar

Online Payment Service Providers – Opportunities and Challenges

As the usage of Internet for business transactions increases, we now have dozens of online payment service providers, of which are specific to a country and some are global.  This wikipedia page has a comprehensive list:

PayPal is the undisputed leader in online payment service providers. Google has tried to build market share for its Google Checkout over the last two years but feedback from my customers and business partners is that Google Checkout is still not their preferred online payment mechanism.

Most other online payment service providers are limited in their appeal, and are used by specific niches of customers. For example, there are some payment providers for online pharmacy transactions and online betting transactions. These are large industries however as the legalities are not the same or favorable in all countries, therefore such payment providers are able to offer a solution that is needed by the companies in these industries. Continue reading

Thoughts On 1000 Point Fall in Dow Jones

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/07/business/07trade_graphic/07trade_graphic-popup.jpg

Create a massive fall in the market large enough to trigger stop-losses typically set up at 5% drop, and then buy blue chip stocks at 30% less price before they recover, sell Put Options at 1000% gain, blame it all on computers and trading algorithms. Some person or some company somewhere has walked away with billions in profits after this event. It looks very well planned. This event was most probably an example of higest form of market manipulation, a bold master stroke, though illegal and unethical.

To find answers, we need to check the money-trail. Continue reading