As just such a shopkeeper, I have to say that I do love my work. I get up early every morning to check how sales went overnight. How many customers came in? What did they buy? Did they ask for anything that I haven’t got in stock? I then check money ‘take’ to confirm what’s selling well and what’s not. My shop, by way, is a ‘24/7’ Internet enterprise.

My next joys are to replenish shelves of my shop with fresh products and remove any old stock. This isn’t a manual labour of love though. It’s just a matter of visiting several wholesalers on ‘net (the affiliate network sites) and ordering stock. These sites offer shopkeepers like me a growing number of RSS product feeds.

I simply select merchants I want to do business with and products I want to stock. The degree of product selection available to me depends on way RSS feeds have been set-up. Sometimes, I must take every product a merchant offers me (or none at all); often I can take a group of products from various merchants; usually, I can opt for a specific product with high value to my customers.

Having made my selections (of merchant and product), I download RSS feeds. This is an elegant process, whereby software checks to see if I already have ordered products in stock at desired levels, fills my shelves if I haven’t, and removes any stock that’s past its ‘sell-by’ date. There are no delivery drivers to monitor; no pallet trucks to push; no returns documentation to fill in. What’s more, my merchants do most of merchandising for me: offering me up-to-date photographs, product descriptions, prices and so on, as part of their feeds.

Within an hour, I’ve re-stocked my shop with fresh, desirable produce. Of course, that’s not end of my joy. Oh no, rest of my day is spent in gleeful bookkeeping, marketing and so on; kind of pleasures undertaken elsewhere in retail management. Thankfully, my wholesalers do much of data management for me, which makes bookkeeping easier. The suppliers meanwhile send me special offers by email, which is akin to entertaining sales reps. in real world shopping, I suppose.

Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places highest value on. But, all incoming links are NOT created equal. This 7 part course looks at kinds of links Google values when "rating" your website in SERP's. Each type of link discussed is important to your overall link strategy and consequently your free traffic levels.

The first factor is of course anchor text used in your incoming links. The importance of keywords used to link to your website are more important to Google than content that is actually on your page. You can generally use anchor link text with your keywords and not even have keywords on page and still get a good ranking in Google for that term if enough incoming links have that keyword pharse in them.

If you've heard of phrase "Google Bombing" then you know what I'm talking about. Basically it's when a set of webmasters or blog owners decide to get a page ranked for a certain term and all leave links back to selected site with keyword phrase that they want that page to rank for.