Swinton Acquires Budget Retail Branch Network

Annual income now over £500m, with 442 branches and over 2m policies.

Swinton Group, the UK’s biggest High Street insurance chain, today purchased the high street insurance intermediary business Budget Retail from the Budget Group.

The deal continues the growth strategy of Swinton, giving the company an annual income of more than £500m and consolidating its position as a leading UK insurance intermediary.

Swinton’s existing 350 high street branches (including those of its brand Colonnade, acquired in 2002) are now joined by 92 Budget branches offering home insurance, car insurance, travel insurance, pet insurance and most other forms of personal and life cover.

The Budget Retail brand will be maintained for 12 months, after which the branches will trade under one of the Swinton brands.

Patrick Smith, Chief Executive of Swinton, says: “This deal means that we have over three times the national coverage of our nearest competitor. We are within easy reach of almost everyone in the UK. This gives us a huge advantage over our major competitors who only offer telephone or internet contact.”

“Research shows that when customers need assistance with their insurance impersonal interactive voice response is strongly disliked by most people. Our professional teams, working right across the UK, give us a great opportunity to capitalise on our personal service operated through local branches either face to face or on the telephone. Our successful growth has shown the clear benefits of providing this personal service.”

All Budget branch staff will remain employed by Swinton. The total number of Swinton employees is now 3,000, made up of staff working in the branches, call centres and head office functions.

As part of the deal Swinton will also take over Budget’s taxi and motor-home units based in Warrington and Coventry respectively.

Around 230,000 policies will be added to the Swinton database and the combined operation will hold more than 2m insurance policies.

Patrick Smith added: “We have strategic plans to continue this growth and enhance our current business capabilities by increasing our customer base through further improvements in direct marketing, increasing our diversification of product and enhancing the relationship between our branches and our online business.

“We intend to keep all the new branches open as we believe that Budget’s coverage is complementary to our existing network and the increased capacity will allow Swinton Group to handle our planned growth and further service our customers’ requirements.

“Our model has great capacity for expansion and we intend to take on the giants of our industry and show that, by caring more for our customers, we can become the leading provider in the personal insurance market.”

Last year Swinton had a gross premium income of £440m and expects premium income to grow to more than £600m next year following today’s purchase. The company has made over 250 broker acquisitions during the past five years.

Cobbetts LLP acted as legal advisors and Swinton received advice from Ernst & Young.

For more information and for interviews with Swinton Chief Executive Patrick Smith, contact Andrew Spinoza or Jaime Markey at SKV PR 0161 236 9909,

Swinton Acquires Budget Retail Branch Network / Swinton Group

Swinton Group was acquired by its parent company MMA Insurance in May 2001. http://www.swinton.co.uk/

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Home Equity Loan Scams – Watch Out For These Red Flags!

If you own your home, chances are that it is your most valuable asset. As with anything valuable, you must be conscious of protecting your home and its equity. Simply put, equity is the difference between the current value of your home and what you owe on it. For example, if you have a home that’s worth $200,000 and a mortgage for $150,000, it means you have $50,000 equity.

Equity Grabbing – One of the most common scams is “equity grabbing”. In one example, a homeowner may be talked into cashing out most or all of the equity in their home in exchange for a large check at settlement. The borrower may be dazzled at the prospect of receiving all that cash at once, but not able to afford the monthly payments that follow that large check, which could cause the borrower to lose their home.

Contractor Scams, – Another equity grabbing scam can be initiated by a housing contractor. The contractor may contact you offering to do home improvement work for what seems like a great price. You may say that it sounds good, but you can’t afford it, at which time, the contractor will refer you to “a lender he knows” for a home improvement loan. This loan may have initially affordable payments that can adjust after a few months of a “teaser” rate into something you can’t afford. Make sure you read all of the fine print and don’t sign anything that’s going to be filled in later.

3-Day Right of Recision – All borrowers have a “Right of Recision” where you can cancel a refinance loan on your primary residence for up to three days after your loan closes (only Sundays are excluded). You can exercise that right for any reason, so don’t be afraid to do so if you suspect something is not right.

 Home Equity Loan Scams – Watch Out For These Red Flags! / CL Haehl

Do You Need a Home Equity Loan? Get Multiple Free Quotes With Our Recommended Online Mortgage Companies – We maintain a list of reputable mortgage companies online who have many programs for home equity loans.

Build a Website with NO HTML

If you have been wanting a website of your own for a long time, but have been scared due to lack of HTML knowledge, you can still have a happy home on the web…and I can show you how! The first thing you need to know is that, contrary to popular belief, you do NOT need to know HTML in order to have your own website. In fact, building a website can be so easy that even a child can do it!

The first thing you need to know about building an HTML-free website is that the type of “webhost” or “host” that you need to look for is a website host with a website editor. Sometimes these are called: editors, wysiwyg(pronounced “whiz-e-wig” and an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get) editors, site builders, site editors, or even template builders. But the most important thing you need to know is that you DO NOT have to go with a “free” hosting company that forces advertisements on your page. While companies like Freewebs, Bravenet, Geocities, etc. do provide an easy sitebuilder, they don’t allow you the freedom of your own domain name, FULL control over your website, or add-free webspace. Many non-free hosting companies have easy sitebuilders as well – and you can often get this type of hosting very cheap, as low as $2 per month or possibly less!

When you use non-free website hosting you can use your own domain names, use a more professional @yourdomain.com email address, install different scripts on your website, and much more! And all of this is much easier than it sounds.

The first thing you will need to do to set up your own website, is to purchase a domain name. There are many different domain registrars on the internet. GoDaddy is the one we recommend, however a Google search for domain registration will also give you many different results. Once you have purchased your first domain, you will need to purchase website hosting. Check out my author bio for my own hosting company which offers reasonable hosting services. Once you have purchased webhosting, you will receive information from your new webhost that will contain your new nameservers. You can try to set your domain nameservers yourself by logging into your domain purchasing account, however it might be easier just to call the company you purchased the domain from and ask them to change the nameservers for you.

Once you’ve set your domain’s nameservers, the rest is easy. Login to your new website’s control panel, and login to their particular editor (you, did of course remember to purchase from a website host that had an easy sitebuilder right?) and begin building your HTML free website. Publish it to your directory, and voila! You now have your very own domain, your very own website, and full control over all of it, at very little cost and with NO knowledge of HTML. Congratulations!

Build a Website with NO HTML / Stephanie Davies

Stephanie Davies is a 28 year old work at home mom to a 9 year old boy in Mid-Missouri. Her hosting company, Hosting WAHMs offers premium webhosting from $2 per month and up, with an easy to use sitebuilder! She also loves to knit, build websites, and talk to people.

What are my chances to get the first place in search engine listings?

You must have heard the stories how people became rich and famous with their websites. How could they achieve this? Their websites took a first position in search engine listings targeting popular keywords. Sounds easy, right? Wrong! To be honest, chances for a regular small business website to get to the top of the search engine listings are close to zero and each day they become smaller and smaller as a number of new and old websites grows.

      Let’s examine the situation from the beginning. Search engines just need your content to deliver it to searchers. If a searcher is happy with the search result from the particular search engine, he will come back and use this search engine again. Do not think that search engines serve to send customers to your website. They DO NOT CARE about your website or your business. All they need is content.

      When the search engines first appear in the Internet they needed help to determine what your site is about and how relevant is your website to search queries. People used “Keywords” meta-tag in those days. Keywords gave too many opportunities to cheat with search engines results so searchers were not happy with their search queries results. Same thing was with the search engines. Manipulation with a website position in the search engines listings became known as Search Engine Optimization. That was the time when you could actually wake up a rich man after the search engine came to your website, included it into its database and started sending you thousands of customers.

      Then came the time of big G (Google) with its concept of website popularity based on two factors: content and links. They introduced the new factor which was called Google PageRank. Now it becomes more and more complicated to get to the top of Google results. You need to bother about your website content, incoming links and outgoing links, IP of your website, number of visitors coming to your website and many other things that are being counted to determine your page position in the Google index. Linking fever came to the webmasters community. New websites (no matter how original their content is) have to wait before they will get enough links to be displayed in search engine results. The more complicated the search engines have become, the more ways of cheating people could think of: invisible text and links, doorway pages, cloaking pages etc.

      Surely, you can try one of these methods called “Black SEO” (search engine optimization) and you may even succeed for a month or two. When a Search Engine catches you, the punishment will be immediate: your website will be banned and no visitors will ever be sent to your website again.

      Let’s be honest – for small websites and home based businesses starting from scratch chances to get to the top position in search engine are minimal. The WWW is so rich that you probably will not find any competitive areas in search engine listings. Let me give you several suggestions, however, on how you can get started. I would recommend concentrating on one or two main keywords and trying to get the highest position in search engine and not waste efforts trying to cover the whole market. The right keyword can bring you several thousands visitors/customers in a day. Webmasters should concentrate their efforts on developing unique and original content. Search engines like new content and analyze if it is unique. Write articles, reviews, online publications etc. As an example, I can say that as soon as search engines index my recently written article for http://www.metamorphozis.com we get several hundreds visitors to that article from different engines. Exchange links with other websites related to your website. Put your keyword in the link title when you exchanging links.

      Example: <a href=http://www.metamorphozis.com title=”Website Templates”>Website Templates</a>

      We use this link to get the better listings for “website templates” keyword. Just copy it and replace your website domain name with your own and link title to the keyword you would like. Exchange this link with related, popular websites. I would recommend you to create a special page for link exchanges and place links to other websites there.

      I hope some my pieces of advice will be helpful to internet business starters.

This article may be reprinted and distributed with no charge until the credit line below remains without changes.

Thanks for reading.

Article source: http://www.metamorphozis.com/tutorials/ what_my_chances_to_get_first_place_in_search_engine.shtml

About the Author:

Oleg Lazarenko

Production Manager of

Metamorphosis Web Design Studio – Flash templates and Web Templates

http://www.metamorphozis.com.

What are my chances to get the first place in search engine listings? / Oleg Lazarenko

Oleg Lazarenko Production Manager of Metamorphosis Web Design Studio – Flash templates and Web Templates http://www.metamorphozis.com

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of Your Website

Alexa toolbar also useful to Browse expired websites database. Many times when we visit any website we got error message that website is not available. We have to simply click The Wayback Machine button on Alexa toolbar and we can see the old data of that website.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your website?

Alexa Toolbar using millions of users. Alexa Gives Ranking by Analysing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar Users. Alexa Sorting Millions of websites thru Alexa Toolbar and giving numerical rank for each website browsed by Alexa Toolbar.

First Step of increasing your websites Alexa Rank is Download Alexa Toolbar and start browsing your website regularly.

When you completed downloading of Alexa Toolbar, then you can see your websites Alexa Rank on Alexa Toolbar. May be if you dont have Alexa Rank it will Display “No Data” rank. Dont worry after couple of days your website will get Alexa Rank in number.

Keep browsing thru Alexa Toolbar within couple of months period your website will get good Alexa Ranking. Suggest & encourage your friends, relatives, your Company employees to download Alexa Toolbar in their computers. You will see the miracle your compnay websites will get very nice alexa rank.

You can download Alexa Toolbar here also. please click following link to download alexa Toolbar. forward this link to your friends, employees and many others alo.

http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi?amzn_id=ahirebros

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of Your Website / Yogesh Ahire

Yogesh Ahire eMarketing consultant from Mumbai/India URL: http://www.e-Gurukul.com, http://www.e-Guru.org