The Department of State, on December 14, 2009, published a proposed rule to increase the U.S non-immigration visa application fees, also called as the Machine-Readable Visa (MRV) fee and Border Crossing Card (BCC) fees. The non-immigration visa application fees have been raised from its current $131 to $140 and the immigration rule is published in the Federal Register. The proposed rule will bring a layered structure with separate fees based upon the visa category.
The proposed new non-immigration visa application fees are meant to cover the cost of processing non-immigrant visas and border crossing cards. Border crossing cards are issued to certain adult applicants in Mexico. Basically this proposal is initiated to overpower the growing cost of processing non-immigrant visas (NIVs). Some of the categories of non-immigrant visas are very intricate that need profound consideration than other categories of non-immigrant visas, resulting in higher costs.
Under the newly proposed immigration rule, the following visa categories will pay the new non-immigration visa application fees that include
• E (treaty trader and investor)
• H (temporary worker or trainee)
• K (fiancé(e))
• L (Intracompany transferee)
• O (alien with extraordinary ability)
• P (athlete, artist or entertainer)
• Q (international cultural exchange visitors)
• R (religious worker).
Visas that are not petition-based, such as B1/B2 tourist and business visitor visas and all student and exchange-visitor visas are required to pay a fee of $140. Petition-based visas would pay $150 for an application. This category includes H visa for temporary workers and trainees, L visa for Intracompany transferees, O visa for aliens with extraordinary ability, P visa for athletes, artists and entertainers, Q visa for international cultural exchange visitors, and R visa for religious occupations. The K and E visa applications will cost $350 and $390 respectively.
The new immigration rule regarding the U.S non-immigrant visa application fees will come into effect only after the Department of State considering public comments.
If you’re not doing so already, you may want to consider writing articles about your website’s topic. Writing copyright free articles is a great way to:
Establish your credibility and build your reputation and brand
Establish yourself as an expert in your field
Increase your exposure on the internet
Gain laser targeted traffic to your website
Increase the number of one way links to your website, which should help your website in the search results.
Writing articles about the topic of your website is a fantastic way to demonstrate your expertise and credibility and at the same time allows you to build your reputation and your brand. Submitting your articles to the various free article sites gives your articles the opportunity to be picked up by other webmasters for their websites and newsletters. When your articles get used on these other websites they must be used with the author bio section un-edited. This means that you can generate one way links to your website, which in turn leads to greater exposure and better rankings in the search engines. If the readers of your articles on other sites click through to your site, you gain targeted traffic.
Some Article Writing Tips
To get the greatest benefit from your article writing endeavors, try to keep the following article writing tips in mind:
Try to stay away from turning your article into a sales pitch. Give your readers credit – they will be able to distinguish a sales pitch right away. Once they think they’re just reading another sales pitch they will quickly click away from your article. I can just about guarantee that no one will pick up your sales pitch and use it on their website, unless it’s one of your affiliates.
Don’t include too many hyperlinks within the article body and stick to only one in the author bio section. Most webmasters will not pick up an article, no matter how good it is, if there are too many outgoing links. I would recommend not having any links within the article body but sometimes this is unavoidable.
Which situation would you rather have: 1 article with 1 outgoing link to your website that gets picked up by 1,000 webmasters or 1 article with 10 outgoing links that gets picked up by 10 webmasters?
Check, re-check and then check your article again for typos and grammatical errors. Have someone else proofread it for you before submitting it. Nothing says amateur more than typos and grammatical errors.
Write articles that complement the topic of your website. Don’t write about something totally unrelated to your website. Remember, you want to establish your credibility and expertise. Write about what you know.
When adding that one link back to your site, make sure to include a keyword targeted link back to your site. I’m talking specifically about the words between the opening and closing anchor tags.
When the search engine robots come across this link they will index the anchor text and it will help you with those keywords in the search engines. Do not waste this valuable link by just having your website address as the anchor text unless you have your main keywords in the website address. Try to vary the keywords a little as well when creating this link. There is speculation that having too many “uniform” links to a site may hurt you – just something to keep in mind.
Do not place a copyright notice at the top of your article. This leads to confusion and may cause webmasters to stay away from posting your articles on their website and in their newsletters.
It may be a good idea to write completely new content for your articles. Some writers just copy and paste parts of their websites and put them into articles. This may lead to a “duplicate content” penalty and may end up hurting your search engine results. I would recommend that you should play it safe and come up with totally new content for your articles.
John Michaels is a part-time editor for http://www.ArticleGeek.com. John has developed many websites over the years in many different business areas. He is a professional web developer/designer/architect. ArticleGeek is a free website content resource for publishers and webmasters and a place where authors may submit articles for FREE!
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