Google AdWords Keyword Tool - probably the most useful optimisation tool available for free

Many people start the search engine optimization campaigns a couple of steps too late. This means a huge amount of wasted effort, time and energy.

The steps that many people are choosing the most efficient keywords in the first place. If you just pull them out of the air from guesswork, you're like an archer just shooting off in all directions without stopping to check where the target is. How many arrows do you think will actually hit bullseye?

So how do we find out what the best terms are? Well, handily for us, Google is happy to give us all kinds of useful information to aid us in our endeavours. One of the most useful tools is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This free online service can give you detailed facts about which terms people are searching on, how many competitors there are in the UK (or your country if you're not in the UK), and how many competitors there are globally.

So instead of just guessing what terms people are searching on, you can find out not only what keywords their using, but how popular each of them are.

This information can be downloaded for number crunching and manipulation to work out the best terms based on search volumes v competitor volumes.

Check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool here.

Read more SEO and web design tips here or see our basic breakdown of what SEO is here.

Thanks for reading!

How to get to #1 on Google - locally

Are you a business owner? Are you listed on Google local business centre? (Recently renamed as Google Places)

If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, then you're missing out. You can think of Google Local Business Centre / Google Places as Google's Yellow Pages - you can have a free listing there, giving details of your business address, phone number, website and much more. Then if someone searches for your services in your location, your business will be listed above all the regular results.

It only takes a few minutes to set up and could mean massive exposure for your business, completely free - so what are you waiting for?

Sign up now at... www.google.com/local/add

Of course, all of the websites we make are listed on Google Local business Centre as a matter of course.

If you'd like more advice on making the most of your website, click here.

How do I get my website onto the front page of Google?

Ah, the $64,000 question. Well, there are a number of ways you can do it, but rest assured - all your competitors want to be on the front page of Google too, so if you think it's going to be cheap and easy, think again.

Get to the top of Google, guaranteed... as long as you have deep pockets

The only way to guarantee being on the top of the Google rankings for your chosen terms are by paying Google to be in their 'sponsored links' - via their system, which is called Adwords. It works on a bidding system, so if you sell knitted hamster handbags you may well be able to get their pretty cheap, but if your business has the word 'insurance' 'travel' 'flights' 'recruitment' or one of many other extremely popular and highly competitive phrases, you could be paying over £20 per click, and there could be thousands of clicks per day. Not for those on a tight budget.

Of course, you can try to use Adwords with pretty much any budget, but if you've only got £50 a month to pay and you're competing against the big boys, you may find your budget is spent before you've had a chance to say 'small fish'.

Tips for making the most of Adwords on a budget : as most business advisors will tell you aout business in general - niche niche niche. If you can show that you are THE specialist in a specific area/field/colour etc, you cut down your competitors hugely.

Natural search listings

If you're not paying to be in the 'sponsored links' you'll have to do it the hard way, via the 'natural' search results. This means convincing Google you are the best site and should be the top result for whatever phrase it is the user happens to be entering. There are two main sides to this:

On-Page : your website has to be built to be Google friendly, and that means relevant text, no useful text in images, logical use of keyword rich headings, relevant page names, labels on all your images, keyword rich internal links and widgets and lots of relevant key-phrases scattered at natural intervals around the content. It means providing useful free information for passers-by and generally proving you know what you're talking about. If your website is not already built this way, it's painful to make it so later, so make sure it's built right the first time. Naturally, all of our websites are entirely Google friendly.

Off-Page : Google counts a link to your website as a 'vote' for your website. The more of these you have, the higher up the rankings your site will go. But it's not entirely democratic, links from highly rankings sites count as more important than votes than from unknown sites. You can get links by adding the site to directories, getting other webmasters to link to your site, setting up social networking sites and publishing articles.

You can, of course, do this for yourself, but be prepared for rolling up your sleeves and spending many months of nights in. Simply learning about the methods will take many hours, let alone the hard slog of carrying it all out. And results can be slow and disheartening in the early days.

Or, you can hire a professional to do it for you. This is course is another minefield, but not one within the scope of this article. Read more about how to avoid some of the most dangerous SEO pitfalls here.

Websites for Cheap!

We are proud to announce the launch of a new product - websites for sole traders and small businesses. This is an affordable website deal, with guaranteed results!

They are only £200 to set up and £25 per month to keep us beavering away on making sure each website performing fantastically. Not just websites for cheap, but looking great and performing on Google too!

You can find out more about our affordable business websites here.

We say - keep it simple! With a simple website that is guaranteed to make you more money than it costs. How does that work? Well, all of our client websites are on the front page of Google for the terms they need to be. This means they get lots of enquiries from people who are looking for their services, right at the critical moment. As long as they convert some of those enquiries, they are making more money than their website costs them.

We're so confident we'll be able to get sole traders more customers through the web, we're offering a special guarantee. If after twelve months, you don't feel your website is making you more money than it cost, we'll refund the full £200 setup fee!

So for affordable websites with minimum risk and maximum gain, visit www.affordablebusinesswebsites.co.uk

What are reciprocal links?

To answer this question I'm going to start at the very beginning, to make sure no one gets lost. If you know some or all of this already, feel free to skip ahead.

A link is a word or phrase on a webpage that you can click on, and it will then take you to a different webpage.

An outbound link is when you link to someone else's site from your webpage.

An inbound link is when someone else links from their site to yours.

Reciprocal links are when you agree with the other webmaster to exchange links - i.e. you link to their site and they will link to yours.

(An important note I want to make here, which may seem obvious but I have been asked a surprising number of times, is that you don't have to ask permission to link to someone's site. A website is by definition in the public domain - if someone is publishing information in the public domain, they can hardly then get upset if you point it out to people. Quite the opposite, as I'll explain below, you are doing them a favour. So don't waste their time by emailing asking permission to link to their site)

So why bother with reciprocal links? Well, apart from the obvious benefit that you could gain traffic from related sites that click through to yours, inbound links are the original basis for the Google algorithm, and therefore the Holy Grail for many Search Engine Optimisers. Google uses a 'democratic' system to rank pages, counting each link to a website as a 'vote' for that site. But it's not quite as simple as that. The votes of some sites have a heavier weighting, so for example: if The Guardian newspaper linked to you, it would count as a more important vote for your site than if your mate Dave linked to you from his wedding website.

However, Google is moving away from this method and it is only one of many ways of rankings websites that is in their toolkit. A reason for this is that some webmasters abuse the system and set up huge networks of websites, created simply for the purpose of linking to each other. They charge small webmasters a monthly fee and guarantee them high Google rankings, but this practice degrades the experience for visitors as they bounce from directory to directory, never reaching a final destination. Therefore, Google blacklists websites it discovers doing this.

Despite these caveats, it is still worth building a dedicated partners page or even section, which is unobtrusively linked to from your homepage, and having limited numbers of links to related sites listed, on the condition that they link back to you. Try to make a decent proportion of these 'deep' (not just to your homepage) link too.

Happy canvassing!

SWD Recommended in Real Business Online Magazine!

Clare Hibbet of iComplete has recommended Simple Website Designs Ltd in an article offering suggestions to people starting a business on a small budget. Our quality bespoke designs at extremely competitive prices have been recognised for their professionalism and value for money.

iComplete offer a range of business services at low monthly fees, meaning small businesses can have all the advantages of software, hardware, technology and other services which would normally be prohibitively expensive.

Click here to see full article

Should I use music on my website?

Not unless you like making enemies.

Embedding music that automatically plays in your website is a fast way to irritate a huge chunk of your visitors, making them click the back button faster than you can say Snow Patrol.

Reason number one - lots of people surf the Internet at work, and the last thing they need is your music blaring out their speakers unexpectedly while the boss is chatting at the next desk. It's embarrasing and makes them look unprofessional.

Reason number two - many people are already listening to music while surfing the Net. So if your music starts playing over theirs, both sound awful.

Reason number three - what makes you think they like your music? Do you know your visitors that well, that you can be sure they have the same taste as you. And are in the mood for that choice at the time?

'But I have a pause button!'
Even if there's a pause option, you'd better be sure your site really is special enough for them to take the time to search for an often fiddly cryptic little button, instead of just hitting the back button, which after all is huge and they already know where it is. Why bother when there's a million other sites out there?

The exception - if you're a band, you may have the closest thing to an excuse to having music playing automatically when someone hits your site, but in my opinion, it would still be better to confront them with a big play button, and give them the choice.

Arbitrary surveys of the people in my circles who use the Internet the most, overwhelmingly suggests that they find automatically playing music intrusive, offensive and most will leave the site instantly on principle.

So, the negative effects far ourweigh the questionable benefits. You embed music in your website at your own risk.