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.

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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!

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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.

Natural SEO hints and tips for beginniners

A fellow web designer at a networking event once described natural search engine optimization as a 'Dark Art', and I really felt he summed up what I had suspected all along. Google are often cagey about what you can do to get to the top of their rankings, and not without reason - spammers will abuse any information they can get.

What should get you into number one position is providing a quality service or product for humans and a good website that is accessible to most visitors, and easy to read and use. Not stuffing the website full of keywords, building networks of pointless robot oriented directories and generally making sites which are unpleasant for human users.

However, there are some things you should be doing to take advantage of the search engine robots methods of figuring out the best time to display your site; because if you don't, even if you have the most beautiful site in the world, with childsplay navigation and heaps of free useful information - Google, Yahoo, ASK etc might not realise.

One of the most important things is the domain name. Using relevant keywords in picking your domain name makes a huge difference to how Google views your site. Some forums claim this is not the case, but research done by ourselves and other SEO experts offer evidence that keywords in the domain name have a big effect. Please note though - this does not mean you should abandon your company name and opt for a long string of keywords as your domain - it's all about balance. If you can get a domain name that contains keywords and still looks and sounds good to humans, great. But none of your SEO should sacrifice human users, or you're missing the point.

A second point of major importance is header tags: <>, <> etc. Google's robots use these to understand the content of the site. Try to make sure these are relevant and logically used, and contain keyword phrases where possible. The higher up the page, and the larger the header tag, the more importance Google will assign to it. Don't overdo it though, it's about relationships within your page. Put all of your text in header tags in an attempt to make Google think it's all important, and it will just dilute itself as Google will ignore all the header tags, taking you back to square one.

Another important factor is internal links. Make sure your links between pages include meaningful words and a logical structure. I.e. 'bookkeepingservices.html' is better than 'services.html' for obvious reasons.

That's enough to be getting on with for now. Add us to your feed reader and check back often for more web design hints and tips for an effective website.

Digital World Politics

Gordon Brown has been quoted as saying having The Internet is now as important as having gas and water in your home. That may be arguable, but being linked in to a global network can certainly have a very real and serious effect on our lives and lifestyles, as we can see as photos and comments are blogged and tweeted from dangerous areas gripped in political turmoil, right as the action happens.

The Prime Minister says that the modern technological networks have changed foreign policy forever, meaning the 'little people' can have their voices heard much more easily, without needing access to massive funds to broadcast messages via television or radio.

It could mean that as images and comments bounce around the world at lightning speed, public opinion and will grows faster than when we had to rely on a few brave journalists' articles, and what the newspapers decided was newsworthy and appropriate.

So does this increased flow of information mean we will take better action faster, and ultimately make the world a better place? Time will tell.