What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let's talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don't have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don't practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won't be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like "click here" which probably won't relate in any way to your website, using the words "Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten" is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

http://www.webconfs.com

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Before a visual design can begin, you need to do content design. Determine what exactly you’re going to say. Words, sentences and paragraphs are the building blocks of your site’s foundation. Make sure you’ve put them together correctly. And make sure you know what you need that foundation to do. I mean, think about how those words, sentences and paragraphs are going to effect your bottom line. Remember, we’re making this site for a reason. Whether it’s to get a laugh or make a buck, all those words, sentences and paragraphs need a reason for being there. They mean something.

Anyway, you’ve done all that right? We need to think about how we’re going to present that content. To put things really simply, once you know what you’re going to say with your content and what you want it to do site design comes down to designing series of page templates. That’s it really. As a practical matter, site design becomes a series of templates.

Blog design typically involves designing one template. I know good WordPress themes require a score of php templates in their respective directories but really, visually, all you’re seeing is one master template that offers up different content. Which is fine. Most blog designs serve the purposes of most blogs: highlight the latest post by placing it at the forefront of a reverse-chronological list and make it easy to find everything else. There’s a lot of different ways to do this but most blog design accomplishes this visually with one master template.

Web site design can do this too but there’s usually more variation happening between the header and footer. There’s often three or four templates that expand beyond the primary-content-sidebar mold; a home page presenting a hierarchical overview, a landing page for sales, a blog, a support forum, a store perhaps, with product pages, the list goes on. Each of these sections will need it’s own visual template and internal order that relates to the rest of the site. It all depends on the requirements of the content.

Think about why and how we’re going to use WordPress to do all this

We’ve decided that we’re going to do this with WordPress so before we start the visual design we need to consider our limitations and restrictions. We have to look at our tools.

In WordPress, we have pages and posts. Most people like to only think of pages when they consider WordPress as a content management system but posts can be categorized by tags and well, categories. We shouldn’t forget to consider how posts can be used to good advantage in WordPress.

But since likely a lot of what we’re going to do is working with pages we also need to think about what can be accomplished with custom page templates and whether or not they need to be customized further by the end user on case-by-case basis. As it is, we often have to muddle through at this point and think about compromises. Sometimes you’ll want to have a plugin solution that offers up more customization options for the end user. Often it’s going to be easier to just directly edit custom page template code to insert custom HTML as opposed to interacting with the database through WordPress.

If you’re going to need to use really custom loops and interact with the database in a way you haven’t done before now would be a good time to make sure WordPress will actually let you do what you want to do—before you go getting your wireframes and mockups set in stone. In fact, I strongly suggest you dig into what you can do with a book like WordPress Theme Design. Or search through WordPress Trac and the WordPress Hackers Mailing List if you’re planning on doing something really intense with WordPress. While you’re there try and look to the future of WordPress and make sure you’re not going to make more work for yourself down the road when WordPress changes.

I also recommend thinking about how you’re going to use Widgets in your site design. WordPress widgets offer a good way of controlling short chunks of content in a site once the coding and design has been finished and the project has been handed off. If you need more control over when and how widgets appear, the Widget Logic plugin will let you use WordPress conditional tags with individual widgets.

Design your visual templates

Now that you’ve thought about the content, what it means and how you might have to interact with it when using WordPress you actually need to get down to building your set of visual templates.

I’ve made a short list of what that set might entail.

• Home Page
• Blog Index
• Single Post with Comments & Pingbacks
• Single Page
• Archive and Search Pages
• Custom Pages
  • Store and product sub pages
  • Landing page with content “buckets”
• bbPress forum
  • Better take a look at the default theme if you’re not that familiar with bbPress

The first thing you’ll want to do is sketch out a few designs and then move to either mocking something up in a program like Photoshop or proceeding directly to wireframing the site in XHTML and CSS. If you’ve got a good sketch and idea of what you need to do, I think proceeding directly to wireframing the site provides the best bang for your buck.

There’s two approaches to producing a wireframe when you’re going to be working with WordPress. One, you can just start writing plain old semantic HTML and start out from scratch or you can work directly with an existing WordPress Theme Framework. There’s obvious time savings when you start out with an existing theme but make sure the code of the theme is up to your standards before you start.

If you’re designing with a WordPress theme you’ll need dummy content to fill out your site. You might try WPCandy’s Sample Content or The Sandbox Dummy Content. I’m partial to The Sandbox content. It covers a lot of different possible post-content variables. But either one is great. Use the WordPress importer to import either one of these files into your WordPress blog and take a crack at making something beautiful.

Good luck!

http://themeshaper.com

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Make £50 for recommending our Web Design services.

In the past we have offered a 10% reward for any referrals that lead to new clients.

We will now be offering a flat £50 reward, or 2 years free Domain/hosting with us for EVERY referral you make that leads to a paying web project.

We cover all aspects of web design, including clients editable websites, Ecommerce, Blogs and blogging, Flash animation aswell as logo, artwork and stationery.

The £50 would be paid on receipt of final payment from the new client, this is typically based around a 4 week turn around.

So please keep us in mind when you are in a meeting, at the pub or at your friends house party when someone mentions they need a website .........

Acknowledged Web Design
http://www.acknowledgedsolutions.co.uk

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Very simply if a company offers to have your site listed on the top page of Google within 3 days, 1 week or some other silly amount of time for £150 - it is a lie.

Companies out there are charging anything from £150 upwards for these type of services, and as soon as you sign up they want you to use ridiculous search terms that are never going to be used buy prospective customers. And the keywords you actually want used, will be something to ‘work towards’, a process ‘that will take time’ and so on.

For example if your website is www.davidcomplandaccounts.co.uk and you use the keyword ‘davidcomplandaccounts’ with no spaces, the company who offer this service will consider this achieving their side of the bargain, though of course no one is going to find your site. You are simply not going to get first page listing with the term ‘UK Accounts’, without resubmission, care, time and attention, whatever they tell you.

So how do you actually getting top ranking. Well the easy answer though not very popular one, is that it will take time.

There are several techniques though that are invaluable and will aid the submission, listing and ranking process:

Submitting your site monthly to all the major Search Engines.

Change your textual content and Meta Tags before each submission. Therefore over time enabling multiple listing for a single Url.

Incoming links from highly ranked sites. This means contacting related sites, though not direct competition to request mutual or ideally exclusive links to your site.

Keyword frequency. Therefore how often your chosen keywords, both in your html source and those used on submission to Search Engines occur in the text of your site. More importance is given to keywords in your title tag, headings ( h1, h1, h1 etc), text in bold, plus links.

Always choose a relevant title for your submitted page. The title should reflect both your keywords and Url. Each link page should have a different title.

Imagine heavy web pages are less Search Engine friendly, therefore relevant keyword based text is the most effective.

Try and avoid an extremely image heavy web design, it used to be the case that 'alt' tags were given some level of important, other than for image listing on Search Engines this no longer seems to be the case.

So basically Search Engine ranking takes patience, there is no magic wand technique, but if you follow the steps above you can achieve placement and exposure for your website.

by Ashley Smith

Acknowledged Web Design
www.acknowledgedsolutions.co.uk

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Today everyone wants to have better search engine result pages ranks. However only one can have the rank 1. Therefore you need to optimize constantly your websites and to have an edge over others you need to do something different and unique. Following are 10 rare tips/secrets which can help you get high search engine ranks.

First, many people still use directories and search engines give preference to websites listed in directories. There are many free and paid directories available today. The free directories usually ask for link exchange, however you should remember that if you have many links on your web page, search engines can reduce your page ranks or rank on search engine result. If you are paying for link submission in a directory, make sure that the page rank of the directory is high and it has good traffic.

Secondly, many search engines also provide sponsored links. Therefore you can pay to get listing at the top of the result page. However, you have to pay for every visitor sent to your website. This way you can get traffic very quickly.

Thirdly, submit articles to article submission websites. Write quality articles related to your websites and products and you can submit those articles to famous articles submission websites. You can also have links in the articles. Therefore you can get backlinks and traffic from an article submission website.

Fourth, get as many links as possible. You can buy backlinks and many websites display links for free also such as classifieds’ web page.

Fifth, join as many forums and online communities which are related to your websites and products. Talk about your products there and you can also provide links to your website. This way you can traffic as well as backlinks.

Sixth, advertise your website in media such as Television ads, newspapers, magazines etc.

Seventh, have proper content. Optimize the content on your web page. The content should meet the expectations and needs of your visitors. Further, the content should be keyword optimized.

Eight, you can have many email campaigns where you send mails to thousands of people with clickable links. This way you can get good traffic.

Nine, always have a sitemap for your website. This help the visitors to explore the website more freely and conveniently.

Tenth, you must burn feeds for your websites. This way person get informed when there is some new content on your websites.

http://www.seosoeasy.com

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