If you find that your site is not indexed then you need some links for the search engines to find you. Many new web designers when they are first starting out will go to the search engines and submit their site directly to the search engine and then wait… Don’t bother, there are quicker and easier ways to get the spiders to find you.

If your site is indexed then you have passed the first post.

Getting your first links to your site may seem daunting. Where do you start, how do I ask people I don’t know for links? I don’t know anyone else that has a web site, etc. Don’t worry, there are easy ways to deal with the first links.

Search engines, like Google, visit blogs almost every day if they are written on a regular basis. That is where to start. If you already read a few blogs about your own industry, leave a comment with your name and your web site were it is asked for; remember though try and contribute to the subject, just saying “Great post thanks” is not a great contribution, if it is in your area and you know something worth saying then say it. Work at it till you have something worth saying. NEVER type your web site into the comments field, that is spam and will be considered as such by almost all bloggers.

One last point here, make sure the search engines can find your site and read your navigation. Search engines don’t like websites that are completely written in Flash, so re-consider. Are you using Javascript for navigation, if so get a site map up in plain HTML. Stay away from frames, just makes the job harder, sometimes impossible. Don’t make the job of getting up the rankings harder than it is already.

On the bottom right hand corner of your browser there will now be a SEO logo – it is greyed out when off, toggle with the mouse and it will become coloured and on. Do not do all your searches with this on, if you have a fast internet connection Google will treat it like automatic queries after a while and ban your IP address from Google for somewhere between 30 minutes and four hours – therefore if you are using this on a server at work the whole system could be kicked out of Google search for a while.

The default for SEO for FireFox is off, therefore without editing the settings it will not work. Follow the instruction on Aaron’s page and or the tool itself.

Once setup, run a search query; you will now see below each result more information. There are only a few pieces of the huge amount of information that I want to know immediately about a website. The age is right at the start, this is important for getting links from and if I want to get in front of them in the search results, generally the older the site the harder it is to beat and the better it is to get a link from.
The first Yahoo! links number is the inbound links to the whole site and the second Yahoo! Number is the inbound links to that page. The .edu is the education links. Switch off FireFox before opening any of these to see the actual links. You have to open the Yahoo! Page to see the links as the figures given are the total number of links and it often falls dramatically when you open Yahoo! and see that many of the links are coming from the one website – good for Page Rank flow and indexing, but it makes little difference for search results.

The last item on this menu is the whois link. I use this when I cannot find contact details on the website; more often the whois details will have contact information. If there is no whois contact and no contact on the site then it is time to move on quickly.

By no means does this tool give an in-depth guide to the search results, but it can give a very quick feel for the area, and often helps to make my mind up quickly on whether to compete in the area.

RedFly Marketing are one of the few Irish companies that have developed a FireFox plugin. I use it simply because it is easier to use than entering the text details myself. (&gl=country code – at the end of the search string).

Their FireFox plugin allows you to easily see the search results in other geographic locations. If you are in Ireland and search using Google, as most people do, then you will be getting results that are influenced by the Irish index. If you can think of Google as huge databases it will help. They have a database for just Irish results so you can click on “pages from Ireland” and this will give you only pages from Ireland.

If you use Google.com in Ireland the results are influenced by your geographic location, therefore the website at the top in Google.com in Ireland is often not the same website that is at the top if the same search is done in the UK or the US for example.

If you are only competing in Ireland and have no care what happens to your website outside of Ireland this may be of no interest to you, however if you sell online this is unlikely to be the case. For example if you search for “B&B Kerry” the same website is at no1 in the US, UK, and Ireland – however the no 2 and beyond change – this information I am sure is very important to the website that is no1, and for the rest who are trying to get that spot.

This plugin is easy to use, just go to the RedFly site and download and install using FireFox. You will be prompted to restart FireFox, do so. Once installed you only have to right click on the screen and go to “Search Google Global” and chose the geographical location to see the different search results.

So the next time your search engine optimisation team tell you just to do a search on Google.com – well they might just have a surprise.

Companies will rightly advertise their creative skills, technical expertise and design know-how. They will use lots of technical terms and buzzwords in their marketing literature, but because of the sheer number of companies all offering more or less the same services, the point is reached where all the advertising can begin to look almost identical.

How then does one go about choosing a competent design company from the many available? If you are new to the workings of the Internet, then the most obvious and perhaps safest method is via personal recommendation, which by its very nature is a vote of confidence from a satisfied customer and presents a golden opportunity for an organisation to excel itself; after all, there is nothing like a referral to start the ego twitching and make a company go all out to impress.

An alternative method to a referral is of course to look on the Internet itself. You will find literally thousands of web designers advertising their services and at the same time providing visual proof of their abilities via their own websites. It is always a good idea to look at portfolio and testimonial pages; you can then contact one or two of their customers to get verbal references; these may help you in deciding which design company is best for you.

Another option is to choose a company at random and talk to them about what you expect from your intended website. Good designers will listen to what you have to say and work with you; they will gather as much information as possible from a customer before going anywhere near a computer. Moreover, they will always be willing to offer sound advice and will develop solutions to help bring your ideas to life.

In addition, and perhaps the smallest sector of the web design industry are the self-taught individuals who whilst having no formal training or qualifications, do possess a natural talent, aptitude and enthusiasm for web design, and who for the most part produce extremely high-quality work often at a fraction of the cost charged by the larger companies.

It is worth mentioning that there are so many capable and talented designers available, that the hardest part of getting your website built will probably be deciding which company or individual you want to do it. Taking the time to look into all the options should help to ensure that whomever you chose will produce the required result.