Having run a successful web design business for some years, I’m very aware of the benefits of UK outsourcing, particularly in the fields of web design and of search engine optimization. Whatever the nature of your business, the chances are high that, like me, you’ve felt the pinch both in terms of the cost of employing specialists in the many related fields, and in delivering goods that match the high expectations of today’s customers.

One of the biggest challenges in terms of web design is trying to be all things to all people. A few years ago it used to be quite possible for anyone with a good understanding of HTML and web programming languages, as well as competent graphical skills to create good quality websites. But today there are many other aspects to bear in mind, such as integrating WordPress templates and configuring secure ecommerce shopping carts.

But of all the changes that the world of web design has witnessed, perhaps the biggest and most significant to date has been the advent and blossoming of search engine optimization. Whether you need a customized WordPress template, a fully integrated, secure ecommerce solution or simply a basic online presence, the chances are that without effective search engine optimization you’re sunk.

For a small firm it isn’t possible to be able to achieve the professional standard required by businesses and companies, yet at the same time it isn’t possible to afford a full-time web designer, ecommerce programmer, template integrator or search engine optimization specialist. This places web companies in a difficult position, and the worst decision is to try to produce a botch job that gives a bad impression.

I had a look at the idea of employing someone on an as-required basis, using expert specialist experience on certain jobs when it was required. The problem was that almost all of these were in other countries, meaning that there was never any possibility of face-to-face meetings or even telephone conversations half the time. With both time zones and language presenting difficulties, I needed a UK based expert, since my business is also UK based.

The problem with outsourcing outside of the UK is that those you end up working with don’t necessarily have the linguistic expertise and familiarity that is so important when targeting a UK audience. Subtle differences in the use of language, including colloquialisms and UK specific vocabulary can make a huge difference. Search engines can tell the difference between a UK oriented site and one that is not as specific. What’s needed is a UK outsourcing company that knows its pants from its trousers.

Fortunately I came across just such a company. Based in the UK, the people are both professional and approachable. I’ve actually met up with them, and chat on the phone fairly frequently. This in itself is reassuring since I can tell they really are UK based and able to tailor the search engine optimization to the UK audience. For any UK business UK outsourcing is always preferable for this reason.

Having used this company now for WordPress templates, setting up and configuring secure ecommerce sites and covered every possible angle of search engine optimization, it’s made my life much easier. Because they don’t label the products themselves, everything they provide becomes branded with my own business details – they deal with me, not my clients. For UK outsourcing, I wouldn’t try anyone else these days.

The search engines look very favorably on websites that have an incoming link from a prominent website, where that website does not link back to the other site (This is not surprisingly called a one way link).

It’s also known more commonly as a backlink.

The search engines as a rule give less importance to a website involved in two way linking (where both websites link to each other) since this has been abused so much in the past by webmasters seeking to achieve high search engine rankings.

There is still a benefit with two way links especially if you are linking to a prominent site so if your only choice to link to a prominent website is by linking back to them from your website, by all means do it.

Remember if you can get them to link back to you only (one way link) it will be more beneficial to your ranking in the search engines.

Remember that the website you are linking to (or getting one way links from) should have content related to the content on your website.

One way links are far and away the best way to boost your rankings in the search engines, ultimately bringing you more traffic as more people find your website in the search engine results.

The more “important” (from the search engines point of view) the site that is linking to you is, the better, and this is what separates the big boys in relation to search engine rankings.

When considering finding out more about buy backlinks ; it pays to do a little research first as a good way to move forward fast!. Watch the sharks out there!

One good way to get the ball rolling is to submit articles to article directories (see the Articles Directory article for specific information).

The main thing here is to make sure the article directory you are submitting has itself got a good page ranking with Google.

It’s very important to ensure that your one-way links have related content to your site.

Even when it is coming from a high ranking page, if your incoming link is from a website selling flowers, and your selling cars on your site, it’s unlikely to benefit you much.

If for example your website was about car tires then the link would be far more likely to provide a benefit to you in search engine rankings.

The more one-way links you can get from relevant, trusted (in the eyes of the search engines) and quality content sites the better. Remember that a single quality one way link will probably provide more of a benefit to your website than be 20-30 low quality links (un-trusted, sub-quality, not entirely relevant content to your website, or combination’s of these problems).

The other thing you will definitely want to do is to mix-up your anchor text from these one-way links (Anchor text is the text shown on screen for a link to your website).

Wherever possible you will want to try and control what is in the anchor text on these sites (obviously this will not be possible some times because it’s not your website, however I’ve found many web masters are happy to help).

You really do not want to have the same anchor text for many incoming links from many sites as this can set a red flag to the search engines, who may very well rate your website less important because they believe you may be manipulating the results (I’m not saying that the anchor text for every one way link needs to be unique, just that you should ensure you have a number of combination’s of them in use).

You want to have your best keyword phrases in use with your incoming links, but use a lot of variation and even just some regular links (just your domain name in the anchor text) will help keeping things natural.

The other thing you want to do is be sure to not always link to your root directory of your website, but rather directly to articles, etc. This allows your incoming link to be targeted for a particular page.

For example I have submitted articles to various article directories that are a subset of a more comprehensive article.

In this case I’ve chosen to link from the article directory direct to the more comprehensive article on my website.

I’ve also ensured that the article is not just a duplicate, since search engines dislike duplicate content and will mark down your websites importance if duplicate content is found.

And of course one way links to your website will not only push up your site’s search engine rankings, but it will also bring traffic to your website.

Start slowly and build up the links over time, you will find your likely to get far better results doing it this way, and that it’s also more likely that your great search engine rankings are likely to “stick” in the future.

It’s probably the biggest information sharing medium in history, over 1.3 billion people use it, yes you guessed it, I’m talking of course about the Internet.

It is the ideal place to go to buy/sell things, to conduct research, to contact people and to do an endless list of other things. There are hundreds of traditional methods of doing things that are slowly being phased out by the Internet.

But could the fact that the Internet is so vast mean that its virtually impossible to get your own presence on the web without being buried under all the billions of websites that are out there?

Well in truth, yes. The fact that the Internet is so huge means that it almost becomes a double-edged sword. This is because yes you can find pretty much whatever you happen to be looking for in just a few clicks, but it also means that if you run a business based on traditional retail methods, you could easily be put out of business.

But with all the fast moving new technology on the internet, how do you stay afloat? Well, step one goes without saying, create a web site, or get one created for you.

Although just because you have a website, doesn’t mean you’ve automatically got an online presence. You need do promote your site effectively or it will simply get lost among the rest.

One method of achieving this is to employ an effective advertising plan, placing ads for your website in as many places on the web as possible. You will also want a top search engine optimization service. If you intend to get someone to build your site for you, I suggest getting someone who knows about SEO to do it so that they will make it readable to search engines which is really, the most important thing in promoting a website.

So basically, if you want to get yourself a competitive online presence, look to get yourself a site made by an SEO company (if you haven’t already got one) then get them to optimise it for you, this might work out to slightly more than you had in mind to spend, but it might not. And after that it’s a simple case of finding high quality advertising space, preferably that offers some kind of bonus package as well, like a bundle of links to your site.

Implementing a positive strategy for marketing that maintains a consistant flow of web traffic to your site is by no means impossible. To get this web traffic to your site you need a significant search engine presence, and to achieve this, you need to main things, a quality website that is easy for Google to read and a series of links linking to your site from authority sites all over the web.

This is not as difficult as it sounds as there are many systems in place to make this happen for you. First though, you need to understand that not all links are equal. Google uses a Page Rank system to value each page of each site that it knows about. Ranked from 0 ” 10 with 10 being the best, most popular and valuable sites, and 0 being sites it knows about but thinks very little of. Below 0 is a grey bar graphic in the Google toolbar which indicates that either Google doesnt know that the site exists or worse than that, that the site has been blacklisted by Google and should be avoided.

In a perfect world, we’d all have lots of links from the home-pages PR-10 sites, however the fact that there are only around 10 PR-10 sites that exist somewhat hinders this approach, and those 10 or so won’t usually link to many other websites because they don’t need to, have nothing to gain from it, and would never stop receiving link requests. Even slightly lower PR sites, like PR-7/8s are very picky about who they link to. These highly ranked sites are known as “authority” sites and tend not to link to lower ranked sites (not very often anyway) because they simply have nothing to gain from it.

Your mission is to get as many sites with some PR or the potential to soon get some PR to link to you as possible. This means in effect that getting a link from a newish site that hasnt been live long, has no PR but is working on link building is a good strategy to adopt in the longer term. Google only allocated PR twice per year, so if you are unlucky you might need to wait months in order to gain some PR. The amount you are given will depend upon the link juice you squeeze from all the sites that link to you. The more, high pr sites you receive a link from, the higher your PR will ultimately be.

So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.

By far the most efficient way to get to the good seats in the search engine results ranking (at the top) is with one way links (getting sites to link to you without you having to link back). As people aren’t very inclined to give away links for nothing, this can be quite difficult. Some sites may just genuinely like your site’s content and give link to you as a resource for their users, but generally speaking, you will have to give them return

You may have problems achieving these one way links if you only have one website. There are a few answers to this issue, but one way link management is the clear way to go.

Effectively, your site is entered into a triangular arrangment where your site (site A) links to site B, which then links to site C, which then links back to site A (your site) this is beneficial to each site to the value of one one-way link. The big search engines cannot trace these links and so they reward you with a big push up the results rankings.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are some things that are universally agreed upon. When designing a website there definitely limitations on what is considered attractive and irritating.

As a website designer, there is a certain responsibility that you must accept. Many customers have there own ideas as to what kind of website look that they are seeking. Your job as a professional web designer is to be able to take their ideas and give them sound advice to avoid creating an irritating website.

Today I am going to share with you my top five most irritating website designs of all time. Your list may be longer, but this is my top five.

Pop Ups:

There are many marketers who praise the “pop ups” as a great marketing tool, but I have not found anyone yet that is not annoyed by pop up windows.

Loud Flash Presentations:

Flash headers can sometimes bring a website to life and catch a visitors attention. The problem I have with flash presentations are the loud ones that do not give you the option to turn the music off. The customer should always have the choice of whether they want to hear your music or not.

Light Colored Fonts With A Similar Background:

Using a light text color with a light background is really hard to read. A customer should not have to work their eyes too hard to read your content.

Fonts That Are Too Big:

Big fonts are a big turn off in my book. Whenever I land on a website with big fonts, I generally turn the page quickly. It generally makes me feel like I am reading a Sesame Street book.

To Much Info On One Page:

A website that is full of content is wonderful, but there are ways to organize your content so that it is uniformed. Placing too many navigation choices in one page seems a little too confusing for my taste. The use of a drop down menu can do wonders in that situation.

What one person may find to be a well designed website, someone else may find to be not so wonderful. The way to avoid creating a web design that is acceptable by most is to keep everything in moderation.