Whether your a web designer offering SEO services or you own an online business and are trying to rank to the top of search engines, finding your competition’s backlinks is an essential step in your link building campaign. Why would someone need to know what backlinks the competition holds?

Firstly, this is a great strategy for trying to get the similar links your competitors have. Secondly, finding how they think, what methods they approach and if it is a winning method could literally put your website to the top. Do they pay for links? What about their activity on forums, blogs, social networking websites? Are they doing article marketing? These are some questions that can be easily answered when finding their source for backlinks.

As with any method SEO-related, this can be done with free tools or paid tools. For free ones, we have Yahoo! SiteExplorer as first one. Although it can be really useful, this will not show more than 1,000 links and will not disclose important facts like anchor text, sites’ IPs and other essential for getting a complete view over a company link building strategy.

The second tool can be found both in the free version and paid version, it is literally an awesome piece of software everyone should make use of – SEO SpyGlass. Although it is limited to 1,000 links by Yahoo, this can squeeze about 2-300 more backlinks than the SiteExplorer, but the beautiful thing about it is that can reveal impressive data about the backlinks. This includes the anchor text, if a backlink is dofollow or no nofollow, pages’ PR, domain IP and many more, thus making this tool a must for anyone “spying” on their competition.

Last, but not least, here comes the MajesticSEO. These guys provide the most comprehensive reports for almost any given website. Owning their own index, they can reveal hundreds of thousands of backlinks a website has with the anchor text for each and any backlink, in just a matter of minutes. Claiming they hold their hands on an index with about 2.5 trillion unique URLs, their subscription packages start from as low as £ 9.99 each month and definitely worth every penny.

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Even though IE users are still higher in numbers than Firefox ones, the fact that web developers are using Firefox browser while it offers much more functionality is well known. With the plethora of add-ons available to download for free, what starts as a simple Internet browser can easily become a great tool every website designer or developer may find handy.

It is almost impossible to make a list of all the Firefox add-ons web developers could use for daily tasks, so the website designers at WebCreationUK thought to share four of the top ones they are using on a regular basis.

1. ColorZilla

As our fellow colleagues say, this is not only useful for web developers but also for any person trying to adjust the Adsense ads on a blog/website while picking the right colour to match the entire website. Using this extension’s “eyedropper” no one should have difficulties when choosing the exact value of a specific colour from the website. It also features a colour analyzer, an online palette viewer, measurable distances between point A and point B, page Zoom and many other goodies.

1. Web Developer

This is solely for website designers and offers lots of tools for coding and troubleshooting. Editing CSS has never been so easy before with this great extension, from trying different fonts and sizes to different borders or margins. Basically this extension gives you the ability to change options related to CSS and see the changes in a blink of an eye. Using CSS a lot? Then definitely install this Web Developer add-on.

1. Abduction!

This one allows users to take screenshots from different parts of a website or even of a whole web page and store it as images for different purposes. Again, great extension for designers.

1. Firebug

Firebug has so many features it would take a big blog to describe each one. As with Web Developer, it comes with a multitude of development tools that simply give developers the possibility to do anything from editing to debugging on CSS, HTML and Javascript while still browsing with Firefox. What is even greater is the fact that every change is made instantly so every tweak/edit will be seen in real time.

As we said in the beginning of this article, there are literally hundreds of useful extensions for web developers, this is only a small piece of the puzzle, but follow our web design blog and who knows, maybe in a short space of time an impressive list might be posted here…

We have claimed our place in Google Places, we’ve optimised our listing, pictures and video and we have also submitted the business to some important local directories. But what can be done more in order to get a letter in the 7-boxes provided by Google Maps?

As we saw in our latest article, reviews are of major importance when it comes to Google Places, but when former customers do not add a review, what is to be done? The best approach would be to call customers, ask them some quick questions about their level of satisfaction and at the end, ask their permission to use the reviews. Most clients do not have the time to login to different sites, search for your business and upload a review. However you, as a business owner, will not break any ethical barriers while just typewriting what customers said about the services you offer.

An important aspect would be not to add the reviews only on your Google Places listing but also on other business directories that accept reviews and are relevant for your business.

Speaking of local directories that are relevant for Google Places listing, how can one find more local directories to submit their business to? The best method available is to check where your competition has other listings and reviews, that is how you will find out the websites/reviews that are relevant for Google Places listing and in a matter of minutes you will have a directories’ list to fill your business details with.

In order to get those directories, search for “Liverpool dentists” and for each competitor appearing on the maps search for “More about this place”. Some businesses appear on maybe 1 or 2 directories but others are listed in tens of places, great for exposing your business as well.

That is about all related to Google Places, following those three parts, one should have no problems aiming for the top 7-boxes in the search results. More about organic listings and SEO to come on our website design blog.

Have you thought about your FAQ page lately? Or if you’re starting a new on-line business have you considered the importance of a FAQ page? Many businesses overlook the importance of this page, but it does offer a vital on-line service for customers.

A FAQ page answers a host of questions that many customers might be asking – and it means that they are less likely to need to be in touch with you by telephone or email (thus cutting down on your customer admin).

When creating this page, think about what it means: Frequently Asked Questions. Ensure that this page really does include FAQs! The page needs to offer customer support – and not a host of sales pitches and promotions.

Here we bring you some great tips for creating a great FAQs page:

Quick access: Offer a table of contents at the top of the page with a hyperlink to the relevant subject. This means that people do not need to do too much scrolling.

Heads up: Group subjects together in logical categories and head these up with a straightforward label. This helps people to access info quickly.

Keep it brief: Questions and answers should be short and to the point. For example: How do I use the checkout? This is a very general question, which would require a long answer. Instead break the questions down: For example, * Is the purchase system secure?

* How do I shop for more items at checkout?
* What are the delivery costs?

Answer the question: This might seem obvious but customers are looking for direct answers. A simple “yes” or “no” might actually suffice sometimes.

Links: Offer lots of links from the FAQs to the website that customers can help themselves, rather than having to call you to find out more. So links should take customers directly to the relevant part of the website, according to their questions.

Keep updating: When customers ask questions that you have not included in your FAQs then simply update the FAQs page.

Talk to leading web designers WebCreationUK about their great deals on ecommerce sites.

In our first part on tips to improve Google Places ranking we spoke a little about the on-page factors that contribute on this issue, now it’s time to go a little further and talk about how to optimise the Google Places listing and other tricks related.

1.      First and foremost, all the fields must be filled with information, from pictures and videos to working hours and so on. Pictures should be optimised for the keywords you are trying to rank for, like for example a photo’s name could be Liverpool_dentist1; as for the video, the best way to optimise it would be when uploaded to YouTube, the description should contain your web address, your company name, address and telephone number, same order as for the Google Places listing

2.       Fill all the 5 categories that best describe your business.

3.      Always use exactly the same business name, address and phone number as they appear on your website.

4.      Email used should be a company email, something like contact@firm.co.uk

Ok, so you should not have many problems with getting your business on Google Places, but how do you beat the competition, what are the tricks that will make your firm stand above the other listings?

The most critical aspect for great rankings in Google Places are web citations. Basically, your business should be submitted to as many local directories as possible, in our example there are some targeted Liverpool business directories that will appear on a simple search.

A must: Always use the same name, address and local telephone number as appears in Google Places! Along with those hyper-local directories there are many other authority ones where you should

Submit your business to: Yelp, Thomson Local, HotFrogUK and others, just see which ones are the most “beloved” by Google.

Another critical aspect is the number of reviews a business receives. There are voices saying negative reviews are also important for higher local rankings and here quantity is a much more important factor than quality.

That is all for part 2, however part three will come with some top notch tips on how to get more relevant directories in the eyes of Google and where to get more reviews, these only on best website design.

Recent studies have revealed that over 45% of all searches on Google are related to local services like “web design London”, “plumber in Manchester” etc. We all know the importance of organic rankings, but what if we struggled to reach no.1 for a keyword like “Liverpool dentist” and we are still under the 7-boxes provided by Google Places?

Well, the first step would be to claim your spot in Google Places. We will continue with the “Liverpool dentist” for the sake of our discussion. So let’s see how many exact searches per month this phrase gets:

-          We have 110 searches for Liverpool dentist

-          We have 260 searches for dentist Liverpool

As we may see, there are 370 highly-targeted leads searching for this term monthly, meaning about 18 leads per day for 20 working days. However, the Liverpool dentists with the 7-boxes for “Liverpool dentist” also appear the same for “Dentist Liverpool”. Wow, that would be a great number of new customers, right? Are you willing to let them click on the 7-boxes results while you only satisfy with a no. 1 organic ranking that will definitely not bring you as many new clients as the ones above get? People searching for “Liverpool dentist” are as targeted as possible while they are strictly interested in A. The service you offer and B. The location where you sell that service.

What more can you ask?

Here are some tips to optimise your website for Google Places:

1.      Address and telephone number should be placed on all pages (footer, header, does not matter, just place it’s there)

2.      Always use a local telephone number!

3.      “Dentist Liverpool” phrase as well, moreover add it in title, description and meta tags

4.      The content should be aimed for local searching, but also should be user-friendly as well, here is a small example:

Title: Are Liverpool dentists the most experienced ones?

Content: Finding a dentist in Liverpool that ……

5.      No keyword stuffing, will only hurt your rankings in the future.

Stay tuned with our web design blog, the next parts will reveal some great tricks like optimising the Google Places listing, where to get citations and reviews and many others.