Getting back links is central to website promotion - the more backlinks you have the more likely people are to find you, and as well as people, search engine spiders will index your site, and increase you pagerank. Amongst others, one source of backlinks is from peoples blogs - why not comment on what they have to say, while leaving a link back to your site? One problem could be finding the right blogs!

I noticed at the weekend, that a simple mistake (several months ago), has led to a chunk of one of my sites being inaccessible ever since... My embarrassment only just outweighed my frustration! Fixing the mistake took seconds, and released a lot of content, but it demonstrates just how easy it was to make the mistake. Since then, I've had a look at some link checking tools and stumbled across this Fast Link Checker, which allows 30 days of free trial - easily enough time to quickly check your links are in order.

After you've sorted out your keywords another major step in SEO is cultivating back links. Nothing gets you noticed faster by search engines than external links to your site from a few heavy weights. You know the ones I mean, those with a high page rank and zillions of eyeballs.
But how do you know who links to your site?

Any web guru would tell you that the first step to optimising your website is to manage your keywords - and when first planning and designing your site, it's key to know what keywords to use, and how to use them effectively. Here, lets investigate some of the tools available to help with keyword optimisation, and discuss strategies for managing keywords. First, what are keywords and why are they important?

For us web designers it is very important that you check your web creations in as many different browsers as you can get your hands on. Before that, you have to make sure it’s working in at least one browser, and the most popular at the moment is Firefox. I’ve recently found a couple of useful add-ons for Firefox that aid you during web design.

Shopping list:

• Latest version of Firefox
• Firebug
• Web Developer Add-on