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Today, one of our clients was called by a "dodgy" SEO company who wanted to charge them megabucks for getting them on the map that appears on the top of a Google search.

But you can do that yourself for free!

Just go to http://www.google.co.uk/local/add - follow the instructions and enter your details. It will only take you a few minutes.

It's now only 7 weeks and a day until the Beauty UK trade show at the NEC in Birmingham (which takes place on Sunday 25th and Monday 26th April)!

Salon Alchemy have got a stall there (stall F49, near to the Nail Competition area) and we will be demonstrating the Salon Alchemy system and how easy it is to use, as well as showcasing our portfolio of websites.

Please pop over to see us - we may well have some special "show only" discounts on the Salon Alchemy system too.

One of the most important ways of getting visitors in to your website and improving your website's performance on Google and other search engines is to get as many links in to your site from other sites as possible.

We always recommend getting your website listed on as many free index websites as possible, e.g. http://www.freeindex.co.uk/ and http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/ - as this is an easy (and free) way to bring in extra traffic to your website.

Another way of getting extra links is to "swap" reciprocal links with other sites, i.e. you link to them and they link back to you.

Salon Alchemy already had an easy to use Links page system, where you could log on to Salon Alchemy and add links to other sites, but now we've gone one stage further and added a new system which makes it easy to swap links with other Salon Alchemy website customers.

This new system is available to all existing Salon Alchemy customers who already have links pages, at no extra charge. It's available by logging on to Salon Alchemy and choosing "website -> swap reciprocal links" from the main menu.

Here, you can enable the system by ticking a checkbox and entering your business name, a description of your website and your address (this is used to work out how many miles you are away from other customers using the system, so you can avoid swapping links with direct competitors, but is not shown to other customers for privacy reasons). You can also upload a banner (if you have one) which will then be displayed with your link.

Swapping links with other sites is easy - you just view a list of available websites and click a link for each one that you want to swap links with - this will send an email to the website's owner asking them to log in to approve or deny your request. And approving/denying incoming requests is as easy as clicking a link too.

You can also choose to be notified by email when a new website joins up to the link swapping system, or when someone approves or denies your request to swap links with them, or deletes an existing link with you.

It's a win/win situation - your website gets extra hits, the websites you choose to swap links with get extra hits, and Salon Alchemy websites in general get extra hits, so it's great advertising for us too!

We've now finished work on the online shop for the P and S Jewellery website, http://www.pandsjewellery.co.uk/ - this sells a range of quality Celtic jewellery made at their workshop in Derbyshire.

Although we've gained a reputation for developing high quality websites for salons at a surprisingly low cost, we're also happy to design websites for other people, businesses and organisations too.

We've recently added an online shop to the website for Love & Roses Boutique in Aberdeen, which sells a range of designer jewellery, handbags, cards and gifts, and are currently working on an online shop for P and S Jewellery, who design and produce handmade Celtic jewellery from their workshop in Derbyshire (this will hopefully be "live" within the next few days).

We've also developed a website for PREM Management, a public relations, event and media management company based in Staffordshire. This is our first website to feature a Flash gallery (the rotating carousel on the home page of the site), and we're pleased to now be able to offer Flash-based galleries in addition to Javascript. This website makes extensive use of Salon Alchemy's advanced gallery management features, which lets a website owner quickly and easily make changes to images in galleries on their website - i.e adding and deleting images, and changing the order that they appear in the gallery.

We're also delighted to sponsor Bikes and Bands, who are raising money for "Help for Heroes", by providing them free hosting for their website.