News

For clients who have a POP3 mailbox with us (as opposed to email forwarding to another address, e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail), we now offer secure webmail access, where you can check your email and reply to messages from any web browser connected to the Internet.

If you have one of our websites but don't currently have a mailbox with us, but would like one, please get in touch for more information.

Something we have been meaning to do for some time is to shoot a series of short videos about Salon Alchemy - e.g. a brief overview about us and what we do, information about things like SEO (search engine optimisation) and a series of tutorial videos about how to use and get the best from Salon Alchemy (which will be available from within the Salon Alchemy application itself, as well as on YouTube and a dedicated new website which we hope to launch in due course).

So far, we've just shot a short "test" video explaining a bit about the Salon Alchemy salon software system and our web design services - it's not perfect (we need to sort the lighting out for example - it was literally just a case of setting up a video camera in the Computer Room yesterday and using the lights that were already there) - but hopefully it will give you a bit more information and background about us and how we can help you.

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!