Search engine optimization has long been a frustrating conundrum to many small business owners that painstakingly create and launch their company's Web site only to find that it ranks poorly if at all on the major search engines. Wouldn't it be great if someone came up with a tool or service to help get Websites at the top of the search engine rankings?
Of course, there's no limit of such services and apps available claiming to do exactly that these days; the only problem is that many of them fail to improve their client's rankings and some even use illegal tactics that can send a Website's rankings into a freefall or get the site completely banned from the rankings.
The challenge then is to find a service or tool that lives up to its claims without costing a fortune in up-front or ongoing maintenance fees. Enter Internet Business Promoter (IBP).
IBP effectively combines a number of search engine optimization (SEO), Website promotion, and SEO results tracking tools into an interface that is both easy to understand and work with. And while its capabilities don't exactly come cheap ($249 or $449, depending on the edition desired), the Website promotion suite can easily pay for itself in a very short period of time with better search engine results for your Web site(s).
There's a lot under IBP's hood, and the tool's undergone some significant changes recently, including integrating two separate apps into one (more on that later). Fortunately, the developers of IBP, Axandra, have done a nice job of integrating the various features into a design that's both attractive and easy to use.
Stepping Into the World of SEO
The first tool in IBP that new users will likely find themselves gravitating to (and for good reason) is the Top 10 Web Page Optimizer. This handy tool compares the home page of your Website with the ten top-ranking Websites according to the search engine of your choice. The optimizer analyzes the front pages of these Websites for specific keywords and then returns a report that compares factors such as keyword density in the title, meta description, meta keywords, body content, image alternate text, and even the site's URL.
The results are displayed in a report that provides statistics on how you site compares to the competition. These stats are complemented by helpful advice for modifying your content to better fit the profile of what search engines are typically looking for.
The tool's recommendations are certainly useful in many cases, but you're likely to find that several (or even all) of the top ranking Web sites lack many of the recommended content factors. In other words, while the tool is obviously useful for tweaking your site's content for better search engine placement, you'll quickly discover from the results of the top 10 Websites that there's a lot more to search engine ranking placement than just the content of your Web pages.
The Push for (Link) Popularity
Once you feel you've optimized the content of your site for maximum search engine benefit, it's time to turn your attention to the one of the most important external factors that affect your ranking — namely inbound links. IBP has two useful tools for this purpose, both originally part of the original ARELIS program that has been integrated Internet Business Promoter as of the release of version 9.0.
The Top 10 Inbound Link Optimizer and Link Popularity Improver & Link Management tools may carry excessively wordy titles, but their value in helping a site improve its ranking is considerable. While content once reigned king in the realm of search engine optimization, these days popularity is a far more important factor in garnering top search engine positions.
It may sound a bit like a return to high school, but the push for popularity in this case boils down to gaining links to your site from high quality sites with content related to your own — i.e. in the case of a premium pet food site (like one of our test sites, for example), your inbound links need to be from other reputable pet-related sites.
It's not easy to get sites to link to yours free of charge, but the tall task is made much easier by IBP's ARELIS tools. The link popularity and management tool in particular will help automate, track, and manage your link request efforts. And while you shouldn't expect overnight success when seeking links to your site, the ARELIS tools' at-a-glance status reports ensure you don't lose track of the big picture over time.
