Website SEO Search Engine Optimisation – Review of IBP Software from iBusinessPromoter.com

It would be unfair to develop a series of website optimisation posts without mentioning iBusinessPromoter. Now that I have my website up and running I bought a copy of IBP (www.iBusinessPromoter.com) and created a top 10 optimisation report. The IBP software is amazing and if you can afford a copy I thoroughly recommend that you go get a copy now. Whilst this series of guides is giving you the broadest overview of the major steps that you need to take in order to ensure that your website is spotted by the search engines and stands a chance of being listed, I cannot even begin to go into as much detail as the report from the IBP software. The report for my website runs to 60 pages. I hope that by outlining the results I can offer some opinions as to their meaning and what to actually do. IBP is literally overflowing with information and suggestions on what to do. It does an awesome job of telling you what it is reviewing and from that the actions are usually obvious.

And it’s all in here, I’ll give you an overview of what the software gives and some of the responses for the day my website was ran thorugh it but if you are serious about running your business on the Internet then you really should go get a copy.

• Report overview — in this section the software contains your site to other websites that use similar search terms it gives examples of their homepage and the descriptions used looking at this is obvious that WordPress does not have an easy place to create your website description meta tag and this is something I need to do. [update] There is a great plugin All in one SEO Pack that covers this properly I love WordPress plugins.
• Ranking score — before adding this content and tackling my meta tags my ranking score was 30% after a bit more work I’ll run this report again and post some comparisons below. What I particular like about this is page is that it shows a variety of factors and where you pass and where you fail. Currently I fail on 29 ranking factors.
• Keywords — the report outlines the various search terms and keywords used on my site and on the comparison websites in shows me what I do well and what my keyword density is. This is one section that I think could be improved because my keyword density is deemed to be okay but I know that this is purely because I don’t have much content. I would really like to see some attempt to compare entity with volume of content to show how much work really needs to be done on my website.
• Global Link popularity — obviously is a new site I’m not expecting amazing results yet but it is kind of depressing to see that I have zero links and some of our competitors are into the thousands in one has over 8000.
• Inbound links — again I don’t have any links and so this makes for rather depressing reading.
• Keywords in body text — again we see that my keyword density in some areas is reasonable and again I know that this is only because I haven’t got much content in still at least this is an area that is totally in my control and I’m confident that I can add good value content in a reasonable timeframe.
• Age of website — Google and other search engines like websites that have been around for a long time and if you are like me and have a new website there really is nothing we can do about this. However when you are registering your domain this might be a good reason to buy a domain name that has been around for some time from another person however when I looked at this, the pricing was kind of ridiculous.
• Keywords used in H1 — When I ran the report I didn’t have any text marked as H1 but this is also something that I can control. What I particularly like about this section is that it compares my site to that of my competitors in shows me what I can do about it.
• Keyword use in domain name — this section compares where I managed to include keywords in my domain name to the success of my competitors.
• Keyword use in page URL — now I’m learning something there is a value in having your keywords embedded into the name of the page URL. In WordPress there is an option to manage the way the permanent links are created. By default WordPress uses a page number or post number naming convention and whilst these are short I think is better to use a month and name combination and always ensure that your posts are named to include heavy hitting keywords. Man I love this software.
• Links from social networks — the software obviously knows about a whole host of social networks and shows the links back from del.icio.us and Digg. Some good news for me here, only one site has had any real success and another has had marginal success. This is an area where I should be able to easily outperform my competitors and boost my ranking.
• Service speed — the report didn’t seem to work for me here, I think it may just be that there were many pages on my website, maybe not enough for a reasonable benchmark. As I add more content compare these reports and see if I improve. Although I had my suspicions because many of the competitors have also not return a school.
• Keyword use in subsequent headings — looking at other headings from two through to six, I really like this section it shows that my competitors are pretty poor at managing subsequent headings and with a bit of work that is somewhere I can really outperform them. It also shows me that at the moment I have a lot of work to do.
• IMG ALT attributes — we use images on your website the alternate text is used by Google to determine the relevance. A lot of people make the mistake of being quite lazy when inserting images (it’s just a picture right) but it pays to be ever vigilant. So far it looks as though I’m doing a good job, and my competitors have been pretty weak in this area.
• This is great I’m already starting to see that my competition might have nice websites that look good with lots of pages that they had not thought much work into optimising their website and I can clearly see a way forward.
• Top-level domain — a simple check that we registered at the top level. I passed this test of this kind of pointless and is only here for the sake of completeness I feel.
• Keyword use in bold body text — okay I have talked about this before, and when we ran the test I was doing a pretty poor job but hey at least the good news is that so were my competitors and I’ve been working really hard to ensure that my keywords are highlighted in bold.
• Number of visitors — okay no surprises here my visitor numbers suck it in their website. The report however is awesome it uses the Alexa.com traffic rank information to show me just how bad I am doing. I really like the advice at the bottom of this page “your website does not appear to have many visitors. This could be disadvantageous to your rankings on Google.com”. Yeah right, tell me something I don’t know. Oh well I guess only time can help me now.
• Keyword use in same site link texts — maybe I’m not really reading this right but  think this relates to the relevance of shortcuts within my site and whether those links contain useful keywords. When I built the report I was still using the post ID for my naming, and I’m now convinced that this is a bad idea because none of my links contained keywords. Having changed to the month and name convention I should be able to improve my stats on this one.
• Keyword use in outbound links — so again if I’m reading this right, any links we make to the outside world will improve our ranking if they include our keywords so I intend to start creating some links to my site on pages that have my keyword in their title.
• Keyword use in same site link URLs — OK these are where links in my site to other pages in my use have my keywords in them – oops I was using post ids and that means no keywords – ok lesson learned.
• Keywords use in outbound link URLs — okay so the obvious flipside is that we need links to external websites and we need to use our keywords in those links. I scored pretty poorly on this one but I think the answer is fairly straightforward, linked to similar to some relevant websites and make sure I use the term business software solutions.
• Keyword use in meta description — each page has a meta description tag and it’s clear from the report by have not used my keywords in these descriptions. I’ll go back through my pages and add meaningful descriptions and try to ensure that the relevant keywords are used in each. I really must say that doing this manually would be a real chore and I can’t imagine trying to do this without IBP.
• Number of trailing slashes in URL — a case of if I understand this some web search engines don’t like subdirectories that don’t link to the rest of your site. I seem to have a clean bill of health.
• HTML validation of webpage to W3C standards — have now moved into the sections that are deemed slightly important by IBP. Apparently I have an HTML error this is where a tool like this really pays dividends. No one would have the time to do this manually, and would you even know where to start?
• Readability level of webpage — I really like this section are maybe it’s because I scored well (I had to do well somewhere) my website scored 70/100 with the sweet spot considered to be between 60 and 80.
• Keyword use in meta keywords — this section is testing if I remembered to put my keywords into my meta tags. I scored really badly but I know that’s just because I ran the report before I’d done this work. You can guarantee I’ll be coming back to this one.
• Keywords used in HTML comments — to add comments using WordPress I assume that you would use the HTML editor rather than the visual editor. I guess it makes sense that if I put most myself in my webpages that refer to the keywords I am targeting then Google will be more inclined to think that this page is genuine. This is something I haven’t done yet, but the good news is that neither had my competitors.

The next section of the report focuses on search engine compatibility and give some general feedback and advice on things that you should and shouldn’t do. So far my site looks to be doing things by the book.

The next section is advice on factors that could be preventing a top ranking, the choir loft content in here and too much to go through in a review especially as you should really buy the software rather than read my review if I’m to be fair to IBP.

Subsequent pages of the report for a summary of your results and scores in a tabular format at this early stage this is possibly irrelevant for me but later on I can compare the results and short on track in the right direction.

My IBP SEO Scorecard Timeline

I moved this section to it’s own blog, it was getting kind of big and we are only onw week 2 or 3 so I thought time to make a seperate post http://polychromenz.com/2009/06/website-seo-my-90day-project/

Conclusion

OK so I have been playing with a bunch of different products such as keyword country but iBusinessPromoter wins hands down for simplicity, functionality and completeness. I really cant find anything I don’t like yet. One area that deserves a special mention is the checklist, I really like being able to step through an answer questions to see how much I’ve got left to do. And with general tips and tricks scattered amongst the list you are always been prompted to cover everything. I’m pretty sure they have an affiliate program and so I’m off now to sign up.

Thanks for reading

My score = Essential business tool 10/10 buy it today.