Review of IBP11 – Internet Business Promoter – SEO Software

This is going to focus on the ‘Top 10 Optimizer‘ because this is the tool I have used, and probably the main reason anyone would buy this software. It is loaded with other features, but they all just seem to be extra things that I would never use.

I don’t consider myself a pro at rankings or SEO by any means, but I do have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to get good ratings. I have spent many hours reading all I can on the subject, and have used that knowledge in several cases to get pretty good results.  The one site of mine that I have worked on ranking ranks #5 in Google for the 3 word term, and #1 for the 4 word term out of 84,500,000 results. So I think that’s pretty good.

So when I saw this software and read the reviews I thought this looked like a pretty good tool that could save me a little time and also hopefully improve my results. I have been working on ranking a clients site and currently they rank 4th and 5th on Bing, and Yahoo, but only 28th on Google.

What first brought my attention to this product was that they have a web bot that had spider a page on my site. So when I saw this, first of all I banned them from accessing my site again. But then I checked out the site a little more to see who they were. I figured if they were spidering the Internet and then compiling that information into there software so that they could give out highly accurate information this would be great… Unfortunately that was not the case.

The way the optimization software works is by downloading the top 10 ranked pages from the selected search engine, for the search term that you have selected. It then breaks the pages down into there separate parts and analyzes them to give you a low and high, or in some cases an average and tells you that this is were your site should be. Which in theory is great but there are several flaws in the logic.

The first is ‘stop words‘ which are words that are ignored by the search engines. There are really some places in the software where it should use them and then there are others where it should not. For example when one of the keywords in the phrase I am using is ‘in’ it tells me that it shows up too many time in my page. It also finds the word ‘in’ inside of other words like ‘indiana’ so this is just in no way accurate. The software reports on the entire keyword phrase, and also each word individually, so I can understand it using the stop words in the whole phrase, but not in the individual break downs. So if you enter your term with the stop words it messes up the density of certain things, but if you exclude them then it throws of the full term searches. So you just can’t make it happy either way.

The software will also compare the density of words in certain sections of the page.  For example it searched for the full search term in the H1 tag of all of the other top 10 and none of them had it at all. So it said that my count, and density for that term was too high and that I should remove it. I know enough to know that having my keywords entered once in a H1 tag at the top of my site is NOT going to hurt my rankings. Also it complained about the density of the keywords in things like the ALT attribute, and several others, and to the best of my knowledge there is no max density that you can have in those tags, so it makes no sense.

It also looks at the number of incoming links to the top ten sites and then calculates an average, and if you don’t have that many it tells you that you need more incoming links. But in the first 2 sites that I analyzed 9 of the top 10 sites had between 100 and 1000 incoming links, and then there was one site that would have several million. So this would totally skew the number making it useless. Actually looking at the numbers and analyzing them myself was helpful, but the average number that they compared to was useless.

All said and done I still figured I would give it a shot and do what it said to see what happened. I was able to get the percentage complete up to 87% before I took a break. They claim that if you get at least 95% they guarantee a top ten result. There were really only 3 main things that I still had left to fix and those were dealing with incoming links which of course are a huge factor in Google’s rankings.  So I watched for a few days and waited for Google to update, and when they did my ranking had actually dropped from 13th to 29th.

So on the negative side, the site sank several positions in the rankings. But on the plus site, I now know that the work I originally put into designing the site was pretty much right on. The only thing that the site seems to be lacking at this point is quality incoming links which will hopefully happen over time. So from that standpoint it was helpful…

So in the end I would say it is very simple to run, and puts all of the information you need into an easy to follow report with advice on what needs to be changed. Unfortunately much of the advice that they proved is just not very helpful because in my opinion it’s wrong. I think the software could be greatly improved by getting the input of a true SEO professional so that the software could give much more educated advice.

Getting Started

Demand and Visibility!

These are the two things that you need to think about when creating a web site.

First is there a demand on the Internet for what you are putting out there? If you have a product or service that you are offering on the Internet but no one is interested in that product or service, then there is no point in building a site for it. For example I had a client that paid over $30,000.00 to build a web site that offer free information. There hopes were that the site would get popular and that eventually they could charge for advertising. The problem is that they did not do there research. When they contacted me about helping them rank their site the first thing I did was get a list of common words (keywords) that they thought people would use to find their site on the Internet. There are  several online tools to research what people are looking for on the Internet. I found that basically NO BODY was searching for any of those things. But I did find something in the same field that was extremely popular. So we where able to change the focus of their site and now they are doing well.

Next is Visibility. Can people who want what you are offering find you on the Internet? The Internet is a big place and unless you do everything just right you may be just another invisible web site. The term here is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of designing, and marketing your site on the Internet so that you rank very high in the search engines for specific word phrases. If you don’t rank well you will not be found and your only other option is paid advertising.

And if you happen to also have an item that is either unique or the cheapest then you may just have a gold mine on your hands.