Small Business Resource Review: IBP SEO Tool
by Veronica Stone on February 20th, 2008
One of the most important factors in any business’s success is the visibility they have to their potential customers, especially online. Whereas local newspaper and trade magazine advertising is a little easier due to the format only allowing a certain amount of advertising space, online advertising is a different story altogether. With thousands of competitors, your business will disappear unless you have a strong presence.
Once of the ways of doing this is by using Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is a multi-faceted process where your website is optimized with keywords related to your business, therefore pushing you up the natural search rankings with Google and other search engines. The higher placed you are, the more visible you’ll become to people looking for your type of company. However, unless you’re an SEO expert, you’d normally have to hire a specialist company to run your SEO campaign for you, and this can run into thousands of dollars, which is a lot to pay if you’re a small to medium business. Thankfully, there’s an answer that will allow you to get strong results yourself.
The IBP Internet Business Promoter ($449.95 for the Business Edition) is a key tool for any small business that needs to increase its online presence. Easy to use, and hugely effective, it allows you a number of useful ways to increase your Google ranking and track your performance as well, to ensure that you’re keeping up to date with any changes that Google or other search engines make to the way your website is indexed and ranked.
Currently in its 10th incarnation, some of the key features that the IBP software includes are:
* Search engine submission to all the major search engines as well as thousands of smaller ones
* Keyword analysis, helping you use the most effective keywords for promoting your business and website online
* Top 10 ranking optimization
* Link popularity builder
* Search engine ranking checker
These features and numerous more are similar to the ones that SEO specialists use to help you climb the rankings on Google, and stay there. For a fraction of the price, however, you can now do this yourself, and the good news is that it’s relatively straightforward.
For example, the Top 10 ranking optimizer is an excellent tool that actually trawls the Internet and gets the keywords and descriptions that your competitors are using to attain their high placement with Google. All you do is set up a project for your website, type in the keywords for the audience you’re looking for, and set the program running. It will find the Top 10 websites on Google or your preferred search engine with these keywords, and show you how these companies are using them. You simply take the best ones and implement them on your own site.
Using this software has seen users appear on the first page of Google when searching for their particular niche. And with the tracking as well as performance tools, you can make sure that once you’re on the first page, you’ll stay there. One thing you do need to know, however, is that SEO is not something you do once and forget it. It’s a continual process and will not yield results overnight, or even in a week or two. IBP may get you started, but you can’t just stuff keywords into your site’s text and expect a number one ranking. Your visitors come first – so design and optimize your site for them first, and then for the search engines.
One of the downsides to the IBP software is that is doesn’t really allow for multiple search engine optimization – the changes you make to your website are for the search engine you set the project up with. So, if you optimize for Google, you’ll probably not receive the same results for Yahoo or MSN. But with Google being the dominant search engine anyway, it’s not that big a problem.
