Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review

I’ll say right from the start that the way that most SEO software products try to rank your webpages doesn’t work; sure they can help you decide which keywords to use and where they should go in your webpage, but other than that they really can’t push you to the top of Google.

 

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more years than I care to remember and to be honest with you; Internet Business Promoter, or IBP as it is popularly referred to, is the best thing for ranking since sliced bread!

 

Obviously it’s a good idea to analyse your pages to ensure that they are perfectly optimised for the given keyword(s), but unfortunately Google simply doesn’t work like that.

 

Google doesn’t care about your optimisation in silo, they want to know how good your site is against your competitions sites, it quickly works out which sites are worthy of being on the first page of their results; so it would make perfect sense to optimise against these top 10 results – and that’s exactly what IBP does.

 

Once you enter you primary keyword, IBP does a search (either on Google or your preferred search engine) for that term then analyses the top 10 sites to see where they have put their keywords, how many times, are they in bold, the title, description etc., and then it presents you with the results in an easy to follow report that is your roadmap for updating your page to be as good as these on the first page.

 

This on-page SEO analysis isn’t the end of it for IBP; it also looks at the inbound links so you know if there is room for improvement there too.

 

One of the great things about IBP is that it will never offer any advice that will be a short-cut to SEO success. It may take some time (as any SEO does), but if you follow its advice your website is more likely to succeed. But remember, just like life, there is no guarantee that it will actually work.

 

IBP is actually a suite of tools from Axandra. These tools allow you to do the following:

 

1. Research the most potent keywords in your niche/market
2. Optimise your website for these keyword(s)
3. Generate high quality back links for improving your Page Rank and rankings, and
4. Track the position of your website as it improves its search engine ranks.

So all in all it’s an excellent piece of software that I use in my professional role on a day to day basis, the only thing I would say is that you shouldn’t expect magical results, the software is excellent and keeps updating itself as Google releases changes to its algorithm, but even if your page(s) were exactly like pages in the top 10 with more links into it, there could still be indicators that Google looks at that could still put these sites above yours (i.e. design, architecture, bounce rate, times on site, previous penalties etc.)

 

But all in all, if you are serious about ranking well on Google then you need to invest in this software.

Download it for a FREE trial now.

Read More

SEOPressor Review: How to dominate Google search rankings when using WordPress

Effectively SEOPressor vs Yoast SEO

The first time I managed a WordPress site it came with Yoast already ready for me to continue the SEO, and for a long time I really didn’t know any different; but I became concerned that my SEO work wasn’t having the effect that I needed, so I started my search for a new WordPress SEO plugin.

After a fair bit of searching and testing I landed on SEOPressor, and loved it, but if you want a little more detail then hopefully this short review will help.
Start taking a closer look at SEOPressor today, click here for more information.

So which SEO plugin is best for your WordPress website?

If you’re just starting out or you’re simply looking to make the most out of your website content with videos, articles, categories, tags etc. then Yoast SEO should be good enough for you.

On the other hand, if you are serious about marketing your website and squeezing that little bit extra out of your SEO, then I would highly recommend using SEOPressor Connect.

For the basic stuff they can both pretty much do the same thing, but never versions of SEOPressor now comes with some really great features that really does push your rankings higher.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

Choose up to 3 Keyword/Phrases
OK, it’s the free Yoast SEO plugin that only lets you choose a single keyword/phrase for SEO purposes, but to get multiple keyword focus on Yoast costs a minimum of $69. Whilst you do pay for SEOPressor, the standard version lets you focus on three keywords. Making it easier if you don’t know (or not sure) which term to rank for immediately.


Real-time LSI Recommendations

The best part of the latest version of SEOPressor is real-time LSI recommendations; it will actually recommend Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to use, this is important as Google uses LSI to better understand what your webpages and website is all about. Once you enter your primary search term(s) into SEOPressor the LSI keyword recommendations start suggesting other useful keywords and terms you should be using in your content to get Googles full attention and to ensure that you really dominate the rankings for your chosen term(s). This is not available on any other WordPress SEO plugin and is a priceless addition to WordPress.


Real-time Keyword density

If you’re heavily into your keyword density (which I’m not) then this is a really useful feature as you see your keyword density on the fly, it can be really useful if you want to get the keyword density down you can see it going down as you add more content in real-time rather than having to ‘run’ a request.


Over optimisation alerts

If you are working on a page that is overly optimised (which could seriously damage ranking), you’ll get a real-time alert letting you know that something has gone wrong and you need to look more closely at your optimisation.


Social SEO

Usually when you share content, the social platform you are using will automatically pick and display the Description of the page, whilst this can sometimes be all you need, but social channels are more personal that webpages and Google search, so it makes sense to alter key landing pages to add a little more personality into your description. This is particularly true if you sell to Businesses and Consumers – typically Businesses might only see you on Twitter and LinkedIn (SEOPressor doesn’t actually support LinkedIn yet), but you could in theory have a more professional description on Twitter to that on Facebook to help talk to your different target audiences.


Internal Link Manager

SEOPressor allows you to effortlessly fix, build, and manage the perfect internal link structure to increase your reader’s retention and reduce bounce rate.


Other great features:

SEO Score: SEOPressor let's you set a lower limit for SEO score, if the content you have created doesn't pass the limit it won't let you publish it.

SEO Checklist: SEOPressor uses a checklist approach so that it becomes easy to create great content time after time, useful if you have a team of content developers and you want the same quality from the team.

Overall

SEOPressor just seems to have been built with Google rankings in mind, and take it for someone that has been in the digital marketing space for more years that I care to remember, this works the closest to how Google actually thinks and ranks, making it a clear winner in my books.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

SEOPressor Review

This is a quick video I put together that explains some of the key differences.

 

Best of luck with your SEO :-)

Read More

How to rank for RankBrain

Launched in early 2015, RankBrain is Google’s machine learning technology, it uses artificial intelligence to help Google understand exactly what you want to find with your search and delivers you highly relevant search results.

So how do you rank for RankBrain?

Actually the answer is rather simple and something that I’ve been advocating for years now, we know that RankBrain is effective for the 15-20% of the queries that Google has never seen before; this clearly indicates that these are natural language queries, typically long typed out queries or more likely voice queries asked on smart devices (smartphones, tablets etc.).

So optimising for these is easy, just write in natural language, write for humans, write for your target audience. If in doubt read your content out load to see if it makes sense (again, something I’ve been advocating for years), if it doesn’t make sense then your content isn’t correctly optimised and it need rewriting.

As a content writer, you tend to find that the highest quality content is written in a very natural way that is conversational.

So that’s it, check your content, check that it reads well and you will improve your Google rankings.

Read More

Link Building in 2015

Links, the lifeblood of websites, without these your website will not not highly on search engines, if you can't be found on search engines then you'll not get the visitors your business desperately needs.

Link building is fraught with difficulty, recent Google updates mean that if you get links from a poor website, then it will negatively effect your ranking.

But how can you get these all important links?

Two recent posts on LinkedIn help show the way:

• Link Building For A Brand New Website
• Link Building in 2015

These articles offer practical advice to help you improve your search engine rankings.

Good Luck

Read More

Old skool SEO still works

Matt Cutts and the team at Google have had a lot of press lately about how SEO should be done; a lot of people took some of Matts comments the wrong way and seemed to suddenly stop wanting to do any old school SEO in fear that Google would find out and deindex their website or pages.

Matt was only really repeating what he has basically said from day one, and that is that you can do pretty much anything that is ethical to help promote your website, but just don’t be spammy about it. Rule number one always has been and always will be – think about your market first and ranking second.

So what “old school” SEO still works?

The truth is that pretty much everything!

Guest blogging

Ok, this was the recent big topic that started to get webmasters a bit jittery, you can still be a guest blogger for someone else, there are just some very simple ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that you need to follow.

Do guess blogging as it can drive targeted visitors to your own site. Always add value to the blog that you are writing for – consider their audience AND yours. Consider creating a separate landing page for this guest blog post that adds value to the post.

Don’t use the same article that you have used elsewhere, this simply doesn't work. If you like the theme of a previous article you have written then consider a heavy rewrite of it. Don’t write a heavily weighted keyword article. Neither should you expect a link to your website, if this is your only motivation then don’t guest blog.

Forum backlinks

Do try to get links back from forums – there still is SEO value in doing this, but ensure that the forum is highly relevant to the pages that you want to link to. As with guest blogging consider creating a landing page that provides additional value to the forum comment you post – give the readers a real reason to click on your link.

Don’t create lots of spammy low value comments on Forums with a link back to your site, and don’t put your keywords in the Name field, and NEVER use automatic blogging software – that is so 1990’s and it will get you a Google penalty.

Directories

Do continue to use directory sites, but ensure that you are listing your website in a high quality directory that is likely to delivery good quality traffic to your site. Look for Directories that have strict submission guidelines. If you are a local business then local business directories can work well.

Don’t bulk submit your details to every directory that you can find, and NEVER use automated listing software.

Your own link pages

Do have quality outbound links to relevant websites, use pages that are highly themed and only consider links that are relevant to your audience.

Don’t have pages full of random outbound links, Google know that this type of activity is usually from link exchange programs and it could get you a penalty.

Read More

SEO benefits of Social Media

Most businesses now recognise the fact that social media doesn't necessarily directly lead to a sale, but I know for a fact that it can help that sales process; instead most big businesses now look at social media as having SEO benefits and allowing their website and webpages to gain better rankings than their competitions, but how!

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits that social media could bring your to your SEO.

Social Media in general:

There are a couple of linked reasons why we would want to use social networks in the first place.

1. It allows people to share your information and links with their Friends and Followers 
2. It allows a greater chance for more people to see your brand and your products 
3. You get a spread of profiles and individuals that link back to your site 

Google+:

Specifically Google+ looks good because of the obvious tight integration with Google Search; this benefits you because Google has a good chance of knowing a little about everyone that use its services.

It knows for example if individuals are interested in or an expert in ‘home decor’ or ‘flooring’ because of their Google+ profiles and/or their search patterns and/or their Gmail topics etc – now if you sell flooring and one of these individuals shares or +1’s some of your content (image/URL etc) then Google will naturally believe that your site or specific page is more important than a competitors that hasn't been shared by these interested parties.

Social sites as information hubs:

We also look at social media sites now as information hubs (a bit like mini websites).

If we take the above example about a flooring business and they focus on posting good content about flooring then Google will understand that their Blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest account is about ‘flooring’; and as such any links from it back to that site will generate a little more link juice.

The future of SEO and Social Media:

We (the SEO community) also don’t yet fully understand how Google looks at social engagement (individuals sharing social content), but whether it happens now or in the future, if individuals engage with your social content and brand then it can only benefit ranking.

Read More

The NEW Social Media Strategy - how to get rankings from your social channels

During the last quarter of 2013 I started to change my view on Social Media and the benefits from it to search engine ranking; tests that I was undertaking didn’t really give any credence (improved ranking) to the fact that Google love it when you post and engage with people of social media.

Sometimes there was a improvement in ranking, but constant Retweeting, Liking or Sharing of posts on Twitter and Facebook did nothing to improve ranking.

The majority of people I know in SEO would swear blind that I should see some benefit, but no!  Absolutely nothing! So what’s going on?

On further investigation I noticed that the social channels that saw a jump in rankings contained a sustained stream of related (or themed) posts; could this be the secret!

I tested a little more and indeed, I realised that I definitely seemed to get ranking benefits from accounts and sites that contained lots of themed social posts.

Then, mid January, Matt Cutts confirmed this approach (see my other post here).

What Matt basically says is that where they can get access to profile and posts, Google treats them just like any other website, they will look at the authority that you provide and pass that onto any linked sites.

So the strategy for the use of social media for ranking now seem very clear; view your social channel as a microsite; ensure that you tweet or post lots of themed (related) posts often (ensuring that you add the URL’s that you want to rank for). 

Ensure that your posts contain your keywords (like any website don’t spam them).

Treat your social channel like you would any small website, remember that content is king because you still want people to engage with you and link to your social posts; follow this simple advice and you’ll soon find that main webpage starts to see an improvement in ranking.

Read More

Twitter doesn’t use Twitter and Facebook social signals to rank pages

Matt Cutts (Google's head of search spam) yesterday explained this in a video (see below) that whilst the Google algorithm doesn’t treat social sites any differently to aid (or otherwise) webpage ranking, where they can they do still crawl and index the page like they do for any other website.

What does this mean in practice for website owners and brand managers that currently undertake social media in order to gain improved rankings? Simply don’t stop what you are doing!

Whilst the fact that you are engaging with your market doesn’t explicitly mean that your rankings will improve, some of this engagement will lead naturally to users taking a look at your site and offerings; this traffic is highly desirable.

The fact that Google does crawl and take notice of social channels does mean that a well crafted and themed channel presence could still rank well in the Google index or be seen as having a good amount of authority and any links back to your webpages become more influential in your own rankings.

In the future think about your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ page as being more of a microsite for your business and brand.

Great content

The learning to take from this video is that we should all continue to do what Google have always recommended and that is we develop great content that visitors will want to read and share through their social channels and other web properties.

Future

There is no doubt that in the future things may change, especially as Google become more adept at understand the value and authority that a particular author may have. If for example Matt himself comments on someone else’s SEO themed blog post then it is unlikely to change anything about their ranking; when Google fully understand that the Matt Cutts who just commented on that blog post has some authority in SEO, then it could affect ranking.

In Summary

Continue to do what you do in Social Media, do not ignore the content, don’t expect great leaps in ranking though your social engagement.

The Full Video

Read More

SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

Read More

Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

Read More