Many people still seem to think that building a website will mean they will appear at the top of Google for the products they sell. Then they think that the answer is to add keywords to their homepage. Obviously, it is natural for a webmasters is to to want their website ranking in the top of Google’s search results, but with so many factors determining ranking, it can sometimes seem an endless battle in getting all the elements right on your site.

Well, Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed there is definitely one task you can remove from your list.

Matt was recently asked if spending time optimising keyword meta tags is actually useful. His short answer was: “Don’t waste your time!”

Keyword meta tags are not used by Google in determining your ranking, so concentrate your efforts on the other meta tags, especially the title & description tags, which may be used in the search results if Google sees them as being useful.

A keyword rich title tag together with an effective & relevant description meta data can be very useful in enticing searchers to click on your search engine listing, as they think they will find good information on your page.

So, you should definitely spend time on title & description meta tags, but Matt says he personally wouldn’t spend any time at all on keyword meta tags.

While many website owners focus on obtaining external links, it’s easy to miss internal link building, which is still an effective way to boost rankings for other pages within your website and the the best part of Internal Linking is that you have complete control over the implementation!

To get the highest possible return for your SEO, follow these simple guidelines to ensure internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimise the anchor text
You should ensure your anchor text targets your core keyword for the page. This is a good tactic to use in site-wide footer links, or even in the navigation, provided what you put there still makes sense for your visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow
Google ignores link value from any links marked as “nofollow”, so make sure that you haven’t marked internal links with the “nofollow” attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from the main navigation and footer links, linking to the main pages within the body text of your web page is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the actual text fits within the context of the sentence, so that the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant

4. Keep the total link numbers low
Make a note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link “juice” is divided amongst ALL the links (external and internal) on the page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on. Having hundreds of links on a page will dilute the effect of each link to almost nothing!

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive effect on the rankings for your keywords.

Some people don’t believe it: we can guarantee that your website will be found in the regular (unpaid) top 10 results on Google for the keywords of your choice. It is true and it can be done with IBP.

How can we guarantee top 10 rankings on Google and what’s the catch?

Many people will tell you that it is not possible to guarantee top 10 rankings on Google. That is correct. No one can guarantee top 10 rankings except for Google’s engineers.

However, our tool IBP has a success rate of more than 98% and we will give you your money back if you belong to the very few people who don’t get top 10 rankings on Google with IBP.

How does it work in detail?

1. You choose the keyword and the search engine

You tell IBP for which keyword you want to get a top 10 position and you choose the search engine on which you want to have a top 10 position. This can be Google.com, Google.co.uk, many other local Google variations as well as Yahoo, Bing, their local variations and many other search engines.

2. IBP analyzes your web page

IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer will then analyze all the relevant ranking elements on your web page as well as the links to your website and calculate a ranking score based on that information. The higher the ranking score, the more likely it is that your website will be listed on Google’s first result page.

3. IBP tells you in detail what you have to change

If your website does not have a 100% score, IBP will tell you in plain English what exactly you have to do to improve your web page and the links to your site. The advice will be tailored to your website, the chosen search engine and the chosen keyword and IBP will tell you in detail what you have to change and how you have to change it.

4. You make the changes on your web page

In the last step, you change your web page according to the suggestions of IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer until there are no further suggestions (IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer gives your site a 100% rating).

That’s it. No catch, no fine print. If you follow the advice of IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer then your website will be listed on Google’s first result page.

A real top 10 ranking guarantee should be for the keywords of your choice and it should be for the regular, unpaid search results. That’s the guarantee that you get with IBP.

Happy New Year everyone! How can you improve the rankings of your website in 2010?

It seems that a lot of people have HEARD about Social Bookmarking and they’ve HEARD that it can do wonders for your traffic and positioning, BUT many may still be asking : “What exactly IS Social Bookmarking?”

The most common “Social Bookmarking” sites are Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Dropjack and others… But there are dozens, even hundreds more.

They are websites where you can create a user account and then submit links that you find interesting to share with your friends, or the entire web.

If others like the links you submit, they vote for them, or they tag them, or they save them to their own bookmarks. Either way, the more activity there is surrounding a link, the more popular it gets on the site.

Now, the beautiful part is that most of this social bookmarking and voting is “public” for all the web to see and guess who loves sites that get social bookmarked?

The search engines.

In fact, with the rise of social web, search engines like Google are placing a larger importance on sites that they see are being socially bookmarked on these sites.

The result is simple: if they see your site being social bookmarked, your search engines rankings tend to rise.

So how do you get your site social bookmarked?

Well, you could spend hours/days/months listing your site and any relevant internal pages on all the social bookmarking sites yourself. Or you could try using a social bookmarking service!! Social Bookmarking has become one of the most important methods to getting traffic to your site. In Social Bookmarking, we bookmark your site with 311 bookmarking sites including all the major bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. Once submitted, these bookmarks can be viewed and shared by others.

Social Bookmarks can offer your website all of this:

• Build Permanent Web Site Links
• Get your web site exposed in more areas on the internet
• Get your site indexed by the major search engines easier
• Receive more targeted traffic to your web site
• Uses Manual social bookmarking process for best results
• Creates Text Links Using Your Important Keywords
• Uses the optimal number & highest quality social bookmarking sites
• Boost Your Search Engine Rankings and Position

And unlike many web directories, deeplinking is positively encouraged by the social bookmarking sites!!

I recently relaunched http://www.easyonlinediscountcodes.com and did some SEO work on it. Within just a month or two, it has managed to reach 20th place in Google for the search term “online discount codes“, which has approx 8,000 searches per month & about 50,000,000 results to compete with on google.co.uk!!

There may be further developments with this site, so hopefully the content will become even more comprehensive & improve the rankings still further!

It just goes to show that there is definitely something strange going on with Cashback Shopper, as this site still fails to rank in Google, despite being optimised more than some of the sites that are actually in the top 10! It’s very annoying & my resolution for 2010 is to find out why.

I’ve been carrying out a lot of link building on Cashback Shopper as its Google rankings have pretty much vanished & I’m keen to recover them. I wonder if it’s because the site is a white label & Google has decided it’s just duplicate content.

However, a recent ranking check of Bing has revealed that Cashback Shopper has 15 page 1 positions, 5 on page 2 & 5 on page 3, for some of the most popular search terms relating to cashback shopping. This is how the site used to feature in Google, so I hope these positions aren’t just temporary until Bing picks up a market share of searchers.

It’s very frustrating that Cashback Shopper is in no4 spot for “cashback shopping” and “cashback uk” in Bing, but neither phrase is anywhere in Google! I guess I just have to keep trying to find more Google worthy links for the site

Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm & although no-one but Google knows what they are exactly, we can have a reasonably good guess at many of them. In fact, WebmasterWorld have set themselves a challenge to list them all!

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

• Age of domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keywords in body text
• Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website inbound linking
• Quality of web page inbound linking
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text of link
• Title attribute of link
• ALT tag of images linking
• Country specific top level domain
• Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

• Number of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over optimisation
• Purchasing links
• Selling links
• Comment spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript links
• No follow links

Pending

• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of Javascript

Not included, but often focussed upon

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• PageRank (General indicator of page’s performance)

It’s easy for everyone to get caught up in obsessing about how to optimise your site & build links for Google, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google totally dominates the search market. But, there are still other search engines that some people are using, so it is wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too!

Obviously the other two engines are Yahoo and Bing and whilst Yahoo is seemingly declining fast, Bing is actually gaining a market share. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway. With the muscle of Microsoft behind Bing, you can be sure the search engine won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to Google for long!

However, unlike Google, we don’t hear much about what Bing wants out of a site for decent rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for complying with Bing’s policies, does not differ too much from the advice that Google would give you. It is however, still always nice to hear what they think, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”

What You Should Do!

DeJarnette shared some tips for getting more quality links. The following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

What You Should Not Do!

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,” says DeJarnette. “If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalised with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any experienced search marketer is not already aware of, but it can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and not to do, to help webmasters get better rankings.

Why not use one of our link building or Bing Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site.

I still hear a number of people talking about page rank, page rank, page rank, when discussing whether their website is doing well, or trying to assess the results of their search engine optimisation efforts. However, page rank became less relevant when Google removed PageRank values from their webmaster centre!

Here’s the statement Google made when they did it:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

However, if this is Google’s position, then why bother updating their toolbar PageRank values? Doing so is only going to create a stir in the webmaster community & cause confusion as to it’s relevance. Surely it would’ve been much mbetter to remove it from both webmaster tools and the Google toolbar at the same time.

It’s also important to remember that the toolbar Page Rank values can be a couple of month’s old, so they’re out of date even after the update & therefore not really relevant to your current ranking position. The recent PageRank update has left many webmasters confused with most reporting major decreases in their website’s ranking in the search results. But if Google’s statement is to be believed, should you really be concerned about it?

If you have a search engine friendly site, the most important issue for your Google search engine rankings are quality inbound links!

Use one of our link building or Google Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site

I’ve been using IBP for a few years now & have found it a very useful tool to assess the search engine optimisation of both my own sites & those of clients.

A new version has just been released by Axandra – IBP 11.5, with a much improved keyword tool.

Finding the best keywords for search engine optimization is crucial if you want to succeed with your website. For this reason, they have completely revamped the keyword tool in the new IBP version.

The new keyword tool in IBP helps you to find good keywords as quickly as possible:

Just enter a keyword and IBP will quickly return the following information:

• keyword suggestions for the entered keyword
• the estimated number of monthly searches for the keywords on Google
• the number of search results for the keywords on Google
• the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for these keywords

A unique keyword database + support of the official Google keyword tool!

IBP’s keyword tool uses the unique keyword database of KeywordIndex.com. KeywordIndex offers you a unique database that cannot be accessed through any other keyword tool on the Internet. KeywordIndex.com provides you with 38 million unique English keywords, and 20 million unique German keywords.

The quality of the KeywordIndex database enables you to find keywords that are really used on the Internet.

Find keywords in 13 different languages

IBP’s new keyword tool will also help you if you’re looking for keywords in other languages. In addition to the keyword database of KeywordIndex.com, IBP’s keyword tool can also access keyword suggestions of Google, Amazon and YouTube. You can even access the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool without entering a captcha.

You can use IBP’s keyword tool to find keywords in thirteen languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new IBP version also creates targeted keyword lists for Google AdWords, long tail keywords and much more. It even shows you the Google AdWords adgroup score while collecting your keywords to make it as easy as possible to get a high Google AdWords QualityScore.

Top 10 rankings or your money back

Fact: If you want to get high rankings on Google and other major search engines then you need optimized web page content and high quality inbound links. IBP helps you get both. Download the latest version For FREE now!