Well this blog was initially intended to focus on internet marketing strategies, and it will continue to do so. However, I’m currently in the middle of launching DigitalFrameGuy.com and as such I find my work life turning to the fascinating subject of SEO. Therefore, you’ll likely see a lot more SEO related posts here in the next little while.

So, since we’re talking about SEO, I wanted to let you know about another magnificient little tool I just discovered. My intention isn’t really to flog every product I can find on this blog, but I do want to make mention of tools that I’ve legitimately found useful so others can benefit. I’ve been getting SEO related sales calls quite a bit lately, and mostly they cost a pretty penny. So I opted to do my own SEO. However, I wanted something to help me with the often odious task of link building and search engine submissions.

Anyways, I came across iBusinessPromoter today, which is a cool bit of software that helps you with the complete SEO process, from ground zero all the way through keyword selection, site optimization, search engine submission, link management, and finally a top 10 ranking on the search engine of your choice - guaranteed. Yes, that’s right. Their guarantee is that if you follow their recommendations for your site, and can’t get a top 10 ranking on Google within one year they’ll give you your money back. That’s a pretty good offer where I come from.

So anyways, I downloaded the free version of the software to check it out. I also discovered that companies like eBay, Lexmark, Canon, etc etc have used this product, which gave it a fair bit of credibility off the bat. So after installation, I setup a few of the options and then ran an optimization test on my site. I was expecting something like what I’d seen from other tools online; however this thing took a good 5 minutes crawling all over the internet, finally spitting out a 40 or so page report for my perusal. It also told me that my site ranked at 87%, and then proceeded to tell me why.

The premise here is that if you want to get into the top 10 for say, “internet marketing tips,” then the software will look at the top 10 listings for that keyword on Google. It will analyze each of the 10 pages for something like 130 different factors, then compare your own site to those 10. The idea is that comparing these 10 sites will give you a range of what Google is looking for to get a high ranking, for each parameter. The report then goes into great detail telling you how you match up to the top 10, where you fall short, where you’re too far over the top (ie my keyword density was too high for some variables), and basically where you need to be.

My next step, after making a couple more tweaks on the optimization front, is to do a wholesale site submission to a bunch of search engines and directories. IBP has about 130 search engines that it can submit to automatically, plus a few hundred more that it gives you an assisted submission. In other words, it will fill out pretty much all the fields, then you get to do the CAPTCHA and hit submit. So its like manual submissions on hyperdrive, times 3. IBP apparently has all the updated specs on all the search engines - I checked ou their update log and there have been regular updates every week for a long time.

After the site submissions comes the link building and management. IBP will identify similar sites to mine, based on the keywords provideded and rankings, and work to help me get inbound links coming from those sites. It helps with both reciprocal links as well as one-way links. You can email webmasters from a standard form inside the software, which is cool. Plus you can now see all your inbound links from one tool, with stats on each one. Talk about link management. Prior to this, my link management involved managing the fact that I needed more links, and walking around in the dark trying to get some. This brings it to a whole new level.

Another thing you can do from inside the software is all kinds of keyword research and manipulation. You can generate keyword lists, then modify them for use in PPC as well as on your site. Take the list over to the search engine ranking tool within the program and run it through to get every keyword’s ranking stats: searches, number of results in Google, KEI, and the top link in Google for that word, along with the PR of that link. It’s pretty cool.

I don’t even know what else this software does, but all I can tell you is that as of right now, it looks like it’s going to be my ticket to SEO happiness. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, feel free to checkout the free version of the iBusinessPromoter software.

Recently I’ve come across a few cool SEO oriented plugins for Firefox. Honestly, until recently I naively didn’t even know plugins existed for Firefox, so this was a pleasant surprise, and since then I’ve been trending away from IE7 towards Firefox. Anyways, I thought I would share these three SEO plugins with you as I’ve found them useful.

SearchStatus Plugin

* Google PageRank
* Google Category
* Alexa popularity ranking
* Compete.com ranking
* Alexa incoming links
* Alexa related links
* backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN

SEO For FireFox (seobook.com)

This plugin has a big long list of cool things, including PR, Age, Links, .edu links, .gov links, del.ici.us, Technorati, Alexa, DMOZ, Bloglines, WhoIs, and more.

Rank Checker (seobook.com)

Checks your sites for rankings on user-specified keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can customize this to a certain degree as well. There is a detailed how-to on the page.

In three days I have nearly quadrupled my inbound links (110 to 482 on Yahoo), and it all came from 30 minutes of easy work. More to the point, all of these links are linked to my homepage with the keyword phrase “Affiliate Marketing Tips.” Wanna know how I did it? I used a remarkably fresh new method by Michelle MacPhearson, called “30 Minute Backlinks.”

So now you’re wondering what kind of black-hat stuff I’ve managed to dig myself into right? SEO is grueling, hard work right? Nobody gets quick results with a puny amount of work, right? Well I can tell you the whole thing is completely legitimate. The basic idea is to take advantage of web directories that have high PR, yet are virtually unknown to the majority of webmasters! How can this be you ask? They are software directories!

Software directories… I can hear you laughing already. Like what is a software directory going to do for me? Well what if I told you that Michelle lays out no less than 5 different ways you can create your own customized, branded, software in less than 30 minutes? The beauty of this system is it doesn’t even really matter too much if nobody ever uses your software… though it would be nice of course. The trick here is that you’re getting your software placed in the directories with the keywords you choose as the linking term, coming back directly to your site. These are all one way links coming from good PR sites!

I’ve only used one of the five examples that Michelle discusses - so far I’ve made myself a toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can check it out here if you want - it’s got some cool tools on it for affiliate marketers. The best part was, I didn’t need to know a single line of code to produce this toolbar. If you can spell your name and type in your internet address, you can be a programmer!! Well, not quite, but you get the point.

So basically she lays out five different ways to make a cool bit of software, targeted to your niche, which you can then upload to hundreds of sites around the internet - sites that want your listing- even crave your listings! You see these guys want to have the biggest, hugest link directories out there because that is their reason for existence.

The best part is, it is completely free and takes very little time to implement. (The video series itself costs a bit, but it is very reasonable). Anyways, I don’t want to make this too “salesy” - really I’m just kind of stoked that I managed to triple my backlinks with so little effort, and I wanted to share that tip with you. Check it out, and let me know how it works for you!

(UPDATE) As of today (April 9) this domain is up to 631 inbound on Yahoo. I’ve done nothing additional since this posting aside from leaving 3-5 comments on some other blogs.

(UPDATE) April 10 - Yahoo now shows 785 inbound. This is the gift that keeps on giving!

(UPDATE) April 19 - My backlink tool appears to be dead, I now have 0 inbound from each of the big 3! Can anyone recommend a better link checking tool? Argh.

This evening I “discovered” Alexa. I guess I knew about it before but this was the first time things really clicked when I looked at it. Basically what they do is rank all the webpages on the internet, in order of the traffic they receive. My site that has been live for 4 years was ranked 9,561,167. All of a sudden I have a goal to increase that ranking!

I’m in the process of setting up a webstore, so I decided to look up my competition on Alexa’s site. Turns out one store which I had previously thought was decent competition and might even be a good supplier is actually ranked at more than 3.5 million, while several of the others were in the 100-200,000 range, which is more respectable.

The other cool feature there is the Wayback Machine which actually contains an archive of the internet going back to 1996! So I looked at my site and what it looked like when I started it in 2004. Then I looked at my competitor’s sites, and found that my most serious competition started in 2007 and has gone up to a 208,356 ranking in that time! This tells me that they are probably my most serious competition and are on top of their game. The one I mentioned earlier with the lousy ranking has been around since 2001, with only minor updates in the first couple years of its existence. It appears to have sat idly since then. I’m glad I never pursued them as a supplier (which I had been considering at one point)! You can use these tools to tell you a lot about a website from a business and competition perspective!