BIOS: Technology Means Business

If you are planning to launch a new Web site you could assume that it is simply a matter of launching your site on the Web and then sitting back to watch all those millions of users flock to your site. We’re sorry to say this isn’t the case - finding a new Web site can be like looking for a needle in a haystack! The many thousands upon thousands of potential visitors to your site don’t know you exist and all your hard work can be for nothing.

Spending a long time making sure your Web site design and style is perfect is all well and good, but it is the underlying code that search engines like to look at. Search engines account for over 80 per cent of visitors to Web sites, so if your page is search engine friendly you can be guaranteed good placements on the likes of Google and Yahoo! - which will lead to more visitors.

If you have a ‘great’ site which is getting relatively small traffic, what can you do? Well a big buzzword thrown around the Internet at the moment is the term SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. As the name suggest programs supporting this system will help you gain better results in search engines, either by submitting your Web site to search engines for indexing or finding links to share between your site and others (helps improve popularity).

But where do you start? This is where IBP8 (£238) comes in. IBP8 is a Web site optimisation and each engine submitter tool, effectively combining over 15 SEO tools rolled into one neat package. With its simple-to-use interface, reporting tools - which help you understand where you need improvements - Web page editors, search engine submitters, link propriety and ad tracking there is no stone left unturned.

As soon as you start the program you need to create a project name, including your contact details and Web site address. You are then presented with IBP8’s main interface which is broken down into several sections on the right - all the important functions are included in a logical order so even if you are new to Web site optimisation you should find this style a lot easier to use.

The first point of call is ‘Make your Web pages search engine ready’, a series of tools which help you generate keywords (in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Danish) and test how many times that word appears on your site - keywords are important for search engine optimisation. Moving on you have a ‘Web site optimisation Editor’ to help implement any changes to your Web site, ‘HTML Validator’ for testing if your Web page’s code is up to scratch and a ‘Search engine Spider’ simulator for showing you how a search engine sees your page and reports if it is optimised and ready for the Web.

The ‘Top 10 Optimisation’ wizard will be top on the list, as this allows you to compare your Web site with other competitor sites to see how a certain word (such as ‘Gadget’) competes with search engine placement results - i.e. does your site appear in the Top 10 displayed results if you type in ‘Gadget’ and with over 300 search engines from 30 countries to pick from you are not short of comparisons. Once it has finished its comparison it displays the results and recommends changes and improvements - with examples for beginners - but you will still need to have some understanding of HTML in order to implement the changes onto your site.

Once you are satisfied with the way your Web site looks you can move onto the next batch of tools which is classed as ‘Submitting your site to search engines’. With over 500 search engines worldwide to submit to you can get the software to automatically submit your site to these search engines or semi-automatically for manual submission and generate a report of your submissions at the end. ‘Directory’ and ‘Special Interest Submission’ are more specialised search engine submitters. Luckily the IBP8 Interface gives you an explanation of each function before you enter it so you can judge for yourself if your site fits into these specialist categories.

‘Improve the Link popularity of your site’ contains the link popularity improver. The link improver is away to share links with other sites. If your site is linked to another site the search engines pick up on this and thus generate you more visitors by improving your search placement. Again you can give the program up to 10 items from which it can gather the best sites for your to link to. If you left the software to run all day you could quite easily get millions of sites. However, stopping at about 500 is recommended - you then get a list sorted in order of relevance with the sites that will likely link back to you.

The program can automatically fill in most of the details on the link submitter page but you are still going to have to link back to them. Again this is not as straight forward as you think and you will need to have knowledge of how to add links to your Web site. We felt the majority of sites that were displayed did not suite the style of our test site so you will need to spend a great amount of time making sure you are getting linked to sites that will generate you traffic.

The ‘Track your results’ section contains ways you can see how your site is progressing in any of the search engines you submitted to. You even have a section called ‘Manage your pay per click ads’ which gives you PPC ad manager to manage all your pay per click (PPC) search engine campaigns in a single window. Keyword editors for creating words for Ads, Return On Investment calculator - a feature useful if you are involved with PPC. Finally you get a useful set of marketing tips in the ‘Learn about search engine marketing’ section.

Being the Business edition you are not limited to five domains (Web sites) like you are with the standard version and you can also customise reports in HTML, PDF, Word or Text using your own logos and fonts which will allow you to sell the reports to others. However you may as well save some money and go with the ‘Standard’ version if this is not your goal because the majority of features may not be needed by most. The standard version costs about £100 less. Also the program comes with 12-months free updates after which you will need to pay for the upgrades (£55 per year or £31 for six months).

For a real world test we optimised a test site for over a month (search engines can take up to six weeks for improvements to kick in) and we can definitely say the search engine placements of our site are improved. However, while search placements are important, more important is that you need to make sure that your site has good content - which changes daily - otherwise most visitors will not return.

Even though the program is the easiest program we have used we must point out that you will still need knowledge of how your Web site works, with a touch of HTML understanding and other Web skills thrown into the mix as well. You will also need to know how to re-publish your site by uploading new content, so for this reason the program is not for the complete beginner. Remember, IBP8 is not the answer to everything - it is just a tool that works better the more work you put into it. But what IBP8 does do is combine the best SEO programs in one package. And if you spend time working with the program you will see an improvement to your site’s position on the Web. [8]

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