How to Improve Your Google Ranking
January 20th, 2010 | Link-Assistant.ComPart I: Enhancing Your Search Listing
Hitting Google's front page makes an SEO happy as a boy who just got the latest video game for Christmas. And the #1 Google ranking is truly the holy grail of the SEO world. Grab it, and there you get your everlasting flow of free traffic, loyal customers and through-the-roof sales. Nothing left to wish. Nothing to strive for, right?
Wrong. I mean come on. Top Google ranking? We can do better than that! Much better in fact. Here are at least 3 things (more to come in part II) you can do today to build on your SEO success.
And You know what? It doesn't really matter whether you rank #1 or #12, on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. You can still use these tips to squeeze more out of your organic listing.
1. Improving Your Organic Click-Through-Rate
You don't necessarily need to increase your ranking to get more traffic. You can always get more clicks by simply putting out a more compelling, more engaging listing. Even when you rank #1 there's still a lot you can gain by making your website stand out.
A bit of basics first. So, your search listing is made up of 3 core elements:
- The title
- Text description (snippet)
- The URL of the webpage
Search Listing Structure
There may be additional elements like sitelinks, but we'll talk about them later. The above three elements pretty much determine how many searchers will click your link. The difference they can make is HUGE.
Here's a quick example. How do you like this listing of Bing?
Bing's Search Listing on Google for 'search engine'
This is what happens when you don't take the time to write a Meta description. Sure we've all heard that Google and Yahoo! no longer use Meta description in their rankings algorithms (that's official, you guys). But that doesn't mean you should abandon this page element. If you don't write your Meta description yourself, Google will do it for you. It will randomly take text samples from your web page and pile them together.
In Bing's case there wasn't plenty of text for Google to choose from, so they ended up with this thing above. Soon the guys at Bing noticed how miserable their listing looked so they added a Meta description:
Bing's Search Listing with Meta Description
Looks much better, don't you think?
You have a lot of control over your search listing: you choose the page URL, the Title and the Meta description. There's plenty of good advice out there on writing engaging titles and descriptions, so I won't go there. A couple of tips though:
- The title and URL have a significant impact on your rankings. If you rank pretty high (say in top 10) don't mess with your page's title and URL much. At least keep the keywords intact (you do have your keywords in the title and URL, right?)
- Like I said, the Meta description has no effect on your rankings so you can experiment with it all you want without putting your rank at risk.
- Google likes highlighting the keywords from the user's query in the text snippet. When it doesn't find them in your Meta description, it will go and search the rest of your webpage making its own snippet. So, make sure you have your major keywords in your Meta description.
- Sometimes Google takes site's description from Open Directory (DMOZ) instead of using your Meta Description. You can tell Google (and other search engines) not to do this by adding the following Meta tag:
- Check the other listings on the page and see how you can make yours stand out from the crowd.
<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">
If you get it right you will end up getting more search traffic from your 3rd but great listing than the top two guys.
2. Double Indented Results
What can be better than a top Google listing? Come on, this one's easy. Two top listings of course 
Double Indented Results
A double listing gives you a number of benefits:
- It makes your listing stand out
- You get twice the real estate of a single listing on the page
- You push one competitor off the page
- Since you got double results the searchers think you're somehow special and click through to your site
How to get double search result for your site?
The answer is simple - you need to promote 2 pages of your website for the same keyword. When the two pages get to rank on the same results page they will be joined into one double listing. If you have more pages that rank well for the keyword you will also receive a "Show more results from..." link like the one in the above screenshot.
If you feel that a double listing is not enough you can always go and promote more pages to get 3 or even 4 results combined.
3. Getting Additional Links (Sitelinks)
Sitelinks (or quicklinks) are additional links to other pages of the site that Google shows below the site's search listing.
Sitelinks (aka Quicklinks)
The main purpose of these links is to help the searcher quickly get to the relevant page of your site. Alongside with that they also make your listing stand out and increase both your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and conversions, because the searcher can better match the landing page to her needs.
How to Get Sitelinks
Sure sitelinks are one cool enhancement of your search listing. Now the question is how do you get them?
Google (and other search engines for this matter) don't disclose how they determine when to display sitelinks. There are a number of factors suggested by testing and common sense that give us some clues as to what triggers sitelinks:
- You need to rank in top 5 (the higher the better)
- You need to have additional pages that are relevant to the keyword
- You need to have clean navigation structure (preferably text links)
- You need to trigger at least 3 sitelinks for them to appear in search results
Optimizing Sitelinks
You can't tell Google what sitelinks to use for your site. You can't edit them either. But you can block specific sitelinks and Google will remove them from the search results. Why would you want to do this? There can be several cases when you don't want a sitelink:
- The sitelink leads to an irrelevant page you don't want to send the traffic to
- The sitelink has an irrelevant name (Google picks them automatically so this does happen)
- One sitelink blocks another, more important one from showing up
You can check your sitelinks in your Google Webmaster Tools account under Dashboard > Site Configuration > Sitelinks
Optimizing Sitelinks
There you'll see all the sitelinks generated for your site with a 'block' button next to each one. Google doesn't show more than 8 sitelinks and if you have more you can handpick which ones to use in your search listing, and block all the rest.
Suppose you have 9 sitelinks and Google shows a sitelink to your about page but doesn't display the one that leads to order/download/subscribe page. You can block the sitelink to the about page and it should be replaced with the more important one (you can always unblock it if you change your mind).
Show time
There seems to be enough said already. It's time for action now. Take a look at how your search listing appears for your most important keywords and find ways to improve on it. Feel free to share your experience in the comments. Know of another way to enhance a search listing? We'd love to hear that. The commentator to get the highest number of thumbs up for his comment gets a Pro license for one of our SEO tools of choice.
Soon we'll publish Part II of this post, where we'll tell you how you can dominate the front page of Google. Subscribe to our RSS feed to get this post into your favourite reader as soon as it goes live.
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Thanks for these great ideas! BTW I'm ranking on page 2 for my words but I still see that I've been getting more traffic ever since I got a double-stack result.
Gotta love those double stackers! Quad stackers even better!
Thanks for this post. Lovely stuff.
You are on the money with this post. The Basics are so often forgotten - especially the URL. I am glad that you are reminding all of us - old and new - that the starting blocks of SEO begin with these things.
Till now I did not care about "Getting Additional Links (Sitelinks)". But I think this seems to get interesting now.
Thanks for your great ideas. I´ll try to get some sitelinks..
Simply and usefully.
Thanks for explainning the Sitelinks, we see them all over the web for major websites.How to optimise for Sitelinks is now very clear to mee and doable.
Nice article, that about the double stacking was really useful. I've been wondering how to trigger that, so I guess I'll be giving it a go over the next week.
As for the backlinks thing - how useful is Yahoo's Site explorer? There doesn't seam to be a limit there, and it does show internal and external inlinks.
Dave,
Yahoo Site Explorer shows you the overall number of links to a website, but when it comes to actually displaying the linking pages it has a limit of 1,000 links per domain.
Thank you so much for a great and valuable SEO Blog. I have the SEO Power Suite and it is awesome. I hope that with it and this great SEO Blog, that I will soon finally get the traffic I really need for both of my websites.
Thanks again
Terry Sachetti
Excellent blog. I'm waitig a year for sitelins on 1 of my sites. Maybe soon.
Thanks for the explanations. We get indented listings which is "thrilling" so the rule about "first impressions" still stands--get attention upon first read to draw them in..
http://www.How2BooksandVideos.com
"When the two pages get adjacent ranks, say #2 and #3, they will be joined into one double listing"
From what I've experienced, it's not necessary for you to have adjacent rankings in order to get a double listing. You just need to have 2 results on the same page (from the same SUBdomain). So even if you rank #2 & #9, Google will give you a #2 & #3. This will be hard to trace in the usual 10 results per page version unless you are monitoring rankings very closely since your 2nd result is on page 2. But if you view 100 results per page, then you can see this easily.
Affan,
thanks a lot for the heads up. Indeed you just need to rank on the same search results page. Post corrected and you're top candidate to win our 'best commentor' prize.
Rock on!
I'm really struggling with the whole SEO notion. I've been reading and reading for about 4 months and still finding it hard to get a PR to get myself off the page 2 spot.
Will you be writing any articles on PR? As everything else I've tried is not happening.
Nice article thank you.
Luke Snowden
http://www.actwebdesigns.co.uk
Thanks for these great ideas!
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Thanks for the input here, SEO isn't that hard itself, it's the competition
Great article I know I will be reading it more the once. I sounds like it can help a lot and I will look at my site and make some changes.
Thanks
D Jenkins
http://www.floridadestinationbeachwedding.com
Thank-You, I didn't know about the sitelink feature of webmaster tools.
Great post!
As far as additional ways to enhance a search listing is by concentrating on local search. Of course local search isn't relevant to all businesses and keywords, but for those situations where it applies, it's an invaluable strategy!
Google will show up to 7 additional results in it's local search box, and often times these results show above the organic listings. So, especially for those new to the SEO world, or late in the game compared to a competitor, Google has given you an opportunity to compete on equal footing via local search.
Ignore local search at your own peril as it presents yet another option for taking up as much real estate as possible on the first page of google.
Cheers!
Steve
Congratulations Steve!
You have won the commentators contest. You can now choose your prize and we're looking forward to more insightful comments from you.
May the force be with you!
this is one of the best seo trick i have read, optimizing sitelinks is sure shot way to get good traffic as your site is considered more trustworthy
Thanks for all the tips.....I'll be bookmarking this Blog!
Great article... so true - how we all want to do be able to do step 2 and 3 as well
Being someone who does some Chinese SEO, I enjoyed the BING example (very funny - especially given who BING are - a search engine, who should really know better about metas!).
Some useless perhaps interesting info for some of you (incase you wondered why they got a meta description like that one)... "Bing" is the latin romanised (romanisation system called "pinyin") form of the Chinese character 冰, which means "Ice" in Chinese... hence the reference to ice sculptures etc. in the pulled together meta description (So... BING sounds cool to those in the West - but means ICE, with similar perhaps semi-negative connotations as those that exist in the West... to people based in China!)
Perhaps of help to some...
For writing good meta's... one tool, which I find useful, (to visualise how my own meta will look to a potential customer), is this tool - see http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
Note: I used to laugh at the use of this tool and think that doing a letter / character count was fine and all that was needed... but now I really like to "visualise" exactly where the main words appear within the metas - to ensure that the meta's get optimised for achieving the response we want...
Hope some find this tool useful too... cheers, Asiaplay
Asiaplay,
Thanks for stopping by. We're really glad to see you here on our blog. seomofo looks like a pretty useful tool.
This is some great information, and I believe we are on the right track. I wish there was a surefire way to tell when, or at what stage your site can get site-links generated by Google.
Thanks a lot.
I was ranking for "dog tag" and "dog tags" on the 3 rd page for many years, Then decided to get better. Long story short, pagers got duplicated and we got banned by google. I got your software and now we making a slow comeback. 54 th page. Thanks for starting this blog. I am looking forward.
Small observation:
Google image search: the image "file name" you upload to your server should have the keyword as well as the "alt text" and "title" and "caption" for an image.
Same as Rod I didn't paid much attention to sitelinks (I couldn't find any article for guidance. Your post is more than informative about sitelinks and google ranking in general. I hope to see another for backlinking techniques soon.
thanks for the great tips.
Thanks for the great blog info! We are working on the double listing and rank on page 1 position 1 for many of our top keywords already. Can't wait to steal position 2 also!
Ken Sherman
http://www.thisoldgrout.com
Thanks for the excellent info. We help clients with rankings and this will help us with the double listings for them. Keep the great info coming!
http://www.pushbuttononlinemarketing.com
I think that sitelinks are more important then the double stack for one reason:
most users does not really understand the reason for double stack , some even find it confusing BUT the sitelinks is self explenetory and brings the user to the page that his looking with one click.
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Yeah traffic is the first obstacle, but it's the EASIEST part by far.
I can generate you all kinds of expensive bandwidth consuming traffic. No problem. Easy.
Now CONVERT that traffic into purchases, subscriptions, or even just inquiries.
That's 99% of the battle. The other 1% is useless without it.
Great blog entry. The double indents are a great way to gain more real estate on the results page. As mentioned above the second result doesn't have to be an adjacent ranking (which would be hard to achieve) only within the top 10.
The info regarding sitelinks is particularly useful. BTW if Google isn't taking any notice of the meta description why is this still affecting the optimisation % in the Website Auditor package ?
Chris Oliver
http://www.ArtisanManagement.com
Chris,
We decided to leave the meta descriptions for two main reasons:
1. Though they don't directly affect your rankings they still affect your CTR. SEO is not only about getting ranked but also about getting clicked.
2. There are still a number of search engines out there that still employ the meta tag in their algos.
Thanks for explaining the "double indented" results - I always wondered how that worked.
With regard to the title - is there a format that works best?
The best format is to have a catchy title that employs your main keyword somewhere at the beginning.
Also keep your title somewhere under 66 characters because Google may trunkate it otherwise.
Thanks for the clear review of the basic necessities. So true about the meta description tag. Whether you are on page 1 or 2, it can help a viewer decide whether to click on your link or an adjacent. Will you be talking about heading tags, keyword research etc.?
[...] post: SEO Tools | SEO Articles | All Things SEO Blog| » #1 Google … Share and [...]
This is great, I didn't know about the sitelinks feature in Google. Thanks very much for the tips.
Great post, superb writing and nice to see there are still many ways to improve your search position.
Great sound advice, some tips here that are so obvious but can often get overlooked
This is fantastic information, I have done most things to my web site but I only seem to get it partly right. I have the SEO auditor, great piece of software. I make changes, upload,check it again, make changes......
So it goes on and on. Keep up the good work with the info, we newbies need it.
Regards.
There is something that is often overlooked in US web site promotion. Any promotion effort is only as good as the keywords upon which the promotion is based.
Since keywords are the foundation of search, effective keywords must be chosen from the very beginning. What separates mediocre keywords from optimal ones, and how do we find them?
The way I see things, it is like 2 sides of a coin. One side is high traffic, and the other side is low competition.
Who wants to promote keywords no one is looking for? One the other hand, no one wants to compete with thousands of other sites for the same keywords.
Through keyword research, niches with good levels of traffic, and low competition can be discovered. There are many products that on the Internet that claim to offer this kind of detailed keyword research, but few that really deliver on the promise.
I am always on the lookout for these kinds of products. That is why I downloaded SEO SpyGlass to see what is can do. I am excited by the possibilities of this software. What is your experience?
John,
Agreed. Keyword research is the critical part. If you go wrong at that early stage all your efforts may go in vain. Of course this post is written with thorough keyword research in mind. But if we started every SEO post with keyword research that would take up too much time. That's why we just imply it.
Btw. if you are looking for a keyword research tool you want Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass is for backlink research
Great article. Sitelinks are the go. Now I need to focus on getting them up for my site for my chosen keywords like ski tuning tools
Another great way to get higher rankings is to make videos on You Tube and have them send the link back to your website. Make sure to put your link in the text (higher is better) when describing your video.
How does one promote 2 different pages with the same keyword for a double search result?
Do you need to have the keywords embedded in each page that you want to promote?
Please can someone explain?
I.E. Do I need to submit both pages to Google?
Same way as you promote one page
Stage 1: Optimize content
Stage 2: Build links
Stage 3: Profit
And you never need to submit ANYTHING to Google. Search engine submissions are a waste of time. Just get a link from an indexed site and search engines will find you.
Thanks for the great post! If you use wordpress blog, there's a plugin called headspace which optimizes title and description for search engines.
Thank you for the useful information. My website is already getting the double listing for some keywords that I want to optimize, but the sitelinks information is very challenging and I will try to do that to my website, thank you...
I perfectly agree on the fact that there are better things than ranking #1 on Google (I mean things that make your customers happier).
Probably, the most important is ranking on the first positions of the SERP with the keywords that actually lead to more conversions and generate the higher sell-through-rate.
Ranking high (I hope that not only #1 make business!) is something quite easy to achieve, especially in not too competitive niche searches.
But ranking high for the most remunerative kewywords is actually more difficult, considering that you have also to do a lot of web analytics to figure out the most performing keyword.
I think that, from a correct SEO point of view, high ranking should be seen as a way for achieving a specific (if possible, clearly stated) marketing result, not as the result itself.
Nice blog, keep posting!
These are the seo tactics we use for setting up our sites, if you don't have keywords implemented through out your meta tags, page title, description, etc. you might as well not have an organic listing at all.
I would have to say, these are the 3 most vital important steps you could take in site optimization!
Thanks for the info - I didnt realiose that Google & Yahoo didnt use the META descriptions any more.
Title tags can do much for increasing CTR. Limit them to at least 60 chars and always put your relevant keywords upfront. If coupled with a good meta description, number 1 or not, clicks to your link will always come.
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Over the past 6 months, I've used SEO PowerSuite to specifically improve the search rankings of a US military support organization called Special Kindness In Packages (SKIP), or "SKIP Cares" as dubbed from the website address.
Upon starting the SEO conditioning, the SKIP website was not listed in the top 100 results for any top-level keywords. Today, through utilizing the software and making several improvements for SEO, the SKIP website now ranks in the top 10 for just about all and in the top 20 for all of the top-level keywords related to the organization's focus.
It is any Web designer's goal to achieve the #1 spot in Google and Yahoo!, and now we add Bing to that list, but more essential than a #1 ranking is being within the top 10 for all major keywords. This article is a wonderful addendum to the software that helped SKIP attain those results.
One thing that really helped drive SKIP into the top 10 was narrowing the focus of what the search engines were looking for. To do that, specify within the search engine's Webmaster Tools that you only want either http://www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com indexed instead of both. You will also want to fix this setting within your .htaccess file on the server, permanently rewriting to the way you want your domain to appear in the browser's address bar.
By doing this, you may eliminate your website from returning duplicate results (www.yourdomain.com/page.html and yourdomain.com/page.html, which may in turn provide you with higher rankings for that page since it's not being indexed as 2 separate pages with separate stats. But, this isn't THE answer to achieving top results. You still need to optimize each page for search engines without losing the interest of the visitor, and that takes time.
Overall, my advice to other Web designers and the managing Webmasters is to heed the advice provided by Link Assistant; they know the business and they do good things for us.
Very good information to improve search listing, can we get two sitelinks for two different pages in same page...??
Congrats on the new blog, your software tools are world class and now I am looking forward to regular interesting seo articles.
Thanks you very much.This is very informative and good educational material.When it comes to SEO it is always nice to known tips and tricks to improve our sites ranking.
I much preferred it when webmasters etc were spouting, "Just put anything in the meta description," first page of google is easy, being the 1 out of 10 that gets clicked is the difficult bit.
We have started out whit a brand new site (local) just to try and rank locally for the keywords (roughly translated) mortgage followed by our city. I don’t name them here because of competitors following me on Google alert.
Now 1,5 year later we rank number 1 world wide for these keywords. In a number of cases we double list (1 and 2) in the rankings on side keywords.
The trick is to start with the basics and they start to build links all over the world. Do it while blogging, writing articles, posting on social media and so an and on. The biggest improvement you can achieve is when you study the links from your competitors (world wide) to see where the really good ones are.
Spyglass is a great way to do this. We outrank a lot of big competitors (six number budgets) with our free SEO knowhow. Use every test tool you can get your hands on to improve your site and always think SEO when you write content. Never stop linking from 1 to another articles you write.
O,.. and doing this you will have PR 1 within 6 weeks after you claim your sites name.
Nice blog. Glad to see you have a new blog site, Ill will be a regular visit. Unfortunately, my website is not even in the top 100! So lots more reading and linking. Ill be sure to check out all of your SEO tips.
[...] variations of our keywords into the limited real-estate of the titles and Meta descriptions when optimizing our search listings. And of course if and when anchor texts in incoming links become effective for their synonyms, link [...]
Very rounded post, indeed.
Webmasters, don't forget you can achieve all that is mentioned in the post by building quality links to your site. If you go strategically about your link building which includes (but not limited to) :
- deciding what deep/category page/s is going to appear in Serps for which keyword/s;
- taking control of your anchor text;
- making your link profile a rounded one and at the same time
- having(deep) pages stand out for specific keywords ~
all this will help you get double listings AND site listings when Google think it benefits the searcher and is relevant to his query.
Good luck!
Thanks for the this - We are usng your software daily and seeing great results - Don't know how we can live without it now
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Lookup websites usually investigate through 200 conditions to spot the suitable pages that have to rank for particular queries. Variables consist of specifics enclosed around the web pages or on-page conditions like title heading and page blog posts. Off-site conditions may also be incorporated. These factors could potentially consist of words utilised to hyperlink back to your internetsite, the status in the page linking to you and how prolonged the hyperlink has been set on. Be informed that both the off web site and on web site conditions do really determine the investigation engine positions. Luckily for you, there is some Top SEO Software in existence which will make the entire course of action so easy to implement and outcomes accomplished as fast as being a flash.
This is one of the best SEO articles I have read in awhile. Thanks, it is to the point and easily understood by the non-seo expert. Great job! I am going to feature it on the Blog Carnival at http://www.HowToBuildAWebsiteQuick.com
Cool summary, back to basics always help
Also the comments are very helpful.
Thats how ı got to the top of Google,with two listings plus additional site listings.NO JOKE
Can always check http://www.groupenerji.com though the page is in Turkish language it is the favorite web site for constructional steel in Turkey with about 5000 visitors per day.
Very useful tips when there are so many competitors all wanting to do the same thing.
http://www.omni.com.tr
Best regards
E.Fırat
Indeed very useful tips. I'm slowly getting up in the organic results, but the sitelinks are terrible after recent changes.
How often are the page ranks and sitelinks updated? Does anybody know?
Best regards,
Marc
Great posting about SEO. That what everybody needs to fight for visitors including our competitors
Regards
http://thesonicareelectrictoothbrush.com/blog
The meta description is a must but if it is not a close match, Google will display a snippet from the content on the page (the one which it feels is a better match)
Brand name related searches will soon give you the site links, for rest it is kind of tricky
Hi,
I really enjoyed reading your post: No. 3 (Google sitelinks) was particularly interesting for me. I guess these are as important as getting a good spot in the local search (ie, to the right of the Map area) or getting indented results.
I must say that I have been using SEO Spyglass (your free version) for a while, and I consider an absolute Must-Have for anyone that is serious about SEO (even with all the limitations of the free version).
Also the hint on NOODP metatag attribute is great! Thanks again! I will share it as bookmark on Delicious!
Regards,
Edmond
Thanks for sharing nice information with us. i like your post and all you share with us is uptodate and quite informative, i would like to bookmark the page so i can come here again to read you, as you have done a wonderful job.
I like this double stack result idea, never really thought about it before. Will try some new stuff! Thanks!
I am trying to do a project for school,about giant pandas.I go to google, I click a link, and it takes me someplace to buy a car. It shows me this sliver car. Is this happening to anybody else?
besides wiki, any good websites to research animals that a VERY VERY VERY strict teacher would be ok with?
Great information overall! This is certainly going to my bookmarks.
Nice... Thanks!
[...] the data on your organic clickthrough rates is vital for optimizing your search listing. Getting your website ranked in the top of search results is only half the battle. Once you’re [...]
Nice and really helpful article....and I have just visited my webmaster tools for my websites and saw that Google has not generated sitelinks for it...And there is a message saying "Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site. Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they'll be useful to the user. If your site's structure doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user's query, we won't show them. However, we are always working to improve how we find and display sitelinks." So Google doesn't always generate sitelinks for a site ?
Thank you in advance
Nice Article - Thanks for sharing thoughts, these are really helpful.
never new meta descriptions had no affect on seo. thanks for the tip!
Thank you for the useful information. My website is already getting the double listing for some keywords that I want to optimize, but the sitelinks information is very challenging and I will try to do that to my website, thank you…
Excellent advice. I think every webmaster needs to go through your checklist and make sure they have a good title, meta tags, etc. (especially for the home page).
I have noticed that it can make a huge impact on your SERPs.
One of my sites is number 2, but I still haven't got sitelinks generated. I wish Google would do it, because I think it would increase my sites ctr.
I can see from using your software that this page's rank is only 3 , how come you cant improve it by using your own software ?
Otherwise your software is brilliant.