Advanced Web Ranking

Three very important but always time consuming tasks of starting, running, and maintain your SEO program for your business or clients are keyword discovery, monitoring your search engine rankings for inclusion, improvement or decline (change) in rankings, and competitive research and ranking.

Fortunately, for those who are willing to give up some of the manual work and let an automated tool either do the research and reporting work for you almost in its entirety, or supplement your manual work there is a well known tool called Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking, as a SEO keyword research tool can be very helpful in providing the data you need so that you can concentrate on creating great content for your visitors and other websites to link to, as well as optimizing your pages and websites for the best possible rankings they deserve.

Let’s be honest, in most cases if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of organic results when a user performs a search query at a search engine on keywords or phrases that your site represents or covers, you don’t exist. Of course the higher-up on the search engine results pages the better, but exact positioning (i.e. a guaranteed #1 ranking) is out of your complete control in many cases due to many signals and factors including personalization results returned based on the users past search patterns and geographical location.

With Advanced Web Ranking, after the easy initial set-up you can sit back and let the software retrieve the data you need to aid you in your search engine optimization efforts.  You can

1. Check your website rankings for a single keyword or phrase or list of keywords and phrases in a wide variety of search engines to see how you currently rank. Use this list to work on improvements and then run the program every couple weeks to see if you have improved on any of the terms.
2. Check which competitors rank for the terms you have chosen to retrieve data on. Advanced Web Rankings gives you the top ranked sites for keyword and search engine combination’s you have chosen. Upon this data retrieval you can do some competitive analysis by knowing and who has the top rankings for the terms you want to ranking well for in order to do some more intensive research
3. Generate a huge list of interactive reports that are as easy as a click on a tab. These reports include:
   1. Current Rank – report that provides information on the rank evolution of your chosen websites list that you are monitoring for the keywords you have chosen (for a single search engine), so that you can see performance over a time period, with KPI’s indicating Position, Previous Ranking, Change (green for improvement, red for decline), what Page the result is on, and your best position to date since you have been running the program. This is more focused on the websites
   2. Keyword Rank – this report provides rank evolution for all of the keywords in your list for all of your websites on a single engine and provides the same KPI’s as the Current Rank report. Unlike the Current Rank report which focuses more on the websites, this provides data on both websites and your keywords together.
   3. Search Engine Rank – report that provides you with your current search engine ranking across all selected search engines for all of your sites for a selected keyword.
   4. Top Sites – displays all the top ranked websites and their position for your selected keywords and search engine. This saves a lot of time as to manually get this information you would go to each search engine and do a search query and then document the top sites returned in the given results. You can also dig deeper to see further into a specific date comparison to what changed.
   5. Overview – this report is the grand-daddy dashboard and splits the report into 3 sort-able sections – Websites, Keywords, and Search Engines giving you an all-at-once glance at your keywords, each of your websites, and your search engines and how you rank in each and an icon to notate improvement or not in your date range comparison.
   6. Visibility – This as the report is named, shows your visibility across multiple search engines. It will provide data on how many first place rankings you have, how many in the top 5, top 10, how many moved up or down in rankings,  how many pages have been dropped, a visibility score, your overall ranking,  how many new rankings you have, and so on. Great top-level executive overview, but drilling down makes it actionable for you.
4. View Graphical Evolution Charts that show you the data retrieved but in a graphical view to quickly scout out opportunities, problems, and overall performance. Current charts available are:
   1. Current Rank Chart
   2. Keyword Rank Chart
   3. Search Engine Rank Chart
   4. Visibility Chart
   5. Overview Report

A convenient feature that Advanced Web Ranking has is the ability to set it to gather data at any specified interval of time that you desire, be a daily, weekly, bi weekly, or any other possible reoccurring time frame you desire so that you can easily maintain a performance schedule of your SEO efforts. After running the reports, you can opt to have it uploaded to your server via FTP for download, save it locally to your computer, or even emailed to you or your clients.

I’ve repeatedly gather this information manually for many years, and depending on the size of your keyword list and the amount of websites you have (or amount of clients you are working for), not to mention just the initial keyword research that has to be done, this can take days to get to. Add in the additional time it takes to manually keep this information updated at a minimum of monthly intervals and you have spent too many hours on data retrieval that Advanced Web Ranking could easily take care of for you.

For more information on Advanced Web Ranking, a complete list of features and screenshots along with information on the different versions they offer, check out their website at http://www.advancedwebranking.com/.

ADVANCED LINK MANAGER

Another very helpful SEO software tool, which is used for link popularity management and link building, offered by Caphyon LTD, makers of Advanced Web Ranking is Advanced Link Manager.

With Advanced Link Manager you can analyze the link popularity of your websites or webpages by:

1)      Easily finding out what other websites are linking to your website, and what keywords they are using to link to you.

2)      Discover who is linking to your competitors websites

You can also use Advanced Link Manager to find potential linking partners in your niche or market.  Using its data retrieval information to find others in your niche or market based upon your keyword list, it will give you a list of who to contact that you may want to exchange links with. The more quality websites that link to your website, especially using appropriate keywords, is one of the signals used by the engines to help you rank better. Even use it as a link manager tool to make sure those who you have link trades with are maintaining their end of the deal.

With its Webpage Analyzer feature you can analyze pages of your website or even against your competitor’s websites and get data back to help you find new ways of improving onpage optimization, saving you hours of research.

For a full list of features of Advanced Link Manager, and the ways it can help you optimize, organize, and maintain your link popularity, view the Advanced Link Managers features page.

Now what are you going to do with all that extra free time you will have?

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Of course, Google wants to be in the forefront of user privacy and at the same time providing website owners with more data so they can spend more promotional money with Google such as on Google AdWords or enterprise versions of some of their other “products”.

Remember the pop-up window? It wasn’t too long before enough people complained and browsers started blocking pop-ups by default and of course many greedy or unethical website owners were using the pop-ups for evil as well.

Now, I am sure that many web surfers don’t know about this Google Analytics blocking add-on at this time, so not much to worry about today, but what it brings to my mind is that of what would happen if it became a default standard for browsers (or some advanced virus protection software) to block Google Analytics, Omniture, or any of the other common Analytics tracking programs, in the name of improving user privacy? What about if enough of a percentage, unknown to you choose this down the road, how reliable will your data be?

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Google actually has 3 test pages going up against their control. The major problem I see as a current user of the existing page to log into my accounts is that there is no link to Google Analytics from the test pages (yes I know I could go direct, but I go this route out of habit). But as we all know, the proof is in the data of what works best for the goals they are going after.

Click on the thumbnails to see the full size pages and let me know your thoughts.

Google Business Services Control:

Google Business Services Test Page A:

Google Business Services Test Page B:

Google Business Services Page C:

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They focused on 3 areas in the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools to help you optimize your websites for Bing:

1. Crawl – to provide you with more information on crawl issues (redirects, exclusions, etc.)
2. Index  – browse the Bing index to verify which directories & pages have been indexed
3. Traffic –  ability to analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data

Bing Webmaster Tools is still not as robust as Google Webmaster Tools in the information it provides, but it is a step in the right direction. I look forward to additional features they have in the works in the coming months.

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Question: Who is your site actually built for?

Hint: It’s the same group of people that should be designing your website.

Choose your Answer:
A) Your Company (web design team, marketers, IT, etc)

B) The end user (i.e. your actual or potential customers)

If you chose B, you are correct! If you chose A, then you probably work for a company whose website isn’t effective as it could be and still wondering why.

If your company is like most companies, implemented ideas and then changes to your websites layout, design, navigation and other features are usually made based on internal decisions by HiPPOS (Highest Paid Persons Opinion). Decisions based on irrational factors such as your competitors site looks a certain way so “we should do it too”, Amazon does it, my ego wants it, and even “it looks prettier”.

A high-performing website is designed by your user’s interactions based around common website usability best practices and grown from there.

• If your users can’t easily get to (or find) what they want, they can’t buy what you have.
• If your web page, product presentation, whitepaper, etc., doesn’t provide the right value to them in their minds, they won’t be willing to exchange money, information-email address, phone number, and so on for it.

Luckily, your users are telling you how they want your site to work, look, or communicate every day in your analytics data. They tell you how they feel about the perceived value of your whitepapers when they fill out their personal information for it, or when they don’t. When you run a multivariate test, they are also telling you how they want your page to work (i.e. we convert more when your page looks like this!)

Your end user is telling you how to design your site, listen to them – they are the ones who you’re trying to convert to a lead or generate a sale from, not your co-workers. Now, why would you listen to anyone else?

photo by Darren Hester

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