If you, as I do, operate an enterprise online, you know that one of the things many people obsess about is keyword rankings in the search engines. Since it is virtually impossible to be noticed without being visible in the search engines, a whole science has emerged with respect to getting sites ranked for certain keywords. For example, if your site is about movers, ideally you’ll want to rank number one in Google whenever someone’s searches include the word “mover” in context.
The problem is that there are only ten listings on the first page by default (you can change this to some greater number but the vast majority of people casually searching for stuff on the Internet do not) and there are oftentimes millions of search results. In addition, we all know that there are more than one keyword to which any one product relates. People might search for “movers” as well as “New York movers,” “NYC movers,” “New York moving companies,” and so on. In order to engage in proper monitoring of these long-tail keywords, you need the right tools to check your keyword rankings from time to time.
While there are a number of free tools available to help you check your site’s keyword rankings, I recently came across two tools from a company (Caphyon) that have become invaluable to me to help in both monitoring my website ranking as well as managing my link popularity (a necessary process to move up the rankings for virtually all your most important keywords).
Advanced Web Ranking
The first tool is Advanced Web Ranking. Basically, it is a rank monitor on steroids. Unlike the free rank monitors available as Firefox extensions or otherwise available at any number of websites that specialize in search engine optimization, AWR is search engine ranking software that sits on your desktop and tracks your keyword rank across hundreds or even thousands of keywords on both a present and historical basis. You can even compare the keyword rankings of your competitors across the same or a different set of keywords. All of this can be set to automatically engage on a set time schedule.
If you are serious about your online enterprise, it is absolutely critical to be aware on a regular basis the status of your keyword rankings. Unless you have a seriously large marketing budget in the nature of certain large corporations, the only real way people will find out about your business will be through searches at engines like Google. Since it is virtually certain all your serious competitors are actively engaging in methods to improve their keyword rankings, you need to also be aware of the status of your keyword rankings.
Besides simple monitoring, AWR will help you spot trends. If it appears that your ranking on certain keywords are improving, you’ll know that whatever you are doing to improve your ranking is working. Alternately, if it appears your rankings on certain keywords are deteriorating, you’ll know that you need to either stop doing what it is you are doing to try to improve your rankings or else do something to counteract that deterioration.
Here are some additional features of AWR that make it more useful and efficient than the free alternatives:
- Triggers can be set to automatically alert you to certain events that occur (e.g. a decrease in ranking on certain money keywords)
- Advanced filtering can be set to get you information that is most relevant for your needs
- You can export the data to manipulate in external programs such as Excel
- You can monitor keywords on a local basis limited to results for a certain city or region
- AWR can help you generate a list of keywords
- AWR runs on Mac, Windows and Linux
Advanced Link Manager
The second tool is Advanced Link Manager. This is a tool that lets you monitor the links that are pointing to your web site. You can also set it up to monitor the links that are pointing to your competitors’ web sites.
Before moving into the features of ALM, it’s useful to discuss why links are important. The veteran Internet entrepreneur will know that besides the traditional PR one gets from mentions on the Internet by other web sites and authorities, the search engines such as Google consider links to be a proxy for “citation” authority. Thus, in determining where a web site should rank for any particular keyword, a large determinant is the number of links (i.e. link popularity) pointing to that particular website.
Besides pure link quantity, another determinant of keyword rankings is link quality or authority. A link from a respected educational institution is considered to be of a higher quality than a link from a site without any links pointing to it and without any apparent authority itself.
Although not a perfect gauge of the quantity/quality mix, you will hear webmasters often refer to the “PR” of a site or a page on that site. PR in this context merely refers to Google’s PageRank indicator which runs a scale of zero to ten. The more links and the more authoritative links a web site or page has, the higher the PR. For example, CNN.com has a PR that fluctuates between 9 and 10. This reflects the number of other web sites that have linked to stories from CNN. Similarly, Adobe.com has a PR of 10 which is most certainly due to the millions of sites that use Adobe Reader for PDF documents and link to Adobe.com.
Now that we have a good sense of the importance of links, it should be obvious why a link manager like ALM is pretty useful. With ALM, you can automatically determine which sites are linking not only to your site but also to your competitors’ sites. This will allow you to monitor your own link building progress as well as compare your efforts to your competitors.
Here are some features of ALM that make the tool critical to my link building process:
- You can monitor multiple sites including your own as well as your competitors’
- You can set an automatic schedule for checking links
- You can set triggers that automatically alert you to changes in links
- Links can be sorted by PageRank to determine link quality
- Links with “nofollow” are shown
- You can export the results to be manipulated into an external program, such as Excel
- You can find broken links
- You can monitor the anchor text of links pointing to your site
- ALM runs on Mac, Windows and Linux
Conclusion
Running a successful enterprise online is not just about throwing up a site and hoping that the world will come. Besides engaging in traditional marketing, you need to have a reasonably solid understanding of how your site will be discovered on the Internet. I have found both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager from Caphyon critical tools to have in my virtual toolbelt.
You can find Advanced Web Ranking at http://www.advancedwebranking.com; and Advanced Link Manager at http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com.
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