If you're going to position your website so it ranks high in the search engines, you'll need software to do the hard work of tracking the position of your webpages, as well as helping you analyze them so your can improve their ranking.

WebPosition Gold 1.0 from FirstPlace Software (http://www.webposition.com) has done a good job of collecting in one program each of the functions you need for positioning, and automating several of them. The program consists of seven components: Page Generator, Page Critic, Upload Manager, Submitter, Reporter, Traffic Analyzer, and Scheduler. We'll look at them one at a time.

Submitter

You indicate to the Submitter program exactly which pages to submit to the search engines, and it carries out the task automatically, disguising itself as a "regular" Web browser, so the search engines don't see submission as done by a "machine." Currently it includes submissions to AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, Excite/AOL NetFind, Lycos, WebCrawler, and What-U-Seek, and a few other minor search engines. A few months ago Northern Light announced that it would block such software as WebPosition Gold, so it was dropped. Yahoo is technically is not a automated search engine but a human-edited directory. You don't want to automate your submission to Yahoo, but construct it carefully by hand. The program gives detailed instructions on how to do that. (See related article "How to Get Listed in Yahoo").

Reporter

Reporter was a core feature of FirstPlace's previous product WebPosition Analyzer. It goes to each search engine you select and checks the position of every keyword or keyphrase you select. Though it's probably overkill, you can set it to check the position of your pages all the way up to position 200 or higher with some search engines, so you can track them as they gradually improve position -- or be alerted when they slip down to a lower ranking. Reporter includes a number of specialized reports which can be customized to show the features you're most interested in.

• Concise Summary Report provides an overview of your search positions by keyword and search engine.
• Summary Description Report shows the description each search engine displays for your site.
• Detail Report show what is positioned above and below you.
• Competitive Analysis Report tracks your positions against one or more competitors.
• Page and Keyword Report helps you evaluate the effectiveness of each page ranked.
• Log Report records the most recent mission statistics and complete results from the search engines.
• URL Submission Verification checks to see if your submitted pages have been indexed yet by a particular search engine.

I found the Concise Summary Report and URL Submission Verification most useful for my purposes, but the detail is there if you need it.

Scheduler

When you use WebPosition Gold you create "missions" which you then save and can repeat later. You'll create a mission to submit pages, and another to report your position ranking. Once you get these missions set up, WebPosition Gold helps you automate the process with Scheduler -- daily, weekly, monthly, or one time only. To do this you set Scheduler so it becomes active each time you turn on your computer. It "sleeps" until the scheduled time, and then runs its appointed mission.

Let's say you decide to resubmit key webpages every month. You set up a mission with Submitter and then set Scheduler to run the mission each month. Perhaps you want Reporter to check your pages' position on the search engines every week -- or every day if you obsess about these things. Scheduler will do it for you. If you were positioning pages for a number of sites you could program Scheduler to check each of them on a regular basis.

While Scheduler is an important part of the WebPosition Gold package, I found myself turning it off. First, I don't like sleeping programs grinning at me from the bottom of my screen. Second, I might be doing something else on the Web, but when a Reporter mission begins, my browser or FTP project slows way down. Finally, Scheduler has an annoying habit of shutting down the modem when it finishes its task -- even if I'm still in the middle of a project myself. Oh, you can set it so it doesn't shut off the modem, but then what if you weren't sitting at the computer when it finished? You'd waste the resources of your dial-up service sitting with anconnection. It's annoying. But maybe that's just me.

Page Generator

If you're new to doorway or gateway pages (see "What Gateway Pages Are and How to Make Them"), you'll probably be delighted that WebPosition Gold will create them for you. But I'm pretty unimpressed. True, it guides you in selecting a title, keywords, and writing a description. And it prompts you to write several paragraphs of body text. When you press start it will create gateway pages for each search engine you specify. Mainly that consists of ugly pages with an attractive dark blue line. Yes, each search engine page gets optimized META tags, or comments, or alt tags, or whatever it likes best, but I seriously doubt that these pages will score very high on the search engines, and you'd be ashamed to have people find them if they did.

At best, Page Generator fulfills two functions: (1) it introduces you to the concept of gateway pages and shows you what they look like, and (2) provides you with a basic page you can then customize and add graphics to so it takes on the look and feel of the rest of your site.

Upload Manager

Upload Manager tracks the gateway pages you've created or modified. Then upload them with your favorite FTP program.

Traffic Analyzer

Traffic Analyzer helps you analyze the source of visitors to your site. You paste a small piece of code onto your webpage that allows logging machines at FirstPlace Software to track visitors so you can see what search engines they came from, what keywords they used, etc. Of course, you can learn this by analyzing the log files your Web hosting service maintains for your server, but this is easier to get to and to customize the report. After a free trial period, however, you pay a minimum of $10 per month for up to 20,000 hits for this service, and more if you have a higher traffic site. It is vital to the process of improving your page's position to find out this information, however. Make sure you analyze your own log files if you don't want to use WebPosition Gold's service.

Page Critic

Sure, I gripe about some of the features of WebPosition Gold, but as far as I'm concerned the product is without peer in its Page Critic feature that helps you analyze your gateway pages and change them in order to improve their positioning on the search engines. WebPosition Gold absolutely shines in this regard!

The most difficult thing about search engine positioning is figuring out exactly what a particular search engine is looking for, and analyzing its special quirks and preferences. You can gather this kind of intelligence from your own research, from books, and from search engine websites. But to use it you must perform a thorough analysis of what the top-ranked pages on a particular search engine have in common, and then adjust your own page to match those features, reanalyzing as you make changes.

Page Critic enables you to analyze a number of sections of any given webpage: title, META keywords, META description, headings (e.g., H2, H3 tags), comments, alt tags on graphics, body text, linked words, and URLs linked to. For each of these sections, Page Critic analyzes the overall number of keywords, the percentage of keywords to total words, the prominence of keywords (whether they appear early in a particular section), and overall keyword use. Try doing that by hand. I have -- at least some of it. Page Critic does in two or three minutes what would take you hours of painstaking analysis.

But it gets better, Page Critic allows you to compare your webpage to the top 10 pages on a particular search engine, and tracks them for each of these details. This is extremely revealing. You begin to see what is important to a particular search engine and what it doesn't care about. You begin to see the percentages in the top ranked pages so you can adjust your own webpages to match them. Page Critic allows you to select full detail if you want to, so you can track each individual page in the top 10, but I found that, for the most part, this was unnecessary; the summary usually supplied everything I needed.

Knowledge Base

Better yet, Page Critic contains a Knowledge Base developed from FirstPlace Software's extensive ongoing research. For each of the factors, Page Critic displays its best guess at the optimum number or percentage to strive for. The report includes a list of general suggestions that help a page score higher on a particular search engine. Then it highlights specifics about your page that can be improved so they fall within what Page Critic deems the optimal ranges. For example, for one of my pages tuned for Excite, Page Critic tells me:

"A word count from 123 to 467 is suggested for the Body Text area. Your word count is 939 right now so you might consider decreasing your word count in the Body Text. A keyword prominence of at least 23% is suggested for the Body Text area. Your prominence is 4.6% right now so you might consider increasing your prominence in the Body Text."

This Knowledge Base is updated monthly. When you load WebPosition Gold it asks you if you want it to check for recent updates. If it finds any, it automatically downloads them to refresh your program with the latest search engine intelligence. Search engines are notorious for changing their algorithms or ranking formulas about the time you think you have them figured out. Now you have a way to take advantage of the latest research to ferret out those algorithms so you can keep your webpages optimized and thus near the top of a search.

FirstPlace Software sells WebPosition Gold with three months of free Knowledge Base updates, and then charges for additional updates. Updates for one year cost $99. Is it worth it? I definitely think so. Compared to the time it would take you to research others' findings, the $99 is a bargain. Moreover, it is extremely specific, drastically cutting down the time you need to spend tuning up each page. In my opinion it's only fair to compensate FirstPlace for the immense investment they make in keeping the Knowledge Base up-to-date.

I was a little hard on Page Generator earlier in this review. To be fair I must say that Page Generator was only intended to be a starting place. The logical next step is to analyze a newly-created gateway page with Page Critic and compare it with the top pages for its keywords or phrases. Page Generator combined with Page Critic are a dynamite combination. Then regularly scheduled missions with Reporter and Submitter keep you on top of the situation.

Help

I also need to mention Page Generator's help features. When you're first optimizing webpages, you have a lot to learn. An intense practical education is built into the help screens, so that by the time you're finished, you've absorbed a great deal about how the process works. I wouldn't consider WebPosition Gold's help system superior or especially intuitive, but it does contain a great deal of information you need to learn about optimizing webpages.

Cost

WebPosition Gold (Standard Version) sells for $149. (Current owners of WebPosition Analyzer can upgrade for $79.) It allows you to position an unlimited number of webpages for up to five domains. If you're positioning for a single company this should be all you need. Professional Version for $349 enables you to go into the business of search engine positioning yourself, with an unlimited number of domains. In addition, the reports you generate with Professional Version do not contain any mention of WebPosition, so your clients won't know how you're generating such great reports. WebPosition Gold runs on Windows 95/98 or NT 4.0+.

Several programs include a few of the features of WebPosition Gold. And some of my search engine positioning friends swear by their analysis programs. But to the best of my knowledge, no product combines reporting and analysis into a single package, and none offers a built-in up-to-date Knowledge Base. After spending several months using the beta version of WebPosition Gold, I am convinced it is the best product of its kind on the market, bar none.

You may download a free trial version (http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=AQH-55E7) from WebPosition that works for 30 days so you can try it out.

Note: Wilson Internet Services is a member of FirstPlace Software's affiliate program. However, we believe our review to be honest and critical where necessary to present a full picture.

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