WebPostion Gold - other options?

[kokk0003]

WebPosition Gold Question

I have been having discussions with several coworkers about WebPosition Gold. Here is a recent email with a question at the bottom. I was hoping someone might have a few ideas...

Pros:

WebPosition Gold seems to be the recognized leader in the industry for quite a while.

Does a good job of quickly logging many kaywords and their relative search engine rankings.

Has some recommended keyword changes.

Provides a lot of SEO "how it works" info.

Provides competitive analysis.

Cons:

Despite being the industry leader, I think the keyword dependant tool is becoming less relevant due to Google's domination.

Despite competitive analysis, the degree to which a site really stacks up is unknown.

It doesn't really address the importance of title tag in general search

Seems a bit buggy and time consuming.

What information does it really provide? Really is only good for a specific keyword validation.

Report generation is just a list of results. Nothing we could really show a customer. Someone who was savvy would realize where it came from and ask "what value are you adding when we could have purchased the software as well?"

Although there are some recommendations, they can only be obtained for single keywords and are otherwise generic.

Linking popularity weak and feature is difficult to find.


Question:

Is there some smarter software out there that will run your keywords and your title tag and then run a comparison for similar sites? WebPosition is really a tool for smaller sites. We could accomplish the same thing just by doing a view source on our clients' home pages and running a quick search on Google (and it takes less time). Are there other applications? Ultimately, WebPosition is a great tool for automating tasks that are done over and over in order to manage a specific URL or keyword for a single site. It's not as good for a one-off competitive comparison or snapshot.

[yellowwing]

In '99 I did a database in VB for an SEO firm. They used Web Gold to track results of 150 clients, some with up to 30 keywords across 3 domains. It took 6 machines all night to produce the monthy positioning report.

Not only was it time consuming, it was also prone to human error. Hand loading 6 machines with all that Web Gold parameter data was not fool proof. A simple spelling error or forgotten domain and they were losing money.

They finally hired a kid to write a position checker from scratch. This new in-house software did the whole job in 2 hours on one machine! :eek:

The human errors were virtually eliminated. From the electronic client contract, the system peeled the client, keywords, and domains. Then it was fed to the position checker software for rank checking. The database then crunched the billing and autofaxed it back to the client.

The whole system took four months to build, (including production management routines), but paid for itself in two months.

I only wish I had license to that software! ;)

[Wail]

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

As a good rule of thumb; if you don't have to break Google's T&C's - don't.

[trellian]

Is there some smarter software out there that will run your keywords and your title tag and then run a comparison for similar sites?

You could have a play with Trellian SEO Toolkit (http://www.trellian.com/seotoolkit/) trial version. I believe it has the features you are after.

Cheers
David

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

... Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service.

I guess this includes Trellian, right?
I also includes any system you build on your own.

I am not saying weather you should use these tools or not but just conclude that doing so can get your site banned or your IP (or company IP) blocked from accesing Google. As I understand it they are free to do so if you violate their TOS.

Another thing is, that I personally do not understand why people are so obsessed with these ranking reports. In my oppinion it is just about the worst way to benchmark the value of good SEO. Yes, in some siturations you do need to check a position for a specific word, to check something, but running monthly reports on all keywords is in my oppinoon a waste of time. Not only is it a waste of time but it also is not accurate and get less and less so with the ever rotating indexes, regionalization and personalization. Soon, i believe, we will all have each our results tailored to us (in some way or another - automatically or using our inputs) which will eventually kill whatever rest of value ranking reports have - in my oppinion.

[trellian]

I tend to agree with Mikkel. The time spent on running monthly ranking reports could be better spent.

Cheers
David

[dannysullivan]

I'm not a big fan of ranking reports, but Mike posted (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=5112#post5112) about this apparently new offering (http://ranking.lycos.com) from Lycos. Includes Google, Lycos, MSN and others. Looks expensive if this is a one time charge, however.

[NFFC]

>but Mike posted about this apparently new offering from Lycos

<whisper>It's not really a Lycos offering, they are just reselling for Ineptor who by a strange coincidence is who Mike works for. Just so you know.</whisper>

[tagheuerfan]

Try Web CEO - I've been using it for several months and find it a very strong and stylish-looking :) software. Check out their features at http://www.webceo.com/how-it-works/features.htm
And, yes, it has professionally looking reports.