Small Business SEO Geek BLOG

Whats the problem?

You may have noticed it is virtually impossible for your business to be noticed without being visible in the search engines. A whole science has emerged with respect to getting sites ranked for certain keywords, which is what businesses like SmallBusinessSEOGeek.com market as a service to site owners who have not yet mastered the field. If your site is about photography or a photographer in a particular geographic area, ideally you’ll want to rank number one in Google whenever someone’s searches include the word “photographer” in “whatever geographic area” they are searching.

When performing a Google search, there are often times millions of search results, and for he vast majority of us, only 10 results appear on the first page. Additionally, keywords can be more complex by combining relevant terms making them keyword phrases. In order to engage in proper monitoring of these multiple-word keywords, you need the right tools to check your keyword rankings from time to time.

A site’s position is not determined strictly by keyword ranking. Another important aspect of good SEO is link popularity. Increasing your link popularity is a necessary process to move up the rankings for all your most important keywords.

So, how do I monitor these things?

In order to know what to fix, add or change on a website, you need the correct tools to do so. A savvy web user can find a number of free tools online that are available to help you check your site’s keyword rankings. The majority of which are limited in features and give little more than a brief summary of your site’s status.

What’s the solution?

The tools we recommend are Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager by Capyhon.

First, Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking application package that installs to your computer. With it, you can track your keyword ranking across user specified keywords on both a present and historical basis.  You can add as many keywords or keywords phrases as you wish, and you can even compare the keyword rankings of your competitors across the same or a different set of keywords. Plus, all of this can be done manually or schedule at a specific time.

Unless you have a seriously large marketing budget like that of larger corporations, the only real way people will find out about your business will be through searches at engines like Google.  So, 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.  Have you ever wondered why your competitors rank higher? They are undoubtedly engaging in methods to improve their keyword rankings. You must understand that in order to remain competitive, you also need to be aware of the status of your keyword rankings. Here is a complete list of features for website ranking with Advanced Web Manager and more features using the Keyword Research Tool.

The second SEO tool you should consider is Advanced link Manager. Another application you install on your computer, this tool monitors 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 to see a market comparison.

SEO specialists will tell you that besides the traditional PR one gets from links on the Internet by other web sites and authorities, the search engines such as Google consider links to be a determining factor of the site’s perceived “authority” on the subject or content of the site.  Following accordingly, determining where a web site should rank for any particular keyword is largely determinant on the number of links (i.e. link popularity) pointing to that particular website. Without many links, the site does not rank as well.

However, link quantity is not the only factor in ranking. Link quality or authority is another determinant of keyword rankings. For example, 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. Google figures the more links a particular site has pointing to it, the more of an authority that site is.

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.  It is not a perfect scale of site authority, but it is Google’s standard bar for measuring. More links, more quality links, a web site or page has, the higher the site’s PR.  For example, ebay.com has a PR that fluctuates between 9 and 10.  This reflects the number of other web sites that have linked to auctions or listings on ebay.com.  Similarly, Google.com has a PR of 10 which is most certainly due to the millions of sites that use Google search on their pages, links to Google, adwords links, and well, it’s their ranking system.

Now what?

Now that you know what you should be doing. Take a look at Capyhon’s website for the tools you need to do it.

Capyhon offers a Free for a 30-day trial period for both packages, the software can be downloaded here for Advanced Web Ranking and here for Advanced Link Manager. After downloading the application, you will have an access pass to all features of the standard, professional and enterprise editions. At the end of the 30-day period you may continue using the software by purchasing a license, the cost for the standard version is $99, and the professional edition costs $199. You can also purchase the enterprise version of the software for $399, which gives you access to every feature the software offers.

Standard functionality allows for link partner discovery, the enterprise features truly make the software stand out. Enhanced features include a domain quality and webpage analyzer, site crawler, Google maps importer, project manager, trigger setting and project proxy setup. The professional version offers all this but is much more report-heavy.

Hardware and Software Requirements for Windows users are at least one free GB of hard drive space, a class four Pentium processor, 512 MB of RAM and Windows 2000, Windows 7, XP or Vista. The Java runtime environment should be 1.5 or later. Mac requirements are at least a G4 with 512 MB of RAM and one GB of hard drive space running OS X 10.4 or later. Mac Java runtime is 1.5 or later. Linux users have similar hardware requirements to Windows users, but the software specifications denote Linux with GNOME or KDE.