A Look at a Few Page Ranking Tools
December 4th, 2007 (6:00am) Dian Schaffhauser 6 CommentsTweet This
What do you use to monitor the page ranks your sites have in search engines? You could — as I have done — enter the term into a given engine and count where a particular site appears; but that can be tedious when the site isn’t in the top 10 or 20 let alone the top 50.
Randy Zlobec, search engine marketing expert and author of SEM Gorilla, who offered his advice two weeks ago for hiring a search engine marketing expert, shares three tools he has found invaluable for monitoring page ranking — one that’s free (with a caveat) and two that cost.
First, the Freebie: DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker
DigitalPoint.com’s free Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool can be used to check Google, Yahoo and MSN and other engines for ranking of keywords over time. According to Zlobec, “You create an account, then the tool follows your activity. It shows you your keyword placement from when you first started using the tool to where you are currently.”
Keyword Tracker requires a Google SOAP Search application programming interface (API) key to work, and that poses a problem. If you don’t already have that key (look in your inbox prior to December 2006 for a message from api-support@google.com), you won’t be able to use this utility — at least, not until the company updates it to work with the Google Ajax API.
SEO Elite
Brad Callen’s $167 SEO Elite is sold through a Web site designed like one of those old-fashioned, yet probably highly effective direct mail letters that go on and on and offer numerous testimonials about how effective the product is. But Zlobec swears by the software. “You can analyze your competition, track where they rank against where you rank. There’s Google AdWords tracking, where you can view the highest pay-per-click ads to see what people are paying for what terms, what ads are being displayed by what companies. You can see what’s been effective for your competition and use that to create ads that will be effective for you.”
For those who see the value in backlinks (in which another web site links to yours), the tool also lets you submit your article to “the most important article web sites that give you the best back links and best amount of traffic,” said Zlobec.
It also includes a keyword finder, which can provide options for your primary key terms. Why not simply rely on similar tools from Google or Yahoo? Because it’ll provide results from all the major engines, he explained.
Web CEO
The more staid Web CEO is similar to SEO Elite but without the article submission aspects. “It has a lot of tracking, a lot of analysis, a lot of historical analysis,” said Zlobec. “You can find link partners and contact them through the software. The company offers two versions, one ($199) for those who do search engine marketing for in-house sites and another ($389) for SEM pros, which provides “private label reports” that can be fed to clients.
Zlobec said he uses both SEO Elite and Web CEO — and has for many years, “because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on that. They’re great tools.”
Are you using a cross-search-engine page ranking tool worth noting?
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I actually use a mixture between SEO Book, SEOChat and IBP. Only the last one however is actually downloadable software. It helps me to generate the basic numbers part of my reports. I will typically clean it up a bit though.
I haven’t used Web CEO but SEO Elite isn’t very good in my opinion and I haven’t tried Digitalpoint keywords. I do, however like IBP (internet business promoter). It is pretty simple to use and has a good range of features. I think it is like $400 though, I don’t remember the exact price.
Great article though, nice information to know. I might have to test some of those out as well.
I have found that Advanced Web Ranking works great – it has all the features you need in a ranking report plus it’s search engine friendly. Trust me, you don’t want to get your personal IP banned by an engine because you are using a non-SE friendly tool which hammers it with too many requests too quickly.
I’ve tried lots of the SEO tools out there (since my job revolves around SEO) and for a strictly ranking tool I highly recommend this one.
http://www.advancedwebranking.com/ is the URL and no I am not affiliated with this company in any way I just happen to like their product because it runs on Linux!
well I guess I’ll stick with the free stuff since everything else is waaayyy out of my budget!
I agree with Rob, Advanced Web Rank and their sister tool Advanced Link Manager are both excellent tools, probably some of the best out there. While the free and web based tools are nice, you do get what you pay for. I have been using both for a little under a year and happy with the results.
As you know, Search Engine Optimization is not made by any kind of software, it ’s only made by humains, of course humains who know how to optimize a website and how to do SEO, and without knowledge, even with the most powerfull seo software we can’t do anything. All what a seo tool can do is giving us informations about our site or a competitor site and geting this informations is possible by hand, but it’s very hard and take a lot of time. So using an SEO tool is very recomanded to do the tasks. In my opinion learning Search engine optimization is the first thing we must to do and for that I recomand the famous Aaron wall’s SEO book. And because SEO is virtual and depend on your competitors perseverance I recomand for SEO software the famous Brad callen SEO Elite which allow you to spy your competitors and know about every bit of their ranking strategy.