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Track Your Web Site’s Visibility with WebPosition 4’s KVI
October 14, 2005 By Webposition SEO Team
by Richard Drawhorn
One of the primary tasks of any web site manager is to gather information about the site’s visibility on search engines. WebPosition 4 provides a convenient way to gather and report this valuable information in its Reporter feature. One of the most valuable metrics presented in WebPosition reports is the Keyword Visibility Index (KVI), a numeric value that represents the site’s total visibility. Read this review to get a detailed explanation of the Keyword Visibility Index and how to use it as part of your web site management toolbox.
As a web site manager, your goal is to be well represented in search engines for the keywords or phrases that relate to your site content. Obviously, you want to be found when internet users do keyword searches to generate traffic for your web site. Having a convenient method of tracking your site’s positions is essential, and WebPosition 4 has an excellent reporting feature designed to do just that. You simply enter your web site domain, keywords (or phrases), the search engines you are interested in, and the software will automatically do the necessary searches and create an informative report containing your position data.
WebPosition actually generates several different reports that display the information in various levels of detail. These include tabular and graphical displays of keyword positions by engine, an alert report highlighting any pages that have dropped in ranking, a report displaying historical trend data, a report comparing your competition’s positions to your own, and others. However, it’s the summary report that you will likely focus on first when analyzing your report data each week. WebPosition presents you with an excellent Summary Report that displays two informative sections that you should focus on to get an overview of your site’s overall performance: Visibility Statistics and Keyword Visibility Index.
The Visibility Statistics are a tabular summary of your site’s positions including how many pages appeared in top positions, how many pages changed position since the last report was run, the number of total pages listed, and the total number of positions the site has gained or lost since the last report. Here is the way the information is displayed in the report:
At a glance, the Visibility Statistics will give you a good sense of how well your site is performing. In this case, the site has 1 page in a number 1 position, and a total of 15 in the top 30. By default, WebPosition will search the top 30 results (first 3 pages) because research has shown that very few internet searchers will scroll past the top 3 pages when looking at search results. If your page is not listed in the top 30, then some action should be taken to optimize that page to increase its ranking using WebPosition’s Page Critic feature. As always, you should be working to improve your site’s Link Popularity as well, because it will also affect your site’s positions. WebPosition 4 provides a convenient Link Popularity chart to help you keep track of this important metric.
Next to the Visibility Statistics table, you’ll find a chart displaying the Keyword Visibility Index. Here’s an example of a chart displaying the KVI:
The KVI actually consists of 2 parts: the Visibility Score and the Visibility Percentage. Visibility Score is calculated by assigning a point value to the highest position achieved on each engine, and then summing the points for all engines queried. The Visibility Percentage is simply the Visibility Score divided by the maximum possible score that would be achieved if all of your keywords were ranked number 1 for all engines. In other words, if your site was perfectly ranked at number 1 for all keywords on all engines, your Visibility Percentage would be 100%. In the above example, the Visibility Percentage is slightly over 50%, indicating that the site as a whole is listed reasonably well, but could stand for some improvement.
In the chart above, the value of the Visibility Score is trending down slightly over time. The trend of the value is a very convenient way to keep track of your web site’s progress. Clearly, you want to see your KVI trending upward over time. Any significant downward trend that persists should be addressed before the problem results in a significant loss of site traffic (and corresponding revenue loss for your company).
The value of your KVI has the most significance if you run your searches for only the major search engines and a select group of your most valuable keywords. It’s a good idea to evaluate your overall site performance using the major engines, and then supplement the information by exploring your site’s visibility on other engines (or perhaps using other less important keywords). By breaking up your measurements into separate projects, you can clearly measure a site’s overall visibility, while maintaining a broader view of the site visibility on the minor engines as well.
In summary, WebPosition 4 offers a convenient way to measure your web site’s overall visibility on search engines over time: the KVI. Any web site manager can benefit by keeping a close eye on this useful parameter.
Run WebPosition 4 from the DOS Command Line
October 8, 2005 By Webposition SEO Team
Many WebPosition users aren’t aware you can actually run missions and publish results directly from the DOS command line.
Although WebPosition provides a built in scheduling tool, there are some advantages of using the DOS command line.
Advantages of running WebPosition 4 at the command line include the ability to use Windows scheduler to schedule missions even when you are not logged into your computer. Also using the command line to schedule missions can provide easier administration when managing multiple missions. You can quickly add missions to the schedule by adding a single line to text to the schedule file without opening WebPosition at all!
Here’s how to do it:
- Create a file in your WebPosition 4 installation folder called schedule.bat. Open the file and enter the missions you would like to be part of the schedule.
- Add a line for each mission as indicated below. In the example below, just replace “zedesco_com.mis” with the mission file name you would like to include. (You may add multiple missions by simply adding a new line for each mission you would like to include in the schedule).
Webposition4.exe START(zedesco_com.mis) HIDELOG CLOSE MINIMIZE
- The HIDELOG parameter prevents the display of the log file upon mission completion. This is desirable since the missions in the file will be scheduled and more than likely nobody will be around to view the log file when the mission is run.
- The CLOSE parameter simply tells WebPosition to shutdown when the mission completes the run.
- The MINIMIZE parameter tells WebPosition to operate in minimized mode when running.
The next step is to schedule the mission using Windows scheduler. To setup the schedule, simply navigate to “Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks” from the Windows Start menu. Add a new scheduled task following the instructions given in the scheduled task setup wizard and selecting the schedule.bat file you created as the scheduled file to run.
That’s all there is to it! Your scheduled missions can now be managed within a single file.