Latest Articles

WebPosition Gets Client-Friendly with Two New Features

August 12, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

A few weeks ago, we announced the upcoming release of two new client-friendly reporting features for WebPosition Reporter.  And soon after, we delivered on that promise with a new feature update that includes your most-requested capabilities – White Labeling and Secure Online Sharing.

White Labeling lets you brand a report with a preferred logo or graphic, and it includes
the option of adding a company name and /or URL.  Once you save the changes, the report will display its new branding each time it’s downloaded to PDF or shared online via Secure Online Sharing.

Secure Online Sharing lets you grant clients or colleagues view-only access to an online, white labeled report.  Once enabled, they can view that report’s data in full detail while you maintain full administrative capabilities to download report views, export data or modify the report’s settings.  Set this feature once to give them secure access to the most up-to-date information any time they need.

Multiple clients?  Not a problem.  These features are set on a per-report basis.  You can also enable, disable or modify the settings for either of these features at any time.

Both of these new features are available to paid WebPosition Reporter subscribers at no cost.  And we’re very excited about new developments that are coming down the pipeline.  So, keep the feedback coming and stay tuned as we continue building out this new online service.

WebPosition Going Forward

July 16, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

We launched the all new, all online WebPosition Reporter on May 11th, and since then have had the opportunity to welcome customers new and old. Over the past two months we’ve received fantastic feedback from our subscribers about how we can make our product even better.

Our top request has been for a White Labeling capability, which we will be releasing later this month along with Secure Online Sharing. Secure Online Sharing will enable our customers to provide view-only access to their clients and colleagues, while keeping full editing, downloading and exporting permissions. Reports that are shared take advantage of the White Labeling feature, and will not have any mention of WebPosition on them. These two great features will be provided at no additional cost to our subscribers.

We moved WebPosition Reporter completely online for a variety of reasons. We wanted to provide a service our customers could access anytime, anywhere. A service that never required a customer to download, install, or update software. A service we could offer to more people on more platforms without requiring a complete re-write. We wanted to provide ranking report data that wouldn’t break every time a search engine changed some aspect of their results pages, as is the case with downloadable rank checking software. We wanted to provide the ability for customers to run high volumes of reports in short time-frames – minutes instead of hours or days – and do so without putting their IP address at risk. We wanted to deliver the data in a more user-friendly format that could be sorted and filtered according to a customer’s whim. We’ve been able to deliver on all of those things, and we’re very proud of the result.

We’ve provided the capability for our WP4 customers to export their historical Reporter data and import it into the new online version. Thanks to the feedback from customers who have taken advantage of the feature, we will be releasing an even more robust version of the import tool along with the White Label and Secure Online Sharing features next week.

Our focus is on improving and expanding our online product offering, and we are grateful for the opportunity to carry this torch forward.

Your Page Weight Still Matters

June 29, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

These days, it’s easy to take it for granted that end users have high-speed Internet and can download almost any webpage in the blink of an eye.  So to attract visitors, pages get stuffed full of flashy ads, audio, video and plug-ins.  And in the rush to get the page up, efficient coding and image optimization fall by the wayside.

After all, it’s a competitive Internet out there, and that page needs its share of the traffic – now.

But consider the end user.  According to eMarketer, a page can lose 50% of its audience if it takes more than 15 seconds to download.  And many users still use dial up or don’t have access to high-speed broadband, especially in countries that are still building out their telecom infrastructures.

Even if a page loads quickly on a desktop, it may not function well on a smartphone.  According to Chetan Sharma Consulting, US data traffic exceeded voice traffic in 2009, which means that the number of users conducting searches on mobile devices is growing.  But not all users have 3G coverage to download overweight webpages.

Page weight still plays a key role in performance and user retention.  Slimming down a page can increase traffic, save hosting costs and improve page rank.  Here are some resources that can help you test your page weight to determine if a ‘less is more’ approach is necessary.

• WebSiteOptimization.com – Free webpage speed analysis
  www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
• Webpositionadvisor.com – Free webpage size checker
  www.webpositionadvisor.com/tools/page_size_cheker.php

If your page is overweight, you don’t necessarily have to redesign your entire website.  It can be relatively easy and practical to create a low-bandwidth or mobile version, and the benefits could be well worth doing so.

Is Yahoo Flatlining?

June 21, 2010 By korbodo

We were doing some research into Father’s Day keyword positions for a SullysBlog.com post using WebPosition Reporter, and noticed something odd.

There was almost NO movement in rankings on Yahoo.

Unsure if Yahoo’s flat lines were an anomaly, we took a look at different report with over 200 keywords and saw a similar trend. There was movement in 12% of Google positions, 7% had some change in Bing and less than 3% had any change on Yahoo.

Almost as interesting is the volatility in positions on Bing – more up and down vs. a visible, gradual trend on Google. Perhaps once Bing receives an influx of traffic after the Yahoo cut-over, and therefore more user and click data, we’ll start to see more gradual trends at Bing?

The New WebPosition Reporter Launches Today

May 11, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team

Today marks the launch of the all new, all online WebPosition Reporter. This new release is completely web-based and lets users run and view search engine rank reports from a web browser on their Mac or PC – nothing to download or install. With this new online version, WebPosition introduces brand-new features, including filtering & sorting, downloadable data and competitor identification & tracking. Additionally, the new WebPosition Reporter runs reports anonymously, without involving users’ local IP addresses.
There are several subscription options available, including the Free Pilot Pack. We’re curious what you think – try it out at http://www.webposition.com and let us know!

How Do You Optimize For Multiple Search Engines?

January 25, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

We are often asked by WebPosition users, “how do you optimize for more than one engine?” Although you can optimize the same web page for multiple engines, some engines will have such widely differing preferences that optimizing for multiple engines can be nearly impossible. As you start creating a page that has more appeal to one engine, it may become less appealing to another. While you can perform split A/B testing in order to see what works out best between different versions of your pages, I think most people just want to put up a few pages and be done with it. If you are in this camp, it is generally recommended that you optimize separate pages for each search engine. Although I’ve covered this a bit in an article called Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings, it may help to illustrate the multi optimization point in a another way. Open another browser window and point it to the e-commerce store, ThinkGeek.com and I’ll show you what I mean.

You can go to just about any product that ThinkGeek carries, but for now, let’s look at this “hacker work shirt” page. When you look at this page, you will see that they have several sub pages for this particular shirt. Just from this main page, I can count at least 3 web pages for this shirt.

There is the main description page at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/

There is a zoomed in view of the shirt at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/zoom/

There is an action shots page at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/
Additionally, once you get to the action shots page, there are at least 6 other web pages that have a photo and a small bit of text next to a photo that a customer or staffer had sent in. These are just a few examples:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/210c0a6/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/2107603/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6620/action/21055d4/

These 9 or so web pages can each be optimized for a different engine and keyword/phrase. Ideally, a theme runs through each of these pages and the text is optimized for one engine or another. While the photo submitters are probably sending in their own photo captions, there is no reason why ThinkGeek staff can’t add some of their own text.

Thus a page like this Mac Hacker photo, might be optimized by ThinkGeek staff for a phrase like “mac hacker shirt”. They could add a couple of paragraphs that either respond in some way to the image in the photo, the submitter’s title/info, or write something up that talks about how even Mac users tinker with their computers and could use a great work shirt. They can even link to other hacker or Mac themed pages from their own site’s product pages in order to reinforce relevance of their keyword themes. They may even link out to a few interesting Mac hacker related sites that fairly above board like this Makezine post of where some one converted a new Mac Mini to use the case of an old Macintosh SE30.

While I’m on the keywords Mac and hacker, I’m going to head to Google and run a search that a few friends and WebPosition visitors with Macs have run: mac hack run XP. These folks have Macs but want to run PC applications like WebPosition. There are a variety of third party software hacks and suites that have been used to make Macintosh computers work with PC programs but Mac now has an official product called “Boot Camp” to help in this process. O’Reilly has a Boot Camp guide that shows up in this Google search result. Technically Boot Camp is not an actual “hack” but something that helps people avoid having to perform potentially harmful things to their machines. If you look, this is a fairly plain web page. In checking other search engines, it does not show up in Yahoo, MSN, etc. in the top rankings. Thus, this page is a candidate for further optimization against multiple engines, or better yet, the creating of additional pages that talk about Mac, XP, Boot Camp, etc. Perhaps they might create a few pages with further excerpts from the guide and create some intro text that optimizes for a specific keyword/engine.

Finally, if you are like ThinkGeek and have a search engine on your site, has anyone told you that your own engine is an SEO tool? If I’m a Mac person compare these two searches: ipod – 21 items and mac – 8 items. All iPod items are Mac items. Also, are there more than 21 Mac related items for sale in the store? These are optimization opportunities and depending on your goals, you may wish to optimize these various product pages for various engines as well as various keywords. If you don’t have an on site engine, consider some of the custom search engines that you can freely create and add to your site.

Thanks to ThinkGeek for allowing me deconstruct a few of the opportunities on their site! If you need a stapler for your geeky office friends or other unique gifts, check them out.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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