Link Building and Keyword Analysis

If you are involved in building websites, either as a hobby or professionally, then you will know that there is one thing that overrides all other issues.

Traffic!

As soon as you get involved in the World Wide Web, increasing the amount of visitors to your website becomes an all consuming goal.

In most cases, the reason for this is usually because more traffic equals more money. But even for those people with a website where the content or message is the most important thing, you are still pretty much wasting your time if nobody finds your site.

So how do we get traffic to our websites? Ah, the $1,000,000 question!

There are many factors involved when we analyze the reasons for the amount of people visiting our sites, but one of the most important issues is the amount of links we have pointing at the website - and the words that are used within these links.

The reason for this is that the major search engines consider these links as a vote of confidence for our site, and the text within the link tells them what the page is about. Therefore, one of the main tasks for any webmaster is to go out and get as many links as they can for their site, and hopefully for these links to use certain important keywords.

The trouble is, it can be a difficult task to keep a track of the links that we have pointing into our site, and also to monitor where our site appears in the search engine rankings for particular keywords. Not only that, but our links and website ranking can vary from day to day!

So wouldn't it be really useful to have a way of automatically keeping a record of all the incoming links, all the keywords used in those links and if our ranking for those keywords is going up.......or down (sob!).

Well, I've been looking for a way of doing this for a while, and after trying many software solutions that claim to do just that, I've finally found some software which hits the spot for me.

Please understand, I'm not saying the following software is the only way to check your rankings and links - and I don't own the company! However, in my opinion, these are my favourites out of all the applications I've tried.

I thought all my birthdays had come at once when I tried out Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager by Caphyon.

These two applications absolutely nail the problems of tracking incoming links and monitoring web rankings. They are powerful yet simple to use, fully-featured but great value.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is the keyword research tool you need for tracking the ranking of your keywords.

Getting started is easy. A wizard takes you through the process of setting up a project, and you just enter all the information that is required on the screens in front of you. The software won't let you proceed until you have set everything correctly.

Basically, the project needs your website URL and all the keywords that you are trying to rank in the search engines for. You can even choose from an enormous list of search engines that you want to check against - from country specific engines like Google USA and Bing Australia, right down to a specific data center that you wish to test out.

It's great to be able to see the difference in rankings between the various search engines. There are search engines from all over the world - and new ones get added automatically every week.

After your initial setup, the software takes over and goes and gets the rankings for all your keywords at the different engines you requested. You can go and have a cup of coffee while it does the boring stuff - or get on with something else as it runs in the background.

When your data has been collected, the fun really begins. You have an amazing array of graphs, tables and reports where you can analyze how your keywords are performing. You can see the changes from day to day, or over a month, or a year.

If your traffic drops, you can see exactly what is happening and understand where you need to improve your performance.

And the real killer is, the software will also show you who your main competitors are for certain keywords, and allow you to track their performance too! Once you know who you're up against, you can make plans as to how you can beat them.

Downsides? I haven't run into many, but the help files could be a little better organized and some of the information appears to be behind some updates to the software.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is the second application by Caphyon, and it is a good partner to Advanced Web Ranking.

Whereas AWR tracks the performance of your keywords at the search engines, the link manager goes out and finds all the links pointing into your site, and shows you exactly what keywords are used in the text links.

Once you can see all this information in one place, it is easy to see where you need to improve your link-building efforts - or perhaps where you've got too many links coming from. A good link profile needs to have a balance of links from different places to be worthwhile.

The two applications share a similar interface and so Advanced Link Manager has a comparable project setup wizard to Advanced Web Ranking.

Your project requires your URL, and from this it will go and get a listing of all your incoming links. Not only that, but it will then verify that each links actually exists.

The beauty of this is that you can set the software to go out every day and check if your links are still there, and it will also add any new links that it finds. You can also get the software to check that reciprocal links with other sites haven't been removed, and you will be warned automatically if these links disappear. What a time saver!

You can analyze your link data in a number of ways, and there are different tabbed views within the application where you can clearly see your link profile on the web. There are tools to view the strength of the domains linking to you, to check for broken links on your site, and even tools to help you find sites who may be willing to link to you.

And, just like in Advanced Web Manager, the beauty is you can also set the software to check all the links of your competitors too. You can then see why they are beating you in the rankings for a particular keyword, and you then know what you need to do overtake them.

There are are couple of issues I have with it. The link software doesn't feel as complete as the web ranking application mentioned above. Although it has many useful features, it feels a little like lots of small applications thrown together rather than a well-rounded package.

This could lead to some users being frustrated trying to find their way around the software - and it may be that some parts of the application are more useful than others.

Summary

For me, amongst all the fantastic information and control these two applications give you, there is one major thing that stands out. Once you start running the software, you begin to create an archive of vital data about the performance of your website. This history can be crucial in understanding how your link building projects are performing, and what impact they are having over time.

If your traffic drops suddenly, you can go back and find out exactly what caused the drop and when the problem started. Once you know this, you can take steps to turn the problem around.

If you don't have this data being collected for you every day, you will have little idea what caused your drop in traffic.

And what's the best news of all? Well, you don't have to take my word for it, you can try it out for yourself. You can go and download a fully functional 30 day trial of both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.

You can run all the features for real on your own websites, and collect all the data you need.

However, once you see how useful this information is - and how invaluable it is having a historical record of your sites performance to refer to - I think you're going to want to keep the software for longer than 30 days.

The software comes in four versions - standard, professional, enterprise and server. The pricing rises throughout these levels as more features are added. However, unlike some products, the standard versions provide the majority of the tools that most people would require and you really only need to pay more if you need certain advanced features.

Follow the links to download a trial copy and find out more information on search engine ranking and link popularity.

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