WebCEO Promotion / Analysis Software

[Phil]

I'm usually a bit wary of software that offers site analysis and promotion but I though I'd give WebCEO (http://www.clickslink.com/sites/webceo.html) a try - netmag were showcasing it this month, and there's a free version of it.

There's different modules of the software that do things like submit your site to 100's of search engines (is it really worth it?), monitor your page ranking across search engines, research keywords and suggest optimisation tips for your site. The tips are mostly quite obvious ones but it's not a bad idea to run your site through it to ensure you've covered the bases. On my site it advised me to change the title tag to include "zombie lore" as separate words rather than "zombielore" one word. This actually resulted in me getting the top google result for those keywords. Other tips like "use more <H1> tags" aren't so easy to implement on CMS site.

You can also generate graphs to track how your page rank is doing over time which could be interesting. I'm still poking around with it, but from what i've seen of it so far I think it's worth registering, and then maybe even upgrading to the starter edition for a tenner...unless anyone else knows something better?

[James]

netmag gave away a similar piece of software last month - Web Position Gold. I tried it but it didn't give me any information I did not already know. It was also quite cumbersome to use.

I believe there is absolutely nothing to be gained by submitting your site to 100s of search engines. It's only the big guns that matter and they probably already know about you. It's all about the quality and number of links to you that affect your position, and your keyword strategies.

In your case, I imagine you want to be top hit for a search on just "zombies". I tried that and gave up after looking through 10 pages of Google results. However you are top for "zombie lore". This is similar to my experience: for a search on "free digital photos" I am improving my rank, but a search on "royalty free stock photos" which is a more common search phrase, I am off the map. It's a l-o-n-g process and can be a bit soul destroying, but rewarding when things do improve.

None of my traffic comes from search engines yet :o, but I get some reasonable traffic from the links on other pages.

[Tom]

Web Position Gold is the grand-daddy in this software group and its widely praised. The only feature in this group I find useful is keyword density analysis and I think it is better provided by KeywordDensity.com (http://www.keyworddensity.com/). It is quite a hard thing to judge by inspection.

[francis]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@Mar 17 2005, 2:26 pm
Web Position Gold is the grand-daddy in this software group and its widely praised.
No it's not! In fact Google specifically warn against using WPG in their 'guidelines for webmasters' (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html). Stay well clear!

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

[James]

Yep, I was reading Search Engine Optimization for Dummies yesterday and it too advises you not to use Web Position Gold.

[Tom]

Thanks for the updates!