Webposition Gold Review

WebPosition Gold is one of the oldest and well known programs in web site promotion I know, it has been around at least since 1997. Over time the program improved in interface and other issues, but the general use of the program stays the same: Web Site promotion.

It is interesting that the makers of WebPosition Gold by FirstPlace Software Team have a different approach with their tool then other manufactories: In contrary to other packages, it does not claim to submit to many hundreds and hundreds of search engines, directories and Free For All links. In fact, it submits your pages only to 9 search engines. This different approach has a reason, WebPosition Gold just submits to the highest traffic engines, but tries to be best at that. It is a very different approach. Not to have as many engines covered, but to have the most crowded best optimized.

As far as I know this is the only software with this approach, but it is doing surprisingly good as it uses a well thought out concept to gain data from the engines. WebPosition Gold has an auto update feature, that checks each time connected to the net and active for updates and new data.

The search engines WebPosition Gold covers:

• AltaVista
• Excite
• HotBot
• InfoSeek
• Lycos
• MSN
• PlanetSearch
• Webcrawler
• What-U-Seek

To understand how the concept of WebPosition Gold works, let's have a look at the features first. The package consists of eight elements to generate, watch, improve and maintain search engine rankings:

1. Page Generator: Creates an HTML "doorway page" based on keywords and details about your business supplied by the user. It leads you through four tabs to input data, then generates the page ready to upload. You can also select which search engine from the list above you would like to target with your doorway page. You can also use a generic search engine optimization. From my point of view, this is the most critical option. Until recently submitting (too many) doorway pages was regarded by most search engines as a attempt to spam them. But it is the program does indeed warns the user not to misuse this option.
   It states in the option to select keywords a warning: To avoid spamming a search engine you should not create no more than 1 or 2 pages that "target" a particular keyword (or preferably a 2-3 word Phrase) for a single engine, unless the content is greatly different on each.
   In the help files you find also about spamming engines:

   "SPAMMING: Some engines are reported to have started watching for people submitting too many pages at once. They sometimes limit you on how many you can submit per day or week. They may also start looking for people submitting too many similar pages and will ban sites that hey feel are abusing the system. Therefore, it's always best to proceed with caution and submit only as many variations of a page as absolutely necessary to achieve your goal. If you keep it to one regular page and one optimized summary page for each product/service then you should not have any problems. Also, you should space out submissions when possible (perhaps once a week). "

   and

   "DON'T SPAM: Don't blatantly 'spam' search engines. Specifically, you should not put in keywords that don't pertain to your site just so you might attract more visitors. You could put in words such as 'sex' or 'stock market' or whatever. However: a) You'll not be attracting the visitors that you want anyway. b) You'll only serve to annoy people and label yourself as a 'spammer'. c) Many search engines are looking for various kinds of index spamming and are banning sites entirely that they catch!"

   I think this is very good said. I am always afraid that the easier it is to abuse search engines, the more and more people will abuse search engines and spam them, making it harder to find anything. That said, I think some of the problem of search engines have with automatic submission programs are the result of such misuse. However, WebPosition Gold tries it's best to educate the user to use the tool correctly. Since more than a year I am subscribed the newsletter, that is accompanying the product, but is also free to subscribe for not-owners of WebPosition Gold. Of course it concentrates on WebPosition Gold, though there often other helpful tips and actual experiences one can learn from - and as FirstPlaceSoftware Team has a lot of actual data by users (more about that later), the experts findings are usually accurate and true. To subscribe to MarketPosition, simply e-mail subscribe@webposition.com They also have recently launched a forum, it is at http/:/www.marketpositiontalk.com.

2. Page Critic: This interesting utility supplies expert advice on how to optimize new or existing pages for special engines or in general. The Page Critic claims to know each search engine's unique "personality" and how to build TOP ranking pages for each without "spamming" or abusing the index. To achieve this, as mentioned before, WebPosition Gold updates its data every time there is a connection to the Internet, therefore making it easier to adopt to changes at search engines algorithms. After you entered a domain name to be analyzed, you can select if you want to have a page local or online analysed for a special phrase or keyword. Partial finding (like cat would score within catskills) is an additional option, but mostly it states that the search engines does not seem to use partial matching anymore. Then you can select at what search engine it should look for top average statistics to compare your page to. You have the option to how many pages in the result it should be compared, additional you can select a page at some location to compare to. This can be used to find out how the other competitor in town is doing in comparison to you.. use ethically.
   The ability to calculate how engines rank in accordance to keywords or phrases is a very valuable option.

3. A simple page editor is also included. The Page Editor: lets you modify pages or select your favorite program for it.

4. Another small application included is the Upload Manager: While you use other options, you can assign them to the Upload manager for fpt-ing them up later. Therefor all your operations can be automatically be assigned for upload later, so you do not have to remember. You can switch to other programs as well, it has also a option to upload a report with the details you select to show the client, so he can look at it online.

5. Submitter: The submitter is certainly the main tool, or one can say the most important for the program. WebPosition offers advanced submission "safety" features that not so experienced or insure users do not "over submit" to an engine or accidentally violate one of their ever changing submission guidelines. You can choose the files you want submitted also by automatic selection of files that changed from a time you specify. Checkboxes checked ensure that the user will be warned if he attempts to submit a page that does not exist, as well if the search engine has received enough URLs to make sure it does not interpret the submission as spam. WebPosition Gold claims to use a cloaking technology that allows you to submit URLs to search engines without being flagged into a low priority queue -- some engines do this to pages they determine originated from automated submission services or mass submitting tools. During submission WebPosition Gold will look for updates if you allow it to.

6. Reporter: The reporter checks your site's positions in the major search engines to determine a site's rank, according to the keywords or phrases you supported it to look up and the engines and directories you specified. This feature is another time saver like the submitter, as it performs the crucial step of automatically reporting a Web site's rankings on as many keywords or phrases as you wish on an ongoing basis as long as run the mission. Additionally it monitors trends and alerts you when your positions decline, shows you also the actual page summary descriptions displayed at the search engines from yours and other submissions. A very clever (for someone who might need this feature) is the ability to export report data to ASCII file format for use in Excel spreadsheet or other products for further analysis. This is extra is included in the professional version only) as the possibility to customize reports with your company name and logo for display to clients in the report.

7. Scheduler: Some sort of time that, activates the Reporter daily, weekly, or monthly to automatically check a Web site's positions or to re-submit. Very useful for larger sites or many clients. You can even have it hang up the phone for you.

8. Traffic Analyzer: Included in this product of many features is a traffic analyzer. It works with a little image script to one of their servers to count visitors, it will be included on your pages at the bottom, so there might be some people you miss. Of course this is not as accurate as log files. But it is very good to give a you a general idea of what was going on today at your Website for example. It includes the search engines and the terms by which you have been found, pages linking to you, prior months. There is one very interesting point about this feature, not as much as control of traffic but rather a tool for the client you are working for. It has the cool option that you can set a variable on a click-through. Say, you agree with a client to pay you by numbers coming to his site only. Rather then getting an agreed on amount of money, you get only paid by the visitors who come around to his site. The traffic analyzer calculates automatically how much you get from the client in a nice way to send to the client with the final amount of money listed. If you are using it your own private site, you can at least knock on you own shoulders how you managed to become a net-entrepreneur-millionaire by clicks in just some weeks (depending on your visits and/or own costs per click).

Summary: Overall WebPosition Gold is a very good program. The price is in accordance to that, as it has been long around in this business and they are really experts, the team working behind. You get updates and the newsletter of them mentioned before is really something worth to check anyway. I like the approach they have with a good help file, trying to help, educate and inform the customer instead of teaching him how to click some buttons to get something that is not realistic. The features wisely used can really help you with tracking problems, making better sites and learn about search engine positioning a lot in general. It is not the "take-the-money-and-run-attitude", in fact their help desk and support enjoys a very good reputation.

For some the program might even be more then they need, therefor the company has published two versions:

1. Standard Edition This edition allows you to monitor and submit up to five different Web site domains and an unlimited number of keywords, phrases, and pages to watch. Also, as this is more a private version. Is is for businesses that are not generating reports as a service to clients

2. Professional Edition The professional edition is designed for the professional web consultant monitoring positions on many sites, generally as a service to their customers. It includes all the features of the Standard edition plus support for an unlimited number of domains. In addition, the professional edition allows you to customize the reports with your own company name and logo, if you like, to suppress mention of WebPosition or tips and recommendations to improve positions. For the ultimate in flexibility, you may export the data to an ASCII tab delimited file for easy import into Excel, or a database or report writer program. This allows you then to create your own reports and analysis. These are the differences to the standard edition.

All editions include lifetime product support and free maintenance updates. If there are more significant upgrades in the future available the purchase will have a discount.

If you decide to buy the software, you are able to participate in very fair affliate program, giving you 15% share of sales you generated.

Not only are they planning to offer web-to-web offers in submission business soon, you can also enroll to a special seminar teaching you the ins and outs of search engine optimization and the tricks of the software. A diploma is handed out afterwards, making you an official WebPosition Specialist partner allowed to display a banner on your site.

For more information and a downloadable demo please visit http://www.webposition.com/

If you have any questions, please ask, you can reach me at wolf@webrom.net.