Hey Guys,

Having used the trial versions of WebCeo and Web Position we are now in the position of purchasing 1 or the other. In your expert opinions can you advise which one of them is better please? Or even if there is a better product out there than these two.

We run a couple of web-sites in a competitive market (marital aids and lingerie) so obviously if we can get a product which gives us the edge in optimising our words, meta tags and descriptions then we will be very happy.

Please advise when you can and thanks for your time.


[ Message was edited by: bhartzer 09/08/2005 12:16 pm ]

Software will not give you the edge in optimizing youe words, meta tags and descriptions.

Experience gives you that.

Software WILL give you data - you still need to know how to use that data.

It might seem like I'm jumping on you about this, but pretty much every day someone buys software thinking the software will do the work. It won't and can't. I hate seeing folks pour money down the drain on stuff like this.

All of those software apps, every one, IMO, will offer you suggestions which are easily found in here, for free. Also, the apps cannot keep up to date like a human can.

What you need is applications to accomplish the following:

Check you rankings in the engines for specific keywords - WP has run afoul of Google recently and is probably not an application you want your domain associated with in Google's eyes - times may have changed, though, so others, do jump in on this point.

Examine your content to help with keyword density - for this there are free applications available.

After that, SEO is about the knowledge and tracking results. If you invest money in the software, you'll get some nice reports, but I'd be shocked to see any real, long-term results if you do what it says to do.

Hi Sportsguy,

Appreciate the information and advice on this subject. Looking through this particular forum has given us some fantastic ideas and options.
I see exactly where you are coming from on this and I will take your advice and not purchase any software. Lots of reading ahead of me from this forum and lots of changes to be made.
Obviously with all of our competitors using the same or similar software then no-one is going to achieve top spot anyway.
Thanks again.
I am sure you will see more of my questions appearing from around this forum.

WebPosition has announced the release of version 4 today. Worth a look if you are looking for organic rank monitoring tools.

[ Message was edited by: markpdx1 09/08/2005 10:45 am ]

"WP has run afoul of Google recently and is probably not an application you want your domain associated with in Google's eyes - times may have changed, though, so others, do jump in on this point."

WebPosition actually now uses an API with Google, so I do not think that they are looked on as badly, now. Also, WP gives warnings to you if you try to search on too many words during one report.

Although, I have one site that has gone down in positioning in Google for no apparent reason. I wonder if I'm running reports too often, anyone know if once a week is too often?

I hope once a week is not too often...LOL I run several reports a week for various sites. I do, however, keep the number of phrases down, and never exceed the 1000 query limit Google suggests per day.

It is extremely unlikely Search engines (including Google) penalize at all for using automated ranking tools, and here is why. The search engines do not identify automated querying from an individual tool.

There are a vast number of rank reporting tools on the market, and if you add to this the number of home grown tools built in literally an afternoon using perl, php and other scripting languages, it becomes clear that it would be nearly impossible and not time well spent for Google or anyone else to hire an amry of people to identify traffic from a particular tool.

WebCEO, for example, actually provides and promotes a way to trick the engines by allowing the user to specify an description in the 'user agent' field of the http request and I would steer clear of them for this reason. I'm actually surprised Google hasn't called them out for this in thier terms of servive.

Even if the search engines wanted to try to identify an individual ranking tool, there is nothing in the signature of an http request that says "hey, i'm an automated tool". There are well over 100,000 of these tools, and growing daily, if you count the home grown scripts.

What the search engines can and do identify is the amount af traffic comming from a single ip address or block of ip addresses, but even this is tricky.

a) In one example, you have one person running queries to check rankings on a single ip address.

b) In anohter case you have a public IP address for a large company where people within the company are all going through that IP address to peforms searches.

How does a search engine tell the difference between a and b? The only way to tell is to lookup who owns the IP address and see that a is owned by John Doe, and b is owned by General Electric.

It is pluasable that corporate IP addresses are somehow given more latitute in the amount of traffic allow, but in my opinion, even this is unlikely as I have heard of many corporations getting temporarliy blocked by automated traffic filters from the major search engines.

Even if you exceed the traffic threshold for a particular search engine, I have never heard of a case of being penalized in your rankings. The search engines don't have the time to penalize John Doe's site x% beacuse he sent too much query traffic, thier algorithms will simply block the ip for a period of time, and maybe permanatly for habitual offenders.

If you undertand and monitor how much traffic you are generating to the search engines and keep it reasonable, you will be fine with most any tool.


[ Message was edited by: markpdx1 09/17/2005 09:23 am ]


[ Message was edited by: markpdx1 09/17/2005 09:24 am ]


[ Message was edited by: markpdx1 09/17/2005 09:26 am ]


[ Message was edited by: markpdx1 09/17/2005 09:27 am ]