Top tools for SEO enthusiasts

There are many different programs on the market which offer help with SEO campaigns. These allow your business to easily track where your website is ranking on a search engine for a chosen keyword or phrase. As an example, if your website ranks in position one for the phrase “football cap” and you receive lots of traffic and conversions from the result, you will want to know when your site falls to position 2, 3 or even off of the first page. Caphyon has created two very useful pieces of software which let users monitor changes in search results and track links. These can help you to monitor your SEO and improve your clients’ traffic and ROI in a simple, easy to use way.

AWR

Advanced Web Ranking or AWR is one of the best tools on the market for monitoring Google rankings. Unlike many free piece of software and browser extensions, this complete SEO software is a desktop program which tracks all your chosen keywords across a range of different search engines. It also stores historic data allowing you to see how your web pages have moved up or down search engine results in the past weeks, months or even years. The software gives you the option to monitor your competitor’s positions and schedules reports to be run at a certain time each week, making it easy to show your client your results and compare them against their rivals.

 AWR has a simple install process and does not require users to add personal information or to configure API credentials. The program’s interface is clear and easy to use with many tutorials available to help you get to grips with the program in a minimal amount of time.

The program covers all three main UK search engines; Google, Bing and Yahoo as well as a list of country specific sites such as Google Germany and Belgium. The software supports regional search engines including Baidu and Altavista as well as a range of other popular websites with search functionality including Dmoz, Youtube, and about.com.

The software has several import features which allow users to cut the amount of time they spend importing data. Users can upload keyword lists from Google suggest or word tracker directly to AWR. The program also suggests other related keywords you can use to increase traffic and ROI on your site.

Following the installation and simple setup the program will automatically review the search engines for your given keywords. Following the results the program gives you the options of viewing keyword rankings compared to a previous date, evolution through time and check the top 10 sites for that keyword. This in turn allows you to spot trends and see the progress of your hard work. If your site is moving up Google ranking for a certain search term you will have clear data to show your work is paying off. If your rankings for phrases are dropping you will know straight away and be able to backtrack to figure out what the issue is and what you can do to stop your site falling.

The software allows users to export data to Excel for further manipulation and offers alerts to automatically trigger when a keyword falls or a certain event occurs.

AWR is available now for Mac and Linux and Windows.

ALM

Advanced Link Manager is another tool by Caphyon which helps SEO managers keep track of their work. Unlike AWR, ALM tracks the success of your link building. This is a common tactic used for SEO and involves asking websites to place links back to your website. Search engines determine how popular a website is through several factors with one of the most common being the amount of links that point to your website. If a site has a large amount of websites linking to it, a search engine believes it should be more popular and be a worthwhile result.

SEO professionals typically mention Page Rank or “PR” as a way to display the strength of a website. The system ranks websites from 1 to 10 which ranks websites by links and authority. Popular websites which have many places linking to them will have Page ranks of 8, 9 or 10, while relatively unknown sites will have PR scores of 2, 1 or even 0. However in recent years PR has become more irrelevant as search engines take other areas into consideration.

ALM specialises in tracking links back to your website, monitoring if a site has removed your ad or the link has become broken. The program has a simple to use interface which is similar to AWR. As with the web ranking tool, ALM offers a very easy setup. Users only have to enter their website URL to start tracking links. 

The program allows users to monitor their links over time and can help SEO professionals to determine which keywords they need to be building inbound links for. The program will display possible websites to place more links on and has a great broken link finder, allowing you to find out which links have stopped working or are being directing to 404 pages on your site.

ALM offers several key services which make it stand out from its competitors, these include monitoring your competitors sites, the ability to schedule the program to check links, creating triggers to alert you of a change, and the option to import information to Excel for further manipulation.

ALM and AWR can be purchased from Caphyon’s website and run on Mac, Linux and Windows.