A Look at a Few Page Ranking Tools

What do you use to monitor the page ranks your sites have in search engines? You could — as I have done — enter the term into a given engine and count where a particular site appears; but that can be tedious when the site isn’t in the top 10 or 20 let alone the top 50.

Randy Zlobec, search engine marketing expert and author of SEM Gorilla, who offered his advice two weeks ago for hiring a search engine marketing expert, shares three tools he has found invaluable for monitoring page ranking — one that’s free (with a caveat) and two that cost.

First, the Freebie: DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker

DigitalPoint.com’s free Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool can be used to check Google, Yahoo and MSN and other engines for ranking of keywords over time. According to Zlobec, “You create an account, then the tool follows your activity. It shows you your keyword placement from when you first started using the tool to where you are currently.”

Keyword Tracker requires a Google SOAP Search application programming interface (API) key to work, and that poses a problem. If you don’t already have that key (look in your inbox prior to December 2006 for a message from api-support@google.com), you won’t be able to use this utility — at least, not until the company updates it to work with the Google Ajax API.

SEO Elite
Brad Callen’s $167 SEO Elite is sold through a Web site designed like one of those old-fashioned, yet probably highly effective direct mail letters that go on and on and offer numerous testimonials about how effective the product is. But Zlobec swears by the software. “You can analyze your competition, track where they rank against where you rank. There’s Google AdWords tracking, where you can view the highest pay-per-click ads to see what people are paying for what terms, what ads are being displayed by what companies. You can see what’s been effective for your competition and use that to create ads that will be effective for you.”

For those who see the value in backlinks (in which another web site links to yours), the tool also lets you submit your article to “the most important article web sites that give you the best back links and best amount of traffic,” said Zlobec.

It also includes a keyword finder, which can provide options for your primary key terms. Why not simply rely on similar tools from Google or Yahoo? Because it’ll provide results from all the major engines, he explained.

Web CEO
The more staid Web CEO is similar to SEO Elite but without the article submission aspects. “It has a lot of tracking, a lot of analysis, a lot of historical analysis,” said Zlobec. “You can find link partners and contact them through the software. The company offers two versions, one ($199) for those who do search engine marketing for in-house sites and another ($389) for SEM pros, which provides “private label reports” that can be fed to clients.

Zlobec said he uses both SEO Elite and Web CEO — and has for many years, “because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on that. They’re great tools.”

Are you using a cross-search-engine page ranking tool worth noting?

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