My New SEO Toy
First let me say I’m not a big fan of high ticket programs. Generally I shy away with any program with a price tag on it, but this one came with a free trial. So I figured why not?
I was knee deep in search engine optimization, having finally gotten out of my slump and back on the horse. I’ve never been one to jump on the “latest SEO tricks”, and always stuck to the tried and true forms of SEO. Wouldn’t you know it’s been nearly a year since I’ve done anything but a few posts a month on Idea Queen, and all my rankings have stayed put for the most part. “Slow and steady wins the race” comes to mind here.
Now as I’m searching for some of the FireFox add-ons I had installed on my computer before the horrid computer crash of ‘09 (I’m starting from scratch here people – I more or less lost EVERYTHING, since I cant even find my back up disks from last April), I stumbled across something new. Well, maybe not new to the internet, but new to me. That program is Advanced Web Rankings.
The first thing I noticed after downloading it was that I’m a HUGE GEEK. I was drooling over all the functions of this sexy beast, and didn’t even know where to start. The main reason I wanted my hands on it was for some -safe- form of checking rankings that didn’t require me typing in all my keyword phrases one by one and searching for them in the listings. Keep in mind Idea Queen has at least 100 optimized pages, some with multiple keyword terms. Talk about a daunting task, and I can’t even keep track of half of them without it consuming an entire day. Granted I only use to check every 3 months or so, but still. Big, big task. Sadly I lost my spreadsheet with all the info though, so this is a HUGE time saver in my researching.
Some of the functions just aren’t available with the standard version, but that’s fine. I’ve always had my own way of keyword research, and honest, it’s worked for years for me. Don’t fix it if is ain’t broke, right? So that part I don’t need. HOWEVER, it’s sparked some suggestions for me as I was adding in my keywords since I had it set on “Google suggest”. Which in turn sparked an idea for more content. WOO!
Now it doesn’t just spit out all your rankings, but give you reports and other functions to see if your really targeting the keywords you should be. It also shows you if your site has moved from specific phrases over time. Very cool, and very good to know.
When my free trial expires, I do plan to buy the full Standard version for $99. And for those of you that know me, spending this much on one business tool is simply unheard of. Even more surprising, I plan to upgrade to the Enterprise version for the keyword research function after I get further into the swing of things again. For now though, I’m extremely happy to have a good handle on where my pages are ranked, and knowing where I can improve.
Your fellow WAHM in success,
Kara
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