Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager reviews

One of the first things you look for when you get into the SEO business is a rank checker. The whole point of SEO, after all is to get your site as close to the top in the SERPS as possible, ultimately aiming for the #1 position.

Checking the site ranking isn’t particullary hard when you have 1 or two keywords, you type them into Google and then just look for your site to appear in the SERPS but it is quite a bit different once your site grows and you start aiming at tens or hundreds of keywords at a time. The situation is even worse when you do SEO for other people, like companies. Everyone wants to get their money’s worth, people want to see progress, reports, charts and so on…

If you Google for a SERP tracker or rank tracker you will get a lot of results, everything from scripts to desktop software for checking your rankings but there are numerous problems with almost all of these. The scripts tends to have only the most basic of features and usually a limit on the amount of keywords you can check. The desktop software tends to provide more functions but it often has huge problems like blacklisting your IP address on Google.

Once you skip all of the low quality options, be it in the cloud or on your desktop you will be ultimately be left with two choices.

#1 Services – As your first option you have services, these are usually hosted in the cloud, so they’re accessible from almost anywhere and tend to provide a decent set of features, depending on which you’re using. Two of the best ones are SEscout and SEOmoz. They are great tools but users usually have problems with these because: they don’t like the idea of their keywords being hosted by some third party and what the dealbreaker for me was, the price. SEscout will set you back almost $50 per month for tracking 500 keywords and SEOmoz almost $100 for 250 keywords.

#2 Quality Desktop Software – I definitely wasn’t gonna pay some service $100 every month just for tracking my rankings, so this was the option for me.

After doing quite a bit of research, going through a few free tools, all of which lacked some way or another I decided on the software I would use for tracking my rankings from this time forward.

 

<h2>Introducing – Advanced Web Ranking</h2>

If you’re just a beginner in the SEO field, chances are you don’t have a lot of money to spend on tools so you want to make the right decisions and get the best SEO software at a good price. So I will give you the info you want the most right away.

 

Price

 

Advanced Web Ranking comes in a few versions. The cheapest version will set you back $99 and like all other versions comes with 12 months of maintenance. What that basically means is that you have access to support and updates for the next 12 months with no extra charge. The standard version doesn’t have many bells and whistles but it should be more than enough for someone who works independently and doesn’t need to generate reports.

 

The other versions are Professional, which costs $199 and has additional features like printable reports and send reports by email and the Enterprise version which in addition to the features of the Professional version also has a keyword research tool and a few other features. There is also a Server version but we use the desktop version and that’s what this review is about.

 

You can get a 30 day trial of any version of Advanced Web Ranking to try it out and see which version suits you best.

 

The software itself

 

When you open the software for the first time it’s gonna promt you right away to enter a web site

Once you enter the site and click next it is going to suggest you some keywords for your site, you can but don’t have to use those, you can just enter the keywords you want into the box, then it promts you to select a search engine, already you will find that the process is as intuitive as possible. The tool offers so many features but the makes didn’t clutter it up and implement a wizard style way to use the tool, which makes it not only very simple to use but you don’t lose the data out of sight while using it.

 

Main Advanced Web Ranking Screen

 

What it sets apart from the rest

 

Most of you will want to know, why you should she’ll out your hard earned cash for just THIS tool. Here are the reasons that were important for me.

The first thing I looked for when researching for these tools is flying under the radar. This probably needs some explanation, if you ever wondered why those services or sites that offer SEPR tracking or checking limit you to those small amounts of keywords the answer is because Google only allows a certain number of requests, if you do too many they will ban your IP.

As your site grows in size you will get a lot of keywords, and you will want to start aiming for those, some will be more important for you, some less but you would want to know how well you’re ranking for most of them. If you enter a hundred keywords into just any SERP checker it will try to get as many results as possible and that will result in your IP getting banned, you want to avoid this at any price.

Advanced Web Ranking has several ways to keep this from happening. The first way is that it uses human like patterns and browser like operation when it requests the results from Google and other search engines.

Another great feature of the Enterprise version of Advanced Web Ranking is that it allows you to enter proxies that it will use for getting the rankings from the search engines. The proxies mask your IP and avoid the chances of your IP getting banned even more.

But that isn’t everything either, it also allows you to use the Google AJAX API to get fetch Google results with that too.

Other than the stealth I also appreciated the fact that you can have unlimited domains and keywords. Most people would think that this is granted but there are actually programs out there that limit the number of keywords and domains that you can have.

Not directly releated to the SEPR checking but equally important (at least for me) is the Schedule Backup feature. It does exactly what it sounds like, it Schedules backups of the Advanced Web Ranking database. I like to set the destination to DropBox to have a fullproof backup of my data.

 

Extensive charting

 

If you choose to go with Advanced Web Ranking for your SERP checking needs one thing I think you will fall in love with are the great charts. There are lots of filders like the web site, the keywords, the serach engines, time frame and so on.

Another piece of software you might want to take a look at comes from the same house as Advanced Web Ranking. It is called  Advanced Link Manager and what it does is the same thing Advanced Web Ranking does for rank checking, only it does it for links.

When you do link building you want to know if the method you use or even outsource is effective, this link manager helps you do that

It will analize your links, crawl your site, look for errors, show you the link popularity and help you find link partners and a lot more.

Basically if you’re using tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and wait for months for backlinks to show up there this will probably be a good addition to your tool arsenal.

 

It can show you who is backlinking to you, what anchor texts they used the backlinks evolution of your site, all things that can help you see what methods of linkbuilding you used, what was effective, what wasn’t so you can use more of the good methods and drop the bad ones.

As mentioned before you can download a trial of both of these programs and test the full version for a full 30 days before you buy it.