Software Review:
WebPosition Gold
By Scott Clark and David Fiedler
You built it, but will they come? They will if you know how to properly promote your site!!
Many developers have come to the conclusion that merely submitting their Web site to the major search engines isn't enough. After submitting their site, even with META tags and descriptions, many search engines fail to place their site within the top 30 matches, let alone in the top 10.
FirstPlace Software's Web Position Gold picks up where you left off. Using this tool will, according to FirstPlace, increase your ratings like nothing else, and they even go so far as to guarantee that you'll get your site into that elusive top 10! In this review, we'll show you how the tool works, and let you know if there's hope for your site yet!
WebPosition Gold from FirstPlace Software
Price: Standard $149.00 Professional $349
System Requirements:
486/75 MHz CPU (Pentium 75 or greater recommended)
8 MB (16 MB Recommended), Windows 95/98, or NT 4.0 or higher, 7 MB of hard drive space plus space for downloaded files, Netscape 2.0 or higher, or MS Explorer 3.0 or higher
Demo: Trial Download Area
Search Engine Philosophy 101
The first thing to understand is that although WebPosition Gold does help create META tags for your pages, they are not the only reason your ratings will be higher in the search engines. The creators of WebPosition Gold believe that META tags only play a small part in the rating process of most search engines. Their philosophy is also based on the famous 80/20 rule, which would state for this case, "80% of your hits from search engines come from only 20% of the search engines".
This is understating the case. Actually, you will probably find that 90% of your hits from search engines come from just the "top 10" search engines. FirstPlace Software has focused on a short list of engines (AltaVista, InfoSeek, HotBot, Excite/AOL, NetFind, LinkStar, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, Magellan, NorthernLight, PlanetSearch, What-U-Seek) and studied them intensively (more about this later). All others -- including the "category-specific" engines -- are totally ignored. While some products (usually advertised via SPAM) promise to submit your site to hundreds or even thousands of search engines, most of these are actually created "on-the-fly" by CGI programs and reside at porno sites...in other words, useless.
We tested WebPosition Gold on a number of sites, including WebDeveloper.com itself. While WebDeveloper.com is quite a complex site and we get many hits from other sites in the internet.com network, the top five search engines that bring us traffic account for over 40% of our traffic from other sites.
In the case of the smaller sites, the results were even more conclusive. On one, a whopping 57.5% of outside traffic came from the top six sites alone...and those were all search engines on the above list! That experience seems to validate the theory quite well.
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