Stacking your Web pages

I moonlight as a Web page developer, and I have one tough boss – my wife. She’s a real estate agent, and for a while she was getting a good deal of business from her Web site. This year, her Web traffic dried up, and she insisted on knowing why.

I couldn’t tell her, until I turned to two very useful applications for analyzing Web pages. The applications check URLs you specify against search phrases at multiple search engines and tell you where you rank. They also give you tips on how to improve your rankings.

WebPosition Gold is the Cadillac of the field. In addition to the basic features, it can generate simple pages, critique pages for their suitability for various search engines, submit pages to search engines, report on the traffic coming to your site and generate reports automatically.

If each of your page hits is worth cool cash to your organization, the tips this $149 program provides on improving your site’s ranking will be well worth the price. WebPosition Gold suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, however.

TopDog performs some of the same tasks as WebPosition Gold. It covers 175 search engines. It too can submit pages and generate reports, but it lacks WebPosition’s tips, among other features.

TopDog makes up for those deficiencies with a clean, intuitive interface. Like WebPosition Gold, you can run a search for multiple phrases against multiple search engines. TopDog reports on what page and at what position your site is found. Click on any line of the display to see a representation of the actual page returned from the search engine. You can look at sites that ranked above yours to see how they wrote their pages. If your ranking falls below a position you specify, TopDog will resubmit your page to that search engine.

Using these tools made me realize that a single page isn’t going to make it to the top of every important search engine for every important phrase that a user might type in. However, you can virtually guarantee you’ll improve your performance if you run one of these programs regularly. My changes to pages, based on WebPosition Gold’s suggestions, rocketed me to the “top dog” position on HotBot for one of my key search terms.