Product Review : Web Position Gold

Web Position Gold is regarded by many as the final authority in search engine optimization software. The heart of the program is the "page critic", which analyzes your pages and compares them to as many of your competitors pages as you desire. You just select a key word or keyword phrase, select a search engine, and after a wait of a few minutes you get a detailed report comparing your page to the highest ranking pages for the search term you've suggested.

In addition, they have a built-in "traffic analyzer", and provide automated and semi-automated search engine submission. All of this is operated from a sort of "mission control" (they actually do refer to your optimization projects as "missions") which is fairly easy to use, but for me, required a bit of getting used to.

As nice as the "Page Critic" and other features are, what I found most useful about Web Position Gold was the extensive library of articles and suggestions in the database. These are past issues of their ongoing newsletter, which is first rate, in my opinion. I ended up spending more time reading many of the articles than actually analyzing pages, because I found such a wealth of quality information there.

Whether you choose WPG or its archrival is probably a matter of personal taste, since both, in my opinion, are excellent. I found myself a bit overwhelmed by the WPG control panel and interface, which I felt bogged me down at first. After a few practice runs, however, I got quite good at successfully running my pages past the Page Critic and making the suggested revisions.

The reports generated by Web Position Gold are very detailed, easy to read, and extremely useful. You can go straight from the report to editting your web page without leaving WPG, which I also found a very useful feature, in spite of my preference to use my HTML editor to make revisions.

Web Position Gold does offer a free trial that has a few of the features disabled, but certainly gives you a taste of everything the full-function version can do.

Update ... September, 2004 I recently bought Version 3 of WPG. I found it much more user friendly than I had Version 2. I prefer the new interface, and love the integrated Wordtracker feature. The program seems tighter and faster to me, and I'm now a full-fledged convert. With only an hour or so of practice, I found myself able to intuitively design a page that would get high ratings from the Page Critic on a number of key words and phrases. I haven't had enough time yet to see how quickly all of my newly optimized pages will move up in the search engine listings, but I have the peace of mind of knowing I have done everything possible to achieve those high rankings. With this new release, I now prefer WPG over its major competitor.

Check out Web Position Gold and the free trial here.