Every so often I come across a piece of software that changes the way I work completely, and the latest addition to this highest echelon of elite software is LaunchBar from Objective Development.

LaunchBar has been on the Mac for many years now, and although I’d heard the name thrown around forums in the past, I’d never though to try it out myself until now. I’m glad I did. As a dedicated user of Spotlight, CMD + Space is my standard application launch routine. However I’ve often been frustrated when trying to find an app or file this way, when Spotlight refuses to bring it up in its results list for one reason or another. LaunchBar mimics the behaviour of Spotlight but is far faster (it uses its own index) and offers a wealth of added functionality too. I can browse and control iTunes, send a quick email or even dial a contact via my Fritz!Box without having to take my fingers away from the keyboard. It’s a fantastic and powerful little application and I highly recommend that you check it out.

There are plenty of applications out there that can help to collate and keep track of this data, communicate it effectively and even offer additional indicators into improving performance. Having tried a few myself I’d like to share a review of my application of choice: Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon, and my initial impressions trialling its sister application Advanced Link Manager.

Advanced Web Ranking offers a wealth of options for viewing search engine ranking data, producing custom reports and refining keyword performance.

Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Given that my preferred daily workhorse is a MacBook Pro this is great news, as I’ve found the choice of SEO tools on the Mac somewhat limited and often end up firing up Windows in a VMWare virtual machine to be able to test out a new bit of software in this arena.

Creating a new campaign in Advanced Web Ranking is pretty straightforward. Define a new project by entering your website details and the site details of any other sites you wish to compare results against, select from the huge and regularly updated list of search engines the software is aware of (including an exhaustive selection of regional variants), create a list of the keywords and phrases you wish to focus on and away you go. Advanced Web Ranking also features a keyword research tool to help you refine your selection of keywords by offering appropriate synonyms and related phrases.

Once the project has been created you can then run your website ranking analysis against the search engines to find out just how well your site is performing against your selected keywords. Advanced Web Ranking takes an intelligent and responsible approach to this activity by pausing between search requests to minimise the risk of upsetting the search engines and invoking a temporary ban through submitting too many requests in too short a time. This means that it can take a while for a project to update, but it is the right way for the software to act. Besides, a project can be scheduled to run in the background at any time, and there’s even a server variant of the application to take the responsibility away from your desktop altogether.

Once Advanced Web Ranking has finished interrogating the search engines your results are ready to view, analyse and report on. The resulting data can be viewed from many different angles, each easily accessible via tabs on the application’s menu bar. Rankings can be sorted by keyword, search engine and top sites; the Visibility tab can display diverse historical rankings data graphically. There are also tabs to review competitor results data and to analyse on-page keyword visibility. All the while, contextual help is available in a useful column on the right-hand side of the interface, with hints on using and configuring the application, and explanations to clarify what the data being displayed actually means.

Slicing and dicing all of this data is fascinating, but of limited value if it can’t be shared with other interested parties. Advanced Web Ranking has a range of available reports, including Current Rank, Keyword Rank, Search Engine Rank, Top Sites, Overview and Visibility. Each of these can be used in their basic form or customised significantly to provide the required view of your data. Reports can be exported in several formats – PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, TXT and CSV – so whether you need to share your data on your website, via an email or just as a good old-fashioned print-out, there should be an appropriate option for you here.

The extent of available report customisation options and project management features within Advanced Web Ranking are dictated by which version of the software is licensed. The software is available in Standard, Professional and Enterprise variants with an increasing range of options as you move up the range, but an increase in price too.

Standard provides a strong set of entry-level features, with Professional providing additional features for customisable reporting and updating multiple websites, making it a good choice for those managing multiple sites. The Enterprise version includes some nice extras including the addition of Google Page Rank for each of your websites, but most importantly the ability to create multiple user profiles with individual permissions for accessing your data, hence the Enterprise tag.

A Server licence is also available which enables multiple licensed users to connect to a single central database.

Advanced Web Ranking’s sister application from Caphyon is Advanced Link Manager. While I’ve been using Advanced Web Ranking regularly over the past four years, I’ve only recently started experimenting with Advanced Link Manager. I currently use SEO Elite for managing and analysing external links to my websites, but I’m in the process of evaluating alternatives as it doesn’t provide the reporting capabilities that I need and I’m tired of booting into Windows every time I need it, as there’s no OS X version available! I’m hoping Advanced Link Manager will prove to be what I’m looking for.

There are several advantages to using link management software. If you manage link campaigns they can help identify potential link partners based on a number of criteria, including the quality of the domain and its other link partners, the page rank, link popularity, relevance and much more. Automated tools can help to identify these partners by looking at these factors and a potential partner’s link neighbourhood.

Once a campaign is underway, it is important to ensure that links remain active, that appropriate link text is being used and to track the evolution over time. Advanced Link Manager promises to be a very useful link manager in this respect.

First impressions are very favourable. The interface is instantly recognisable to anyone already familiar with Web Ranking. The menu bar is busy with buttons, but hovering over each brings up an informative tooltip that promises the features I’ve been hoping to see. These include a website crawler to gain insights from specific or multiple pages, the ability to analyze domain quality to review the quality of a potential link partner’s domain and a wealth of reporting options.

Setting up and running a project, and viewing the resultant data was simple and very similar again to the process in Advanced Web Ranking.

The reporting functionality proved a distinct improvement to my current software and that alone could be enough to convert me.

The real benefit of applications such as Advanced Web Ranking and Link Manager becomes more obvious over time, with the ability to track historical data, monitor trends and take action against any unexpected events that the software picks up on (for example an unanticipated sudden drop in rankings for a keyword or the disappearance of a link on a key third-party website). I will be continuing my experiments with Advanced Link Manager over the next few months and will post my findings here in a future update.

In its 574 pages, The Art of SEO covers everything from search engine basics, determining objectives and an SEO strategy, on to keyword research, link-building strategies, developing an SEO-friendly website and beyond, tackling some of the possible pitfalls and slaying many SEO myths along the way.

If you only buy one book on search engine optimisation, I’d highly recommend that you make it this one. The methods discussed focus on ethical white-hat SEO, and explain clearly why you shouldn’t be tricked into believing that less ethical (or black-hat) SEO techniques are of any worth. The Art of SEO also provides a wealth of links to valuable resources, and a comparison of the different tools provided by search engines and third-parties to help you optimise your site and monitor its ongoing performance.

The Art of SEO deserves to be considered the Bible for SEO practitioners, and I’m quite sure that as an invaluable reference work my copy will rarely leave my desk.

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