Typical of the professionalism of FirstPlace Software, they’ve waited to release WebPosition Gold 2 until all possible bugs could be found and corrected, so it seems like forever that we’ve been waiting for this release. However, for those of us “die hard” Gold fans, the wait has been well worth it.

Let’s take a quick walk through of the program and discuss my favorite features as well as changes made in each area.

Reporter

By far my favorite feature of Gold, Reporter will now report your rankings across an impressive 85 world-wide search engines and directories.

Some other new and exciting features include:

• You can now easily mail copies of the report to your clients, even going so far as to ZIP the file.
• You can automatically upload reports to your Web site.
• You can conserve disk space by checking an option to delete the actual downloaded page after the reports are generated.
• You can even filter out non-ranking keywords from the report, so that the report you send to your clients will be even more impressive!
• “Visibility Statistics” are now included at the top of the Concise Summary Report that will let you know how many top ranking pages you have as well as other valuable statistics.
• Under Options, you’re given the choice of being courteous to each engine by waiting a certain period of time between searches.

Page Generator

While reviewing this program, I created a few pages using Page Generator, which is a feature of Gold 2 that helps you build pages.

This portion of Gold has gotten criticism in the past because the engines don’t want to see “machine-generated” pages. However, Gold 2’s Page Generator doesn’t produce anything remotely “machine generated.” You have to create the content, design the page, and choose the keywords. You simply create the page from within a form, rather than on a blank HTML page.

After creating one of the pages, I ran it through Page Critic, then submitted it through Inktomi’s pay inclusion program. Within a couple of days, I was already seeing top 10 results across many of the engines.

Is the page a “doorway page”? Any page on your entire site is virtually a doorway into your site. Does the page provide value to the Internet, and would it be interesting and valuable to Net users? Yes. Page Generator just made it easier for me to create the page.

Page Critic

Page Critic is designed to look at your pages and offer suggestions in a variety of areas, such as word count, keyword prominence, keyword frequency, and keyword weight. Critic then offers specific suggestions that will help you create a page that is close to the statistical averages of other top ranking pages for that particular search engine. Under General Suggestions, you’ll find a running list of news, tips, and suggestions related to the engine.

Here’s a neat new feature: Page Critic will now check your link popularity for whichever engine you’re working with. Under Settings, check the box that says “Check Link Popularity.” You’ll then see a section above the General Suggestions that gives your link popularity for your site, and where you can also check the link popularity on competing sites, all from within the program.

Upload Manager

Upload Manager tracks any pages generated by Gold and uploads them, or other pages that may have changed since your last upload. Upload Manager will upload the pages for you, or you can use your own FTP program.

Submitter

To me, Submitter is a great program to use for the international engines or lesser important engines that don’t have pay inclusion programs. You can pick and choose which engines to submit to, and if you try to submit too many pages on any one day, the program will quickly remind you to keep you out of trouble.

A neat new feature of this program is its built-in spider for quickly gathering URLs. The new Import option will spider a Web site and create a list of all the URLs, even if the files do not exist on your hard drive. This feature certainly makes submitting an entire Web site quite easy.

Submitter also allows you to add custom engines that aren’t included in Gold 2, so you can keep track of your submissions all in one location.

Traffic Analyzer

HitsLink powers Gold 2’s Traffic Analyzer, and it will track statistics such as visitors, search engines, and the keywords being used to find your site. The feature is easy to use – you simply register, and HitsLink generates the code for you to put on any page that you want to track. Stats are provided instantly and in real time.

Scheduler

Program Scheduler to run your reports or submit pages at a time that’s convenient for you, like at night during non-working hours.

Did you know there’s a brand new book out on how to use WebPosition Gold 2?

Search Engine Optimization with WebPosition Gold 2, written by Brad Konia, is an excellent step-by-step guide in how to use WebPosition Gold 2. The book is now available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I had the opportunity to review the book and found it to provide superb information on how to the use the program as well as SEO strategies in general.

Brad has also developed a new video tutorial for using Gold 2, which is available as both a download or on CD-ROM. The video is available on Brad’s Web site: http://MarketMySite.com.

In Conclusion

I really like what FirstPlace has done with this new version of Gold. As in the past, WebPosition Gold will remain one of my favorite and most used programs in my arsenal of search engine marketing software.

For a listing of the new features of WebPosition Gold 2, visit: http://www.webposition.com/wpg2upgrade.htm.