By Robin Nobles

Typical of professionalism of FirstPlace Software, they've waited to release WebPosition Gold 2 (http://www.webposition.com) 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, wait has been well worth it.

Let's take a quick walk through of 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 report to your clients, even going so far as to ZIP file.

* You can automatically upload reports to your Web site.

* You can conserve disk space by checking an option to delete actual downloaded page after reports are generated.

* You can even filter out non-ranking keywords from report, so that report you send to your clients will be even more impressive!

* "Visibility Statistics" are now included at top of 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 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 past because 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 content, design page, and choose keywords. You simply create page from within a form, rather than on a blank HTML page.

After creating one of 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 engines.

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

Page Critic

by Robin Nobles

If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add site to its index? Do you know that it doesn't see beautiful graphics or fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees source code, or "skeleton" of your Web site?

Do you realize that knowing this little tidbit of information and doing something about it can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings and, ultimately, success of your online business?

One very important thing that you need to remember is: search engines like simplicity. The simpler your Web site is, easier it is for engine to determine what your Web site is about. And, if search engine can determine exactly what your Web site is about, you have a better chance at top rankings under keyword phrases that are important for your online business.

Let's look at this concept in action with a page I recently created for one of my online businesses: Search Engine Workshops.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/search-engine- seminars.html

As you can see, it's a very plain, simple page that was not created to be "main" or "home" page of a Web site. Rather, it was created to pull in traffic through keyword phrase, "search engine seminars."

What I really want you to see is source code of page. So, when viewing page, click on View on top menu bar, then Source or Source Code.

The most important part of a Web page is what appears at very top of page. Why? Because a search engine starts at top of page and begins moving down as it indexes.

So, what appears in section of your Web page is very important, because section is at top of page.

Let's look at section of source code:

top of rankings?">

There are only three tags in section of this Web page: title tag, keyword META tag, and description META tag. Because title tag is in section, and because of importance that most engines place on tag, it is considered one of most important tags on your page, so it should always be first tag in section.

Notice that in title and keyword META tag, important keyword phrase (search engine seminars) appears as first words in tag. In description META tag, keyword phrase is still toward beginning of tag, as opposed to end.

In other words, where you place your keyword phrase in tags and content of your page is important. If you place your keyword phrase toward beginning of all of your important tags and toward beginning of contents, you're "proving" to engines that page is really about that particular topic.

I've mentioned one reason why title tag is important, but there's another reason too. The title tag is important because it almost always appears as title of site in search engine results. Your description META tag may appear in search engine results as well and is considered important by some of engines. So, when you create your title and description tags, remember two things: put your keyword phrase toward beginning of tags, and make tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic.