Position Pro
Position Technologies
10 W. State Street, Suite 201
Geneva, IL 60134

Position Pro is an Internet-based service (ASP) that gives you feedback by spidering your entire website as would a generic search engine. Rather than focusing on high rankings for specific pages on specific search engines, its goal is to increase the overall visibility of your website in all the major search engines by helping you make each page search-engine friendly. Position Pro enables a whole-site search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in contrast to a gateway or doorway page search engine positioning strategy. 

Index Value

Position Pro focuses on what it calls the Index Value of a keyword, a webpage, and a website). Although there are exceptions, pages with Index Value scores above 75 and below 300 with relevant words tend to perform well in the search engines. Position Pro's Index Value claims to act much like search engines do by taking little account of meta tags, but focusing on prominence, proximity, referencing, and repetition factors. Position Pro also calculates an Index Value for each relevant word it finds on a webpage. Here is a graph plotting Index Value (x-axis) vs. Word Count (y-axis) for the WilsonWeb.com website.

Figure 1. Shows Index Value plotted against the Word Count of each page.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/images/positionpro_scattergraph.gif

My site has a rather high average word count of 1,475 since it includes many newsletter articles. (Word counts of 200 to 600 are recommended by Position Pro.) My Index Value averages 130 and is rather tightly clustered between 80 and 180, with a scattering of scores outside that range.

Workshop

The Workshop Section gives you a great deal of information immediately that helps you fix some obvious omissions. For example, on the 814 pages of the WilsonWeb.com site that Position Pro spidered, I was able to spot:

• Missing Title Tags (8 missing)
• Broken Links (45)
• Missing or scanty META Keywords (many)
• Missing META Descriptions (many)

The Workshop Section also allows you to view individual pages. Information shown includes the URL, word count, Index Value, keywords and their index value, title, meta description, and meta keywords. This allows you to see which keywords the simulated search engine spider recognizes for this webpage. You can make changes to the webpage, click on update, and the spider looks at the page again, showing revised data.

I decided to work on the webpages on my site that had low Index Values. I was easily able to sort all 814 webpages by Index Value, and then chose some of the lowest. After making some changes, I then saved the webpage, uploaded it via FTP, and clicked on "analyze" which causes Position Pro to immediately re-spider the page and show changes to the Index Value. After I was satisfied with the Index Value for a webpage, I marked it in the database as "optimized" so I would know which pages still needed optimization.

The Workshop Section includes a brief four-page tutorial offering general tips on optimizing webpages for search engines -- nothing you haven't seen many times elsewhere. The value of Position Pro is not in its documentation, but in the feedback it gives you about the search-engine friendliness of your website.

Reporting

Several kinds of reports are available to show progress in search engine listings over time. The graphs shown are from a site that has used Position Pro for the past year. 

Ranking Reports. In the Utility section you can specify a number of keywords. Every two weeks, Position Pro checks each of its search engines to see if your site appears in the top 20 rankings for each of these keywords. This isn't as detailed as WebPosition Gold's reports, but the graph shows progress and trends very effectively. If you request the detailed report, you can dig deeper to see results for each search engine.

Figure 2. General report shows number of rankings in the top 20 for specified keywords over time.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/images/positionpro_rankings.gif

Figure 3. Detailed report shows current number of rankings in the top 20 for specified keywords.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/images/positionpro_ranking_detail.gif

Index Counts. A second graph indicates the number of webpages from your site that are currently contained in the search engine indexes -- a key to how accessible your site is to the general public. You can also drill down to see how many pages are listed by each individual search engine. 

Figure 4. General report shows number of pages listed in search engines over time.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/images/positionpro_indexcounts.gif

Figure 5. Detailed report shows cumulative number of pages listed in five search engines over time.
http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/images/positionpro_index_detail.gif

Link Popularity. This beta report shows you the relative number of inbound links to your site, tracked over time.

Submission. A final report shows submissions of your webpages to the various search engines over time.

Utilities

Position Pro offers several utilities, some of them extremely useful. The submission utility allows you to submit all the webpages on your site to six major search engines: Excite, Fast, Google, Inktomi, Lycos, and Northern Light. Moreover, you can designate the range of Index Values to submit. I'm not ready to submit the pages on my site with an Index Value under 150 -- I want to optimize them first -- so I set the submission utility to submit only webpages with Index Values in the range of 150 to 350. Once I work on my lower-scoring pages, I'll include some pages in the lower range. This utility is careful not to over-submit to any search engine, and keeps track of submission dates so that it won't be seen as "spamming." Analysis showed that I had good coverage in all but Northern Light. Since submitting too often can hurt rather than help, I set Position Pro to submit my webpages only to Northern Light.

Another utility creates a site map of all the webpages containing meta description and keyword tags. This can become a key webpage on your site to submit to search engines, since it contains the URLs of all the other webpages on the site.

A third utility requests the Position Pro search engine to re-spider your website -- something you might use when you've made a lot of changes to the structure or to a number of pages at a time. Normally, you would use the update feature of the Workshop section to record updates for webpages you have modified.

Finally, you can list keywords that are used by the Reporting section to determine rankings for particular keywords.

Comparison to WebPosition Gold

As you may know, I'm a real fan of WebPosition Gold from FirstPlace Software (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/webposition.htm). It's a great desktop tool designed to help you rank specific webpages high in a particular search engine. It not only checks your current ranking, it also performs a detailed analysis of your webpages, and advises you on what to change to increase your ranking based on up-to-date intelligence for a particular search engine. In my opinion, for search engine ranking strategies using gateway or doorway pages, it's tops.

Position Pro from Position Technologies, on the other hand, is a web-based ASP rather than desktop program, and it uses a somewhat different, but quite valid, strategy. Instead of tuning particular webpages for specific search engines, it provides the feedback that enables you to modify many webpages across your entire website to achieve higher rankings for key search words. In other words, Position Pro enables a whole-site strategy rather than a gateway page strategy.

Position Pro works hard to keep good relationships with the various search engines so that its submissions are not ignored. WebPosition Gold submissions have sometimes faced rejection because of abuse by its users. WebPosition Gold positions itself firmly on the side of the search engine positioner in order to learn and pass on every responsible technique that helps its users achieve higher rankings on particular search engines. Position Pro, on the other hand, has Inktomi (a major search engine) as a partner, and takes a broader view of what is good for both online companies and the search engines. Apparently, Position Pro's approach is working since it has many Fortune 1000 companies among its clients, in addition to huge sites such as About.com.

My Assessment

I've had good success with WebPosition Gold for getting high rankings for very competitive keywords on particular webpages. But, frankly, I don't have enough time to keep all those high rankings optimized when competitors are constantly working to take the lead away from me. Search engine positioning that focuses on the highest rankings is quite effective, but very time- and labor-intensive. For that reason, I recommend that small businesses outsource search engine "positioning" to firms that specialize in it rather than try to do it themselves.

Position Pro, on the other hand, is more of a search engine "optimization" strategy. That is, it is designed to work with the regular pages on your website rather than specially-tuned gateway pages. Its goal is achieving more visibility and higher rankings for your website as a whole so that you receive more overall search engine traffic. Position Pro is used by many SEO firms to manage client website optimization projects. However, Position Pro only accepts websites good enough to be listed in the major directories. They do not accept websites that use cloaking to show different webpages to search engines than those seen by the general public. While the Index Value is useful, WebPosition Gold provides much more detailed information about improving individual webpages.

I think there's a place for both strategies -- (1) positioning several sets of gateway pages for your highest value keywords and keyphrases using WebPosition Gold, and (2) optimizing ALL the webpages on your website to get more visibility and traffic using Position Pro. While I recommend that you outsource positioning, I suggest that you do optimization in-house. Yes, it will take some time to increase the Index Values in all your webpages, but after that, maintenance becomes much easier. 

Position Pro's search engine simulator isn't perfect. For example, when it displayed the most important keywords in my article on PayPal that gets lots of search engine traffic, "PayPal" wasn't even seen as one of the important keywords. The page received a low Index Value (38), even though it is my tenth most popular page for search engine traffic. Position Pro explained, "The phrase 'PayPal' is demoted by us because the suffix 'al' makes it look like an adjective (e.g., 'frontal,' 'elemental'). A keyphrase is allowed to contain an adjective, but the final word in the keyphrase is not allowed to be an adjective. Proper nouns (names) are also suppressed in long documents." The search engine simulator is designed to be generic and not to mimic any  single search engine. Overall, however, it seems to do a pretty good job predicting which pages will rank high in the search engines.

While Position Pro isn't cheap, ranging from nearly $400 to $1000 per year, I believe it is a very effective tool for general search engine optimization. The larger the website, the more useful this tool becomes, since it allows you to see the big picture, rather than getting bogged down just looking at individual pages with the overwhelming detail that WebPosition Gold can supply. This tool allows a web marketer to overhaul even a large website over a period of weeks or months, and to substantially increase search engine traffic. When you prorate the annual cost of Position Pro over the value of increased visitors to your site, it looks more and more like a bargain. This is a tool I'm glad to include in my own arsenal and expect traffic improvement as a result.