If you like Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOQuake to reverse engineer your competitors’ online footprints, then you are going to love Advanced Link Manager.

Rather than tell you about Advanced Link Manager’s features and benefits in this review, instead I’m going to teach you how to use the information it provides to out-SEO your competition. After all, tools are about getting the job done. In this case, intelligent link building is the job and Advanced Link Manager is the tool. Here we go…
The single most important phrase I’ve read or heard about SEO is “match and exceed your competition” which I originally heard from Chad. Applied to linking, this means that if you can figure out the link profile of your competition and get a link from all the same sources – plus a couple extra – you should outrank that competitor. (Assuming for simplicity that site content quality in comparable). The key to putting this strategy into practice is successfully reverse engineering the link profile.

That is where Advanced Link Manager comes in.

• First, load your competitors’ URLs into the software and watch it track down every inbound link. (This first step is similar to what you get from Yahoo Site Explorer).

• Second, ask for the anchor text of each inbound link. Soon you’ll have a nifty pie chart showing you the distribution of anchor text used to form the inbound links! I’ve never seen another link manager with this capability.

• Third, ask for page rank information. The software will retrieve the Page Rank of the domain and the particular page where the link appears. For example a forum profile link on TV.com would have a PR 9 associated with the domain, but a much lower 0 or 1 associated with any one user’s profile. (You are welcome for the tip).

Now you have a complete link profile in front of you. You know:

• Quantity
• Location
• Anchor text
• PR of page containing the inbound link
• PR of domain containing the inbound link

It’s time to set to work matching this footprint.

Obviously you should start with the high PR pages (not domains) uncovered in the analysis. See if those specific pages will allow you to place a link. Next move on to high PR domains. If you are doing local optimization, scan the list for any sites that are hyperlocal blogs or local business directories. Also, be sure to run Advanced Link Manager against a couple different competitor’s sites to study their link popularity and see where the commonalities are. If several competitors have inbound links from a particular site, you should go there also.

It goes without saying that you should run Advanced Link Manager against your own domain. Tracking quantity of links is nice, but what you really want to monitor is your anchor text variety and the disappearance of any high PR links you worked hard to get.

I never used to participate in link requests from other webmasters before Advanced Link Manager. I was always afraid that they would remove my link after a few months and I would never know about it. With the Advanced Link Manager software, you’ll be notified of any links that disappear. Once the system finds a links, it will report each time whether the link is still intact. Pretty cool huh?

To sum up, this little piece of software makes big promises and delivers on them. Together with Advanced Web Ranking, the companion software to monitor rankings, this is the core of my SEO ‘intelligence gathering’. I couldn’t run my business correctly without it.

Thirty days ago, I downloaded the Advanced Web Ranking software to test on my own ~70 websites and several client sites. The trial has worked out famously, and I wanted to be sure to share this excellent resource piece of seo software with you.

Even in thirty days, I wasn’t able to test and fully utilize every aspect of the software. It is an incredibly robust, industrial-strength solution for the serious do-it-yourselfer or SEO professional. Rather than try to share all the features and benefits with you, I thought I’d explain exactly what problem I was hoping to solve and the solution I was able to work out.

Client Rank Tracking Over Time

The Need:

My number one need was to be able to track the rank of client websites over time and prepare intelligent reports. As an SEO provider, my service is judged largely on week-to-week and month-to-month changes in rankings. Because I believe in generating traffic from hundreds of long-tail keywords in addition to the ‘obvious’ main keywords, I need to track rankings on hundreds of keywords for each client.

The Problem:

Before finding the Advanced Web Ranking software I tried two other approaches. First, I tried the free Rank Checker from SEOBook. This allowed me to gather rankings and store the results for one day in one CSV file. I then manually stitched together the CSV files to create time trends. This would have been fine for 2 or 3 sites checked once a month, but was really labor intensive given the volume of sites. Then, I tried using the tracking feature built into LinxBoss (which is one of my main backlink providers). They have a great interface and nice visuals for tracking rankings over time. The problem was that if I took any of my clients out of the LinxBoss program even for a day, I would lose all the site ranking history stored in their database. I wanted the ability to rotate clients through different link providers without losing the rank history. I needed a solution that gave me trend data stored on my own computer and independent of any link provider.

The Solution:

Advanced Web Ranking allows me to:

1. Load hundreds of keywords
2. Check ranks on all major search engines for each keyword/URL combination on a defined schedule
3. Save all the results to my hard drive, server or cloud storage.
4. Produce professional client-facing reports on demand branded with my company’s logo and contact information.
5. Schedule the delivery of reports to clients automatically by email.

It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

Now that my main problem is solved, I’m delving into the other capabilities. I’m still setting up all the schedules. I need to learn how to use the proxy feature to protect my IP address and get better localized results. I’m also still configuring exactly what I want in my client reports from all the options and I’ve only briefly looked at the keyword research tool that is built it.

As I said before, Advanced Web Ranking did so much more than just solve my main problem. Instead of talking about all the cool features, I decided to write my review in this way to remind folks that all purchases are solution driven. If you can solve the customers’ problem at a fair price they will be loyal to you. Across my 30 day trial Advanced Web Rankings solved my #1 problem and I intend to be loyal to them and their sister product Advanced Link Manager. The fact that my client reports look better and are easier to produce is a bonus in my opinion.