Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking, produced by a Romanian software house Caphyon,  are extremely popular tools in the SEO community.  They are tools that help you to track and monitor your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts such as website ranking and link popularity. If you are serious about search engine optimisation you couldn’t possibly do what these tools do manually – well not without wasting a massive amount of time.

Getting Your Copy

Both the Advanced Link Manager and the Advanced Web Ranking  programs can be downloaded from  www.advancedlinkmanager.com.   The package includes all three version of the programme – standard, professional and enterprise.  This will be a review of the standard version.

Installation

Hats off to Caphyon for providing Linux, Mac and Windows versions of the software.  We have only tried the Windows version installed on a Windows 7 Ultimate laptop and the installation was straightforward and fully compatible with the latest version of windows.  The installation took less than five minutes after the download had completed.

The Results

1.       Advance Link Manager

Once the application loads all you need to do, if you skip the tutorial, is click on Project then new project.  Enter the domain name you want to work with and select the search engines you want to check.  The application seems to have every search engine you have ever heard of and some that you haven’t.  This may be overkill as most people in the UK will only be interested in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Once you have done that click run and the application does it’s magic.  I ran it on a site that is about 2 years old with a lot of content and a lot of links – it took about an hour for the task to complete.

So what do you get.   One of the most powerful features is the ability to identify new link sources and to send link request e-mails from the application and track the responses.  This tool can be used as a very powerful competitor analysis tool allowing you to identify and replicate a competitor’s link profile.

One feature that I really like is the link development graph which shows how your link profile develop and grow over time.

It also has a useful broken link checker to find links on your site that are not working.  This is probably in the nice to have category, but it is a nice addition to the package.

2.       Advanced Web Ranking
Again all you need to do with this application is click on new project.  This time you have to select the search engines – sensibly only Google, Bing and Yahoo are selected by default.  However, it is possible to add more search engines – again they have included practically every search engine that you have heard of then some including the new Google caffeine.  One word of caution the default search engines are the US versions, if you are based outside the US you should change to your local versions of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

You then have to add your keywords and there is a nice integration with Google suggest right there in the application itself.

Finally,  enter your domain names yours and your competitors, which is a nice feature, and click OK.  You are then promoted to give your project a name and your rankings are checked.

The results are comprehensive to say the least and you can cut the data in a number of different ways using the built in reports.  These include: Visibility Reports, Keyword Research Tool Reports, Search Engine Ranking Reports and Keyword Ranks.  If you are doing creating these on behalf of a customer there is a built in FTP client in the professional version that allows you to upload them to a web server for your customers to view online.

Overall

These tools are a must have for anybody that is serious about SEO and value their time and doesn’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time doing low level SEO tasks and manually monitoring and recording results.   In terms of cost the tools represent excellent value for money.    The standard version of Advanced Web Ranking and Advance Link Manager is only $99 and this is a great way to try out both tools if the 30 day free trial does not provide you long enough to trial them.  However,   the best value for money option is to go for the bundle to get both standard versions for $149 – saving $51.   If you use these tools in earnest you will probably soon outgrow the standard versions fairly quickly and it is advisable to review the feature comparison charts for both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.  The price for the professional version of both programs starts at $199 and both can be bought as a bundle for $299.  The enterprise version starts at $399 and is $599 for both applications bought together.

Find out more about both products on the Caphyon website.