Advanced Web Ranking User Guide

Chapter 2. Step-by-Step Tutorials

When launching Advanced Web Ranking for the first time, its features, settings and possibilities may seem a little intricate. That is why we have created this tutorial, an intuitive, concise but, nevertheless, comprehensive manual which is intended to ease you in, to help you quickly get started on monitoring your website rankings in one or multiple search engines, according to your preferences. As an user, you will be given a wide range of possibilities, as AWR can easily be adjusted to your particular needs, without its precision and transparency being affected.

Getting Started

1. Creating an Advanced Web Ranking New Project

Creating a new AWR project involves having a clear image of its utility and functionality on the part of the user. Therefore, you first need to know the exact domain you are interested in. As an example, we have chosen for this tutorial the XML Editor field as the starting point.

Now let's choose some search engines. Go to [Project] -> [New Project] or simply press the "Ctrl+N" keys and the "New Project Wizard" will pop up. By default, the "Search Engines" tab is selected. For this tutorial we will pick Google and Altavista, as they are two of the major ones.

Click on the [Next >>] button to switch to the "Keywords" tab. We will add two keywords here: "xml editor" and "best xml editor". These are the keywords for which we want to know our website's ranking. We type each one in the edit box first, then click on the [Add] button (or press the Enter key) to include it in the list.

Now let's highlight our keywords by assigning them a color. It's an easy task. Just select the keywords by clicking on them and then choose a color from the color drop-down list. For instance, let's make our keywords [blue].

In the "URLs" tab we'll type in "www.oxygenxml.com" as being "our" site. It is its rank we want to monitor. From the color drop-down list box we'll pick [green] to mark it.

Finally, let's give our project a name in the "Project Name" tab. Let's call it "xml_editor".

Our project has been successfully created. Click on the [OK] button to finish and load the project in Advanced Web Ranking. For the moment though, our project is empty, it contains no information. In order to gather some data, we need to bring the project up to date.

2. Updating the Project

Update the current project by clicking on the "Start Update" toolbar button, by using the F4 keyboard shortcut or by selecting [Update] -> [Start] from the Main Menu. A "Progress" tab will show up, where you can follow the update's progress.

3. Checking our URL rankings

Now we can finally check our website's position in the search engines. Select "xml editor" in the left side Keywords panel and Altavista in the Search Engines panel. The Current Rank tab will present our URL's rankings on the selected search engine for the selected keyword.

In order to see more information at once and avoid clicking around, we will now switch to the Extended Data view, by clicking on the [Extended Data] toolbar button. This in turn will cause the Current Rank report to switch to a more comprehensive presentation of all keywords.

To see the report in another search engine, select it by clicking on it in the Search Engine left-side panel.

The rank evolution chart has nothing to show yet except for a big dot right in the middle of the page, as we have only one day's data gathered and at least two days are necessary to render a meaningful graph.

4. Monitoring our competition

The Top Sites tab will show you the top ranking URLs for the selected keyword/search engine combination. Here we can see which websites are our closest competitors. Since our site occupies the first place in the list, let's pick the next two websites and add them to our URL list. Right-clicking (Option+Click on Mac) on an URL and selecting [Add URL...] in the context menu will do just that.

In the "Project Settings" dialog box, we will also color-code the URLs in red and orange for easy differentiation.

Now, you added the competition's URLs in your project (they appear in the URLs panel), but you have no data gathered for them. So update the project using the "Start update" icon from the toolbar.

You can see now the rank evolution of both your's and your competitors' sites on the chart views and reports.

Easy enough? Try the Basic Tutorial to learn how to deal with more complex projects!