Put Rank Tracker to use and be aware of each change in your rankings.

Let me remind you that checking your rankings is not simply a way to estimate your results. Not to say that it's one of the most time-consuming SEO tasks, if done by hand — it's also an extra impulse to success that really works for better rankings. And sure, it's the best way to know you're going the right way.

The first thing you need to know, when you start working with Rank Tracker is: it's got two sides, and practically, it's TWO TOOLS in one. It helps you solve two big SEO tasks that go "elbow to elbow" in your daily website promotion.

Here they are:

Task 1: Keyword Research

The first step in promoting any website is finding the right keywords to optimize it for. Any website owner should know: the "right" keywords must be an answer to 3 critical problems:

1. Because you need targeted traffic that translates into sales, every keyword must be relevant to the theme of your site.
   
   
2. If no one's searching for a keyword, optimizing for it is a formula for failure. Every keyword must be actually searched by real people a decent number of times per month or day.
   
   
3. Optimizing for hyper-competitive keywords such as "music" is near-impossible for most sites. So when choosing a keyword to optimize for, you must be sure that you've got good chances to start ranking well for the keyword within a reasonable time-frame.
   
   

Task 2: Monitoring your rankings in 346 search engines

Even if you don't do it now, checking where your site ranks today, if it moved up the SERPs or slipped for whatever reason should become one of your most common SEO tasks. It's as necessary (and in due time as pleasing) as checking how big is the income your site brings.

With Rank Tracker, you'll easily monitor an unlimited number of sites or specific URLs, for an unlimited number of keyphrases, in 346 international and local search engines — and do it fast. Each time, you'll not simply see where you rank today — you'll keep your rankings' history, and you'll be able to compare and analyze your rankings and thus figure out which SEO efforts really lead to success...


Now that you know exactly what Rank Tracker does, it's time to try it yourself. So, here's what you do to find winning keywords and check how high you rank.

Doing keyword research and picking out the best keywords

Now let me tell you how you use Rank Tracker to do the time-consuming task of discovering and researching the right keywords and solving the 3 big keyword problems, which are: relevance to the site's theme, finding a keyword that's really searched for, having good chances to rank high.

First off, launch your software — and let's get started together.

When you first run Rank Tracker, it will automatically pop up a Wizard that helps you create a new project. Or, you can click the New button on the main toolbar to open this screen:

Rank Tracker will ask you to enter a URL, so enter your site's URL. For instance, I used www.link-assistant.com


Then choose Search Engines to apply (in fact, you can click on any, say Google and Yahoo! — it doesn't really matter for keyword research and you can easily change search engines later).


Now you need to enter a keyword to start with. Type in any keywords related to your business, like I typed in seo software, seo tool, seo link exchange tool, etc...


...and Rank Tracker will take a couple of seconds to check your site's ranking for that word (but I'll save talk about rankings for later).


What you need to do right now is: select your keyword and click the Suggest button in the Keywords tab.


You can add more generic keywords related to your niche or business. Rank Tracker will use these keywords to give you suggestions.


The tool will ask you to choose a keyword research method. And you know what this means? You've got a great advantage right in front of you: Rank Tracker comes with 11 different keyword research methods to help you quickly discover profitable keywords you've been missing until now:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
  
  
• Competition research (Rank Tracker will harvest keywords from meta tags of your client's competitors)
  
  
• Keyword Discovery
  
  
• Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
  
  
• Google's Search-based Keyword Tool
  
  
• Google Suggest
  
  
• Yahoo! Search Assist
  
  
• Ask TypeAhead Search Suggestions
  
  
• Word Mixer (enables you to quickly mix up several base words to come up with dozens of new keyphrases)
  
  
• Word Combination (helps build combinations from huge lists of words. Saves you hours of work when you need to create multi-word keyphrases)
  
  
• Misspelled Words (a great way to get more visitors to your site is to optimize it, alongside with your main keywords, for popular misspellings. This suggestion mechanism will help you find misspelled keywords worth optimizing for)

Run a search using each of these methods, one by one (you can easily select them in the combo box).


After Rank Tracker stops searching (it can take a while, depending on the number of keywords you've entered and the speed of your Internet connection), select the keywords it offers and click Finish.


You will see the keywords you chose in the keywords tab. So you've got a huge list of keywords for your website, and you'll be amazed to see that some of them you'd never even thought of!..


Once you got your keywords, Rank Tracker will help you pick the right ones. In fact, you'll check how competitive these keywords are, and thus how hard it would be to optimize for them.

Here's how we do this: on the right of the application window, find the combo box with workspaces and choose Keyword Research View. Now you can see a column with KEI, or keyword efficiency index. It shows you how good a keyword is for bringing traffic to your site. You need keywords with high KEI.

In this KEI column, there's a color marker for each word, ranging from green to red. The greener the marker is in Rank Tracker, the better the keyword. So just sort keywords by KEI (click the header of the column), and separate the best keywords from non-worthy ones. And, you can just remove the keywords having bad KEI.



Now that's it for keywords — you've got an excellent list of highly targeted search terms that're promising to bring you high rankings and good traffic. It's unbelievable how easily you can find best keywords with Rank Tracker. Still it's true, now you've got a software tool at your disposal that helps you find and pick out keywords in minutes instead of days.


Now here's how we do the capital task of Rank Tracker:

Monitoring your site's ranking

How about testing the real power of Rank Tracker? ;) As you have the tool, it's a must to check your rankings by keywords with it and make sure you're going the right way.

Just select the keywords you wish to check, and use the Check button in the Keywords tab to make Rank Tracker work.


Then just wait a couple of minutes and look at the results. You see where you rank for your keywords in all Search Engines you've specified!

Here's something you should keep in mind: you need to check rankings regularly to view your progress. And I promise that the software will be as helpful as possible: it'll keep record of every check, so you'll see in detail how fruitful your job is.


See, monitoring your rankings is easy as a piece of pie, and rocket-fast. And still, that's not it.

Let's have a glance at yet another way Rank Tracker makes users fall in love with it. This is its cool Ranking Reports.

This kind of report not only shows you a variety of ranking factors in a convenient and easy-to-analyze way. It has online help embedded to explain every single figure of the report even to a newbie. And it's so nicely-designed it's just a candy for your eye.

Let's switch to your Reports tab and look at it:


Do you want your rankings report to look like this? We hired a first-class designer to create the graphics and the layout, so that every report Rank Tracker creates would be nothing short of stunning.

And the best thing is, you can customize it all: logo, colors, which report sections and search engines data to include, introductory text, and pretty much everything else! Even if you have an existing report format in place, you can make Rank Tracker reports match this format 100%.

Just look at your report and easily find your strong and weak points, switch from one page to another to see your rankings by keyword, by search engine or by KEI, look at your ranking history, view your progress graph and make sure your rankings are totally under your control!

And, there's perhaps another thing to tell you about this amazing SEO tool. Just some statistics you may love to know:

	Each time you run a search with Rank Tracker, it saves you hours of work and lets you check your website rankings at least 60 times faster!

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These are the necessary basics to know, to use Rank Tracker properly and to the full extent. So why wait? Apply this killer combination of ease of use and dozens of powerful features. With Rank Tracker's smart keyword research capability, rocket-fast rank checking module and stunning reports, you must be absolutely sure you've chosen the most efficient way to do your daily SEO tasks. Now don't delay, run Rank Tracker — and let's see how you move to hit top rankings.

Do you want more detailed explanations? Then, the tool has online help embedded. You can either reach it by choosing Help > Online help or, just use this link to see what you've got there: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/rank-tracker-help.html