Advanced Web Ranking has a number of highly-rated, innovative features. Perhaps the most helpful is the inclusion of an automated process that determines the most popular keywords for a particular region an relays those the application’s user. Advanced Web Ranking will scour the internet, returning the most popular keywords for countries like the United States, Canada, and China — or entire regions, such as Europe or Asia or North America. This allows you to target your page ranking to the region you are targeting or, if you are expanding into new areas, it allows you to quickly rise to the top of that new region’s search results. This feature takes the guesswork out of choosing keywords and immediately gives you a list of the most effective ones for each area you hope to conquer.

Once you have assured your page’s high ranking with the best keywords, Advanced Web Ranking offers tools that help you monitor their effectiveness and keep an eye on your competition.

Competition tracking with AWR

With its historical data measurement tools, it will periodically check your search rankings on a large number of search engines. Because the application supports the use of proxy server, it can do these checks more often than mere mortals without getting your paged banned from search engines for excessive checking of your page’s ranking.

AWR Proxy Manager

This means you will always rest assured that your page is ranked higher than your competitors and you won’t have to risk being excluded entirely from Google’s search results for doing so.

Advanced Web Reports will also do an automated evaluation of your competition and store this as a part of its historical data charts and graphs.

With the built-in option to automatically upload these reports via an FTP server, you will have instant and continuous access to a full history of your site’s effectiveness, your competitor’s approach, and what you need to do to stay ahead.

For all of the functions that this application performs, consumers rated it to be one of the fastest on the market, not bogged down by the large amount of data and keywords it can sometimes store and be processing.

Advanced Web Reports is available in four versions: Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Server. The standard version is great for individuals or small companies, while the professional, enterprise, and server versions add more advanced features like multiple proxies an Advanced Web Ranking server for remote access to your data, user profiles, custom filters, and more.

For Windows users, Advanced Web Reports requires Windows 2000 or higher as well as a Pentium 4 CPU and 512MB of RAM at a minimum. A 1024×768 screen resolution is the minimum resolution recommended for use with this application. Linux users should meet the same hardware requirements and have an installation with GNOME or KDE running on their machine. Mac users should be on OS X 10.4 Tiger or higher and be using a machine with a G4 or Intel processor. All users should have at least 1GB of available hard drive space before installing the application.

At four different price levels, Advanced Web Ranking is a software tool that spans the gamut from startup to business professional. It comes highly recommended from professionals in the SEO industry and is widely used worldwide. For those looking to take over the top spot on Google or other search engines, it is a powerful and indispensable tool.

yeh – doesn’t get more cliche than that

Also, Vishal Sharma’s updated his list on local search players in Australia – up to 26 now!

Good to see some progressive local search tech coming from outside of the usual media/IYP circle – Melbourne is certainly well represented in the local search/review space – you guys must be more community driven than us Sydney-siders

Vishal Sharma interviewed Chris Mander & Johnny Cussen from Docoloco a few months back – worth a read

Searching for ” Mechanic in Parramatta “, I got the following results

1. Live Search Maps (Global)
No results.

2. Live Search Maps Australia

Some results (through Yellow Pages)

3. Live.com

Results are driven by Multimap (which Microsoft acquired last year). No business listings are given, but a range of other sources are presented to the user, including Wikipedia articles, WiFi locations and Nightlife destinations.
Interesting, Live.com presents Australian users, search options for the ‘United Kingdom’ – good use of Geo-IP there

Local search is a market that Microsoft is desperate to hang onto and amidst all the redesigns of Live.com and the new features that have been introduced, at least locally, the experience is not consistent. With Google Maps in Australia, the user views the same set of local results, be it through a mashup, Google Maps search or even through the embedded map results in Google organic searches.

Update: Found this amusing article – Microsoft are offering iPods to users as lucky prizes for using Live Search in Australia!

“…Truelocal.com.au will have a Location Based Service function enabling users to conduct on the spot searches for businesses within a specific radius of where they are standing…”

There’s an interesting article here on Location enabled iPhone apps - I suspect that some companies will be thinking that that the manic app development ended with the Facebook app

Telstra already offer GPS/mobile integration with WhereIS Navigator through a range of devices, just not the iPhone.

With Google Maps tightly integrated with the GPS receiver in the iPhone, would Telstra still go ahead and launch a iPhone app with WhereIs/GPS integration – I don’t see the point given the native Google Maps support. Based on current headlines, Telstra are already selling the iPhone – can anyone confirm whether any Sensis content is on there?

Update:

I was fortunate to get confirmation from Danielle Horan from Sensis:

“…Hi there. Regarding your question about the availability of Sensis’ mobile applications on the iPhone, the answer is yes. To mark the release of the iPhone, Telstra launched an iPhone BigPond portal featuring key Sensis mobile products like Yellow, Sensis Search, Citysearch and Whereis.

However anyone with an internet enabled phone, including the iPhone, can access Sensis’ mobile applications. For example, all you need to do it type in mobile.yellow.com.au to access the Yellow Mobile site. It can then be saved as a ‘bookmark’ to enable easy access.

So together with Telstra’s super-fast and nationwide NextG network, the release of the iPhone means great sites like Yellow and Whereis Mobile are more widely available, and easier to use than ever- and can be accessed across all carrier 3G networks…”

Wintermute, has an amusing comment about Sensis not being able to get pre-loaded content on the iPhone in time for launch:

“…And then there was Telstra, who were a little late to the iPhone party because of their insistence, in negotiations with Apple, that their Sensis properties be loaded by default on the iPhone (ie, replacing Google). Eventually Telstra caved — they offer all that through their web portal anyway. But it was fascinating to see a carrier used to controlling everything have to give in…”

It will take a while before users are happy about iPhone download quotas – personally I know I can use around 1mb just searching an panning around Google Maps on my mobile.
Glad I didn’t stay up until midnight in 8 degree weather to get one from the Apple Store in Sydney!

“Sensis have chosen to keep the content of Yellow Pages out of the reach of all Search Engines, in order to maintain control over their IP…”

It seems now that has all changed – not sure how long this has been going on, but just noticed that the Australian Yellow Pages® is now being indexed by Google with 1,030,000 pages in the index to date.
It has been commented by quite a few people interested in the local search space (Bitemark , VS Consulting , Clickfind, LivePages), that (at the time) this was a necessary move for Sensis as

a) More Australians are using Google as a first destination for searching local businesses than they are Yellow Pages
b) It represents better value for businesses advertising in Yellow Pages because their listing can now be reached through a second means – search engines

It was commented by the SMH that when Google Maps was being launched, that Sensis refused to give Google Maps access to Yellow Pages listings. It still may be a way off before Google Maps has access to Yellow Pages data, because from an SEO perspective they are only half way there.

Edit: 11/07 – As has been pointed out by a few people, Google is in fact spidering individual business listings, but it seems that this will be done by crawling through paginated search results – they may speed up the process by looking at listing individual businesses a la Hotfrog

It was commented several years ago that if you pay for your listing to appear on the first page of search results in Yellow Pages, then in theory it should be spidered first – of course an effective linking strategy would increase the chance of a search engine spider seeing beneath the first page of results to the free listings, though this would not be guaranteed.

What I mean by this is that they are only letting Google index lists of sub-categories, rather than individual business listings themselves. For example, there are only 31 pages in the index that have the word ‘mechanic’ in them, however Yellow Pages would have tens of thousands of mechanics in their directory. In fact this is exactly the same approach that the UK Yellow Pages took

Given that prior to SEO efforts, Yellow Pages attracted 2.5 million uniques a month as a ‘destination site’, the additional traffic that they get through SEO will only be a blip on the radar at this stage. Interestingly, Yellow Pages-powered Mylocal is still advertising heavily using Google Adwords – work that one out..

My guess is that this recent change in the Yellow Pages philosophy is in response to truelocal’s growth and recent site revamp – but that topic requires a post of its own

Funding-wise, they received an undisclosed amount from UK-based Friday Holdings
Otherwise, very clean interface & great search functionality. I like the fact that the one site can span several countries – however they may have some SEO issues with that though..