Today introduces the first in a series of 30 day reviews for Host Discussion. Our new review series will take an in-depth look at various software available to webmasters. Each day we will Blog our progress on learning, using, and implementing what we learn. In addition, we will also feature random Interviews with the authors of the software or service used in our case study. Our first such case study will review RankSense. 

RankSense promises “Point and Click” SEO simple enough for even beginning website owners use. The author promises ease of use similar to that of Word Processing software. 

RankSense System Requirements:
Microsoft Windows Vista/XP/Windows 2000/2003 Server 256 MB 

RAM or as required by OS 25 MB of available hard disk space for installation 
Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended 

Prelude: Everyone wants their website to rank higher in search engines. Most webmasters look to software they can manage on their own. Others look to expensive SEO management firms to do all the work for them.

In todays Internet, webmasters are torn between handling online orders, answering questions from potential customers, managing AdWords campaigns, to accounting and other matters. SEO seems to take a backseat since you can buy “keywords” on Google if you are willing to pay enough. You need to ask yourself “Why should I only buy keywords when I can also rank organically for free?”. Granted, you’ll pay for the RankSense software, but that’s less than one day of our current budget here at HostDiscussion and I’m sure it’s close to the budget of those of you reading this article. RankSense starts at $25/mo with free updates as they occur. 

I’ve always felt that if you first understand how a process works, you can learn to do it on your own and be successful at it. My hope is that the RankSense software can give me the insight and tools to handle SEO more effectively. I need software that not only simplifies, but also provides results with less effort. 

(Day 1) - There is not an OS X compatible version of RankSense yet. Although this is disappointing, I decided to install this on a VMWare Virtual Environment running Windows XP with the latest security patches.

After downloading and installing RankSense own Windows XP, I launched the application. 

Step 1 :: Add New Website

RankSense

On day 1 we will keep things simple and simply add a new website and review the software options. I have chosen to add HostDiscussion.com as the new website to optimize.

All of the fields are simple and you add you can choose your main home page. There is also a check box at the bottom of the initial page asking if the website is a Blog. Since HostDiscussion.com is a WordPress blog and also a vbulletin forum, I felt it best to contact the author, Hamlet Batista before continuing the process. 

Q ”Hamlet, We’ve set up our HostDiscussion.com site differently than most sites. Our home page area is a Word Press blog. However, we have a SEO friendly vBulletin site directly linked. I selected ‘blog’ on the web site creation page. It did not find the vBulletin pages. Did I do this incorrectly?”

A ”Chris, You have a rather unusual setup. For the moment you will need to create a separate project for your vBulletin pages. The reason for this is the posts and pages of your blog are being pulled via the Wordpress API.”

Hamlet responded quickly to my query and you can see his response above. I was able to continue the process of adding HostDiscussion.com to RankSense. In this instance, I added two separate sites: HostDiscussion WordPress and HostDiscussion vBulletin.

When checking “This website is a blog” and clicking next, I was able to add my WordPress logins. RankSense then connected and retrieved all articles within the HostDiscussion blog. In addition, I was able to add in Google Analytics data for HostDiscussion.

Choose Landing / Conversion Pages
The next step of adding a website is to add the landing pages you wish to begin optimizing. As most of our articles are high in editorial content, I selected all of them and then removed some of the WordPress test pages.

After clicking ‘Next’ I was asked for a conversion page. As our conversion goal is to simply gain a new user to our forum or a comment to our blogs, I decided to go with the forum and the confirmation page used when a new member completes registration.

For our HostDiscussion vBulletin new site I was asked to provide FTP information and select the main home directory of the site. I also again provided the logins for Google Analytics. The software then again went through the process of determining what landing pages existed. In this instance, it only found the forum.php as the home page which I had to manually add. It did not find any of the other pages within the vBulletin forum (there are many thousands of pages within the vBulletin forum).

After selecting forum.php as my only landing page, I clicked next and added the same conversion page as used in HostDiscussion WordPress.

NEXT UP…..DAY TWO

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.