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WebPosition Gold Tip: Re-Running Your Saved Missions
By Robin Nobles

When I conduct on location workshops through SearchEngineWorkshops.com, one of the final exam questions is whether you should run a new WebPosition Gold Reporter mission every time you want to check your rankings, or whether you should re-run a saved mission.

You wouldn't believe how many people miss that question, even though we've discussed it in class.

What is the correct answer? Always re-run a saved mission!

This is one mistake that many Search Engine Optimizers make, even those who have been using WebPosition for a while. Rather than re-run an existing mission, they run a brand new mission every time.

Back to the Basics:

Before we go on, let's explain what the Reporter is, and why it's so important to re-run a saved mission. As you may know, the Reporter is the feature of WebPosition Gold that allows you to check your search engine rankings. The report that is run is called a "mission." The idea is that you cannot improve your rankings on the search engines without a method to monitor those rankings. Did your rankings improve or decline this month?

When you first set up your site in the Reporter, you'll enter the name of your domain(s), your important keyword phrases, which engines you want to check your rankings on, and other various options. When you hit Start, the software begins its "magic" to determine your rankings under the keywords you've chosen for the various engines you've indicated.

The first report you run in the Reporter won't have previous rankings to compare to. You'll only see your current rankings, and you won't know if those rankings have gone up or down for your various keyword phrases or how you're doing in the different engines over a period of time.

That's why it's so important to re-run your saved Reporter missions. Then, you'll learn how your rankings compare to the last time you ran the report, and you'll be able to make adjustments, if necessary, based on the report. You'll also see "Visibility Statistics" that will tell you the number of rankings that went up or down since you last ran the report, how many rankings you have in the top 30, your visibility score and percentage, and much more.

Think of it this way. If you don't re-run your existing Reporter missions, you won't be able to see valuable trends with your pages or with the engines. You won't be able to watch as your rankings go up, and you won't be able to make changes to your pages if your rankings go down. Instead, you're looking at your rankings right then and there, rather than comparing them to previous rankings.

Step-by-Step Guide:

So, to make it easy, let me outline in a step-by-step manner how to re-run a saved Reporter mission:

1. Start WebPosition Gold 2. Choose "Open" from the main toolbar. (Don't choose "New"!) This of course assumes that you created a New mission sometime in the past.

2. From the "Select a Mission Type to Open" page, choose Reporter.

3. An Open Mission box will open for your WebPosition files. Reporter mission files have the .mis file extension. The file may be saved in a folder called, "Reporter Mission Results." Or, it may be in the WebPosition directory itself.

Here's a screen shot of the Open Mission Box showing the various folders inside my WebPosition directory. An arrow is pointing to the Reporter Mission Results folder.

Click on the Reporter Mission Results folder to open it or the folder that you saved your mission in, and find the mission file for your Web site. Highlight it, and click Open.

4. As a short cut, you can directly select one of the last ten missions at the bottom of the file menu.

5. Once you select a mission, the Results tab of the Reporter mission will open. If you don't want to make any changes to the mission, you simply choose Start in the bottom right-hand corner, and the mission report will begin running.

If you want to change keywords, make changes to the engines you've chosen, or change any of your options, you can do this before running the mission.

6. That's it! When the Reporter is finished running the mission, you'll be prompted to see if you want to review the results in your browser. Those results will compare your previous rankings with your current rankings on the Concise report and others, and you can see which pages are improving and which may have fallen. Also be sure to check out the Trend report.

Additional Reporter Tips:

With WebPosition Gold 2, many "search engine friendly" features were added. On tab #5 (Options) in the Reporter, you can choose to be courteous to each engine by waiting a certain number of seconds between searches. It's an excellent feature, but let's take it one step further. Run your Reporter missions at night or on the weekend, during non-business hours PST.

Also, don't hammer the engines by entering 150 keywords and choosing every single engine. Choose only the engines that are really important to you. If you have a large number of keywords that you're tracking, run the Reporter in batches, so that you're being respectful of the engines and their bandwidth. However, keep in mind that few people have time to optimize their rankings on 150 keywords at the same time. Start with a small number and work your way forward.

The default for the number of search results to search through is 30. Normally you'll want to keep it at 30, because increasing that number can cause WebPosition to take much longer to run a mission, and it's not an "engine friendly" strategy. If you want to know if a particular page is in the engines anywhere, it's easy to find out by adding that URL under tab #3 (URL Verification) of the Reporter.

In Conclusion:

To many of us, WebPosition Gold's Reporter feature is worth the price of the entire program. So, learn to use it to your best advantage by re-running saved missions and taking that valuable information and using it to strengthen your Web site.

Robin Nobles is a trainer with Search Engine Workshops, which presents on location workshops in search engine marketing at various locations across the country. She's also the Director of Training for OnlineWebTraining.com , which teaches online courses in search engine marketing. Please visit our site for more information about online training and other resources.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.