There are some products or services that require you to invest countless hours installing, configuring, studying and testing – only to finally learn, weeks later that the solution has significant limitations.

I’ve had these experiences with; Accounting programs, time management solutions, photo-editors, PPC-tools, website builders and many more.

This week I’ve been hunting for a program that would track my website ranking for various keywords and discovered Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) by Caphyon.

I’m quite particular about what I want …

1) I wanted something that ran natively on my Mac – either as an application or as something I could run on my server.

2) I rarely track my rankings on sites other than Google US but I did want a program that would give me the option of other search engines (and different regions) in the future.

3) I want something I can run automatically. Ideally a php script I can host on my server, or at the very worst something I can leave to run overnight.

4) I need something that compares my search-engine rankings over time. I was amazed that so few programs offer this.

5) I want something I’ll enjoy using.

6) I’m happy to pay for software but, as my focus is really with PPC, I don’t really want something I need to pay a monthly subscription to. (This ruled out a lot of online applications unfortunately).

You’ll be amazed at how few option there are out here. I even resorted to downloading Windows applications to test them out but most of them just looked so ugly that I knew I’d hate using them.

Advanced Web Rankings does offer a lot of features I didn’t really test. They have a comprehensive directory submission feature which allows you to enter your website details into hundreds of online directories quite efficiently. I’m sure this is something I’ve done many times before and therefore didn’t spend much time on.

What I did use extensively was their search engine ranking checker. I’m trying to get my Plug and Save website ranked for some competitive ’save electricity’ related keywords and wanted to see how I was doing.

To generate a list of desirable keywords I used Google Keyword Tool and my keyword data from AWStats. AWR does have a Keyword Research Tool built into it but I had a lot of research already complete. I am using Advanced Web Rankings with SENuke this month and this also has a tool which assesses the ease at which you might be able to get good rankings for particular keywords. After a few hours of research I got myself a list of about 50 keywords I wanted top 10 rankings for.

I really can’t comment as to how effective AWR was in improving my rankings. I used SENuke exclusively to do this but I used AWR daily just to see how well my keyword positioning was doing.

Advanced Web Rankings is pretty slow to analyse every keyword, especially if you’re not in the first couple of pages. This is apparently intentional and you can change the interval between keywords so that the wait time is less. AWR suggests that by pausing between searches you’re less likely to cause trouble with the search engines. The best solution is really to leave the rank position checker to run overnight.

I enjoyed checking my rankings. On the whole, when combined with article submissions and social bookmarking features from SENuke I’ve managed to get a top 30 placement for all my important keywords already. Most are within the top 5 and there’s certainly a lot more work i could do to improve this.

If you’re looking for a reliable and constantly updated SEO application and / or rankings checker i’d certainly recommend trying AWR for a month.

Sure WiredTree has 24/7 monitoring services but just recently the entire WiredTree server went offline (this was for scheduled maintenance). At this time I didn’t receive any email alerts telling my sites were down so I’ve been looking for an additional monitoring service too.

There are a lot of services out there but most of the free services only check your sites every 30 minutes (or longer) or are restricted to just one or two sites.

Uptime Dog is completely free to register for and checks all your websites every 2 minutes from two separate locations.

If any of your sites fail you’ll be sent an email immediately.

The only thing Uptime Dog ask for in return is that you link to their website.

I was discussing the idea of remote working with a programmer friend of mine and he lamented about how one of his days was disrupted because a particular password was embedded in a Windows Messenger chat log on his home computer and he couldn’t access it from where he was working.

The solution to this seems to be a free program called Dexrex which has versions for Windows, Unix and OS X.

Dexrex works in the background and logs all your messenger chats to your online account that you can access at any time.

I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it’s working great.