What the report means

Reports aren't much good if you don't understand what they mean. Here's a description of some of the terminology you'll find on the report you'll be recieving.
Note: There will be a link to this page on your report.

URL Search:
Pages you listed on the Keyword Tab will be displayed here as found or not found. If you checked the box 'Report whether ANY page on my site is indexed' then WebPosition will report how many of your pages were found.

Matches Scanned: This is the total number of matches that were found for that keyword search. A setting on the Options Tab limits total matches by default to the first 30. Therefore, if more than 30 matches were found, Total Matches Found will display 30 even if thousands of matches could potentially be retrieved from the search. Searches must be limited in scope or the report would be too large to be usable.

Position: This is one of the most important pieces of information WebPosition provides you! It represents the exact position of every match that contains your domain.
Page: This is the screen page that one of your pages appeared on when doing a keyword search. Most engines display about 10 matches per page before asking the user to click to view the next page but the number can vary. The user can often change the number of matches displayed per page by changing a setting on the search engine before pressing search. WebPosition will report your page position based on if the user performed a search using the engine's default settings. Your goal is to at least appear in the first 1-3 pages to have a reasonable chance of being seen by people. Ideally you want to appear on page one. Therefore, if you're ranked 11th with 10 matches per page, moving up just one position can often put you on Page 1, significantly increasing your visibility.

The Visibility Report

This report summarizes your visibility on the search engines by giving you many powerful visibility statistics.

Rankings
The Position Ranking section of the Visibility Statistics table displays the current number of pages found by Reporter in the first thirty positions for all keywords and engines selected. The results are further broken down into all the First Place positions, Top 5, Top 10, Top 20 and Top 30 Positions found. Each column in the table shows the number of pages found for that category including all those pages in the preceding columns.

Position Changes
The second row of the Visibility Statistics table displays how many positions have been gained or lost on all engines selected. The Gain shows how many pages found have made an improvement in position since the last time the mission was ran. Likewise, the Loss shows how many pages have lost position since the last mission. Also shown is the number of positions that have remained the same. The last item in this row is a Total showing the total number of page positions Gained or Lost.

The Gain/Loss numbers directly reflect the information found in the Change columns of the Concise summary report. However, the Gain/Loss represents how many Gains or Losses were made for all keywords, for all selected engines for the mission. The Concise summary tables Change column shows exactly how many positions were gained or lost for each Keyword on each selected Engine.

Visibility
The last row provides information on how many Keywords were reported in the mission and how many engines were selected. The Visibility Ranking portion gauges how visible a web site appears based on the search engines and keywords selected.

The Visibility Ranking consist of a Visibility Percentage and a Visibility Score. The Visibility Score is achieved by assigning a point value to the highest position achieved on each engine. A point value is only awarded to the positions 1 through 30, with a position of 1 being awarded 30 points, position 2 is worth 29 points, 3 is 28 points and so on through 30 which is given 1 point. The points are then summed for all the engines in the mission. This total is the Visibility Score.

The Visibility Percentage is calculated using the Visibility Score and dividing it by the maximum points available. If the mission consisted of 2 engines and 2 keywords for each engine, then the maximum points possible would be 120, or 4 first place positions being awarded 30 points each.
Here is an exampleusing 2 keywords on 2 engines of a mission:
Engine Keywords Position Points
#1 #1 2 29
#1 #2 7 24
#2 #1 28 3
#2 #2 Not in first 30 0

Total 56

56 / 120 = .4666 or 46.66%

The Visibility Score for the above example would be 56. The Visibility Percentage is 46.66%.

As a result, the higher the percentage, the higher the visibility. If all 4 searches had returned a number one ranking the visibility score would be 120 and the visibility percentage would be 100%. Don't worry if you do not ever achieve a 100% score when targeting a large number of keywords. Few people reach or approach a "perfect" score. The purpose of this score is to simply give you a base line for monitoring improvement over time. Obviously the fewer keywords you target, the easier it will be to approach 100%. However, the greater the number of popular keywords you can achieve top rankings on within the major engines, the more traffic you can expect to receive. Traffic and the resulting sales should be your ultimate goal.

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