Software Features and Support

May 08, 2008

Keyword Strategy Studio Updated

There is a minor update available for Keyword Strategy Studio (build 050808). This fixes a bug in keyword builder that caused the keywords to be copied to the wrong list when the "Export to another list" option is used.

We have also enabled sorting the entries in the "compare ranks" view in Keyword Explorer. The sorting was originally disabled because it will make the list appear in wrong SE ranking order. You can now get back the original ranked list by clicking the "#" column header.

April 30, 2008

Domain Punch Professional: Quickly Access Registrar Management Interface

Many users of Domain Punch Professional are not aware that they can access the registrar's management interface with a single click from the software. Even I had forgotten about this and remembered it only because recently a customer asked a question about it!

This option is available under the "Edit > Domain Management Settings" menu. Remember to first highlight a domain in the list by clicking on it before choosing the menu option.

Some settings are required for this. But you need to do this only once (for each registrar).

  • Registrar's account login URL
  • Your login/user name
  • The account password (stored in the local registry in an encrypted format)
  • If the account page uses POST method
  • The various POST variables used in the registrar's HTML account login form. You can find this by looking at the HTML source of the login page.

You can also specify your own data using the following variables. The software will automatically fill in the required information.

  • {login}
  • {password}
  • {domain}

Here is an example settings for Tucows (opensrs)

URL

https://manage.opensrs.net/index

POST

Yes

Post Data

reg_domain={domain}
reg_username={login}
reg_password={password}
action=login

April 28, 2008

IM Toolpad Updated

We have updated IM Toolpad. This fixes a problem with results from Live. The PDF reports have been made more printer friendly by removing the darker colors.

April 26, 2008

How To Delete Unwanted Projects in Keyword Strategy Studio

Here is a quick Keyword Strategy Studio tip...

All the projects created in Keyword Strategy Studio are stored in folders within the "data store" directory. Each project has it's own folder with the same name as the project.

To identify the "data store" directory simply click on the ribbon bar button called "set data store path".  Observe where the data is being stored and click "Cancel".

Data Store Path in Keyword Strategy Studio

Just browse over to the data folder and then delete the unwanted folders. These will not appear within the "Open projects" option any longer.

You can also backup your data by just saving the contents of the "data store path".

April 18, 2008

Some Simple Tweaks Using Web Page Explorer

Are there moments when you just want to take a break from whatever you have been doing?

Here is a simple web page tweaking exercise you should try when you want to take a break but still want to use the time productively!

Start Web Page Explorer (part of IM Toolpad). Run any of your web sites through it to analyze the pages.

Do you find multiple but identical anchor texts? Replace these with more relevant keyword rich text (but not spammy looking)

Here is a sample screen shot that shows multiple anchor texts that simply say "download now!" In some cases this may be relevant (for example, as a call to action). But you may want to find such identical texts and replace them with good keywords.

You can find identical texts by sorting the anchor text column (click on the header).

You can also use the software to check the heading structure of your web pages.  Always make sure that you have a good h1, h2, h3.. structure and that your headings are meaningful. The software can also help with your web page titles and decsriptions.

April 15, 2008

Some More Keyword Strategy Studio Tips

"I have large keyword lists containing thousands of keywords. Your software allows me to find and pull out keywords containing the terms I type in. But how do I extract keywords that do not contain the words I type in?"

That was a question we recently received.

Actually it is quite easy...

Use the "Filter" option to highlight the keywords that contain one or more words. Now use the "Invert Selection" option under the "Filter" menu to invert the selection. Then use the "delete selected" option to delete the current selection. You will be left with all the keyword phrases that do not contain the terms you specified in the first step.

"The software lists a lot of sites in the "Competitions" tab. How do I verify if the sites I specify are listed? Actually I wanted to check if my own sites are present and found it very difficult to scroll through and look"

You can use the "Find" ribbon bar button to quickly check if a site is in the list. Just type in the site URL, even a partial text will do, and click OK. If the site / URL is present in the list it will be highlighted and scrolled into view.

You can also copy the full URL / site list into one of the "My Keyword Lists" and then use the features available in Keyword Builder to locate the sites that interest you.

Are you not yet using Keyword Strategy Studio or any of the other insider tools in the IM Toolpad software suite? You can download a fully functioning trial copy... click here.

April 12, 2008

Some Simple Keyword Strategy Studio Usage Tips

Here are some Keyword Strategy Studio (and some of our other products) usage tips that are not widely known...

Remove entries in drop-down boxes

This is applicable to most of our products that have user entry fields with a drop-down box. Example? the box for entering the base keyword in the keyword brainstorming tool of Keyword Strategy Studio.

Just type

<clear>

(including the angled brackets) into the box and click the Analyze button.

Change the List Display Columns

Want the top competitor list to show only the URLs? Or the Compare Ranks view to show only the search result snippets?

Right click within the list and select Setup Columns. Uncheck every thing you want to hide and click OK. You can also specify the width of each column in pixels or permanently fix the width of a column.

You can use this when you want to copy-out the contents of just one column. For example you just want a list of all top competitors for a specific keyword phrase.

To make the columns auto-fit (when you adjust the program window size), make all columns, except one, have a fixed width. When you re-adjust the window width the columns will auto-fit within the available area.

Change List Display Colors and Font

Right click within the list and select Setup Colors and Font.  You can select the row colors and font. You can also select a larger font size.

Backup The Data

Keyword Strategy Studio allows you to change the data store path. This option is available in the program ribbon bar.  Each project is saved as a separate folder within the main data store folder. You can save the projects by backing up each project folder or by backing up the entire data store folder.

April 11, 2008

Domain Name Software Products - New Releases Coming Soon!

We are getting ready to release newer versions of our domain name products. These include Domain Punch Professional, Watch My Domains ISP and Professional and Domain Name Analyzer. These will be released in a phased manner during May, 2008.

The code-base for all the products have been fully re-written. Here is a screen shot of the new Domain Punch Professional v2.

Domain Punch Pro v2

Updates for Existing Customers

The new versions will be free for customers who purchased after 2007 January 1. Some more customers will be eligible for free upgrades based on some of the special deals we had offered in the past. Details will be announced after the products are released. Other customers can obtain upgrades at special prices.

Price Revision Coming Soon

We will be increasing the prices slightly (15-20%) after the new versions are released. So it might be a good idea to purchase the current versions now (at the current prices) and then get a free upgrade to the new versions.

New Features

We are not yet ready to announce all the new features. But it will include the ability to handle many more domains (even in the non-database versions). We have been able to use the new version of Domain Punch Professional with about 50,000 domains!

Some of the other new features include...

  • Ability to add, rename and delete domain categories.
  • Vastly improved interface.
  • Ability to manually edit the data.
  • Ability to check and monitor domain MX records.
  • Create PDF reports from within the software.
  • Easier whois setup and configuration.
  • Data exportable to MySQL.
  • and more...

New Software

We are also releasing a new software called Domain Strategy Studio. This will be integrated into the upcoming Internet Strategy Studio. More details will be announced soon.

April 09, 2008

Filtering Large Keyword Lists Using Keyword Strategy Studio

While studying our own log files I often extract the search terms used by visitors to our sites. These lists normally contain a large number of keywords. I then use Keyword Strategy Studio to categorize these keywords based on the terms present in each phrase.

Here is a small example - a sample list extracted from this blog's log, that contain the terms "PHP" and "redirect". Notice that some are misspellings!

multiple domain names php
multiple domain redirection php
multiple redirect url in contact form script
php multiple redirect
php multiple redirect how
php multiple url redirection
php redirect
php redirect multiple domains
php redirect script domain name
rederict php script
redirect multiple sites php
redirect script php based on keyword
redirect.txt
redirecting multible domains php
redirecting to multiple domains
simple blog php script
simple php redirect

(I used this just as an example. We don't really have any PHP related products. The above is the consequence of a blog post that offered a simple PHP script for redirecting to multiple domains)

Keyword Strategy Studio is very handy when it comes to peeling away the required keyword phrases from large lists.

Simply add your full list to one of the "My keyword Lists" in Keyword Builder. Then use the "Filter" button and select "Containing Terms Anywhere". Type in all the terms into the box that pops up (one entry per line) and click OK. For the above, I typed in

PHP
redirect

This will highlight all the keywords that contain the words PHP or redirect. Now use one of the options under "Export" to transfer the highlighted keywords to a file or to another list. You can use the "Filter" to do other things like finding keywords that contain terms only at the start or end, phrases that contain more than a specified number of words etc.

The main advantage here is that you can pull out all keyword phrases that contain "any" of the terms you specify. You could be trying to find all phrases that contain any of 50 different terms. All you have to do is paste all the 50 terms into the box and click OK. The entire thing gets done in just one step!

The main keyword list can come from anywhere and not really from your own logs. Keyword Strategy Studio can handle very large lists containing tens of thousands of keyword phrases and the filtering is extremely fast.

If you are familiar with Google Adwords you will quickly see that the Filter option is very useful for creating precisely targeted Ad-groups.

April 07, 2008

How to capture full length screen shots of the web pages you monitor

Did you know that you can use Web Page Monitor (part of IM Toolpad) to capture full length screen shots of the web pages you monitor?

Web Page Monitor, Snapshot View

The software displays the thumbnail views of the monitored web pages in one of the docked panels. You can then right click on the URL list and select Export Screen Shot to save the full sized screen shot (actual size, not thumb-nailed) to your hard disk.