Microsoft Unwittingly Enters Web Marketing Fray With Purchase of LinkExchange, Must Now Play Catch-Up With Market-Leader WebPosition Gold
Joplin, MO - March 1, 1999 - Web marketers now have more powerful tools to guarantee top ranking in the major search engines. FirstPlace Software Inc., a Joplin, MO based Web marketing software maker announced today the full release of WebPosition Gold 1.0, the only software product to automate all the steps required to effectively market Web sites to the search engines. Existing services such as Microsoft's Submit-It and PositionAgent (acquired by Microsoft with their purchase of LinkExchange in November of 1998) provide only partial solutions to the search engine marketing problem and do so at a higher average cost.
FirstPlace Software's WebPosition Gold offers a suite of powerful tools and guarantees to lift any Web site into a top-10 ranking in the major search engines. FirstPlace goes one step further by challenging consumers with a 100% money-back guarantee: If the customer finds any product within the first 45 days of purchase that offers all of the functionality of WebPosition Gold for less money, they will be refunded twice the amount of the purchase price.
Before WebPosition Gold, top rankings have traditionally been difficult to achieve and sustain due to the dynamic nature of the Web and the search engines. WebPosition Gold goes beyond simple Web site submission and monitoring by offering: "Page Generator," to create "doorway pages" or alternate entrances to a Web site optimized to achieve high rankings in specific search engines; "Page Critic," designed to compare a site's HTML code to that of any already top ranked Web page and then suggest improvements to boost that site's rankings ahead of those it was compared against; "Page Editor" to facilitate easy changes; "Upload Manager" to automate the uploading of pages to a Web site; "Submitter" to register Web pages with the top search engines; "Reporter" to measure a Web site's search rankings in the major search engines for any keywords selected by the user; "Scheduler," to enable the scheduling of daily, weekly, or monthly search engine rank checking and site registrations; and "Traffic Analyzer," to track unique visitors or hits and even identify the keywords queried in each search engine to find the Web site. All modules are updated dynamically via the Web. As a full featured tool-set, WebPosition Gold is the only complete answer to strategic search engine position improvement of a Web site.
"WebPosition Gold has set a new standard in Web marketing that has placed Microsoft and other industry players in catch-up mode," states FirstPlace Software's President, Brent Winters. "The big myth is that simply updating your meta tags and submitting your site will make you visible on the search engines. That's just not true anymore. With WebPosition Gold, anyone can improve their site's search engine ranking in less than 30-minutes-a-day." Winters continues. "We have customers that report as much as an 8 to 12 fold increase in their traffic after using WebPosition Gold."
C|NET has announced their intentions to premier WebPosition Gold 1.0 on their download.com site this week, so Web marketers can try the trial version of WebPosition Gold for thirty days. WebPosition Gold can also be downloaded from www.webposition.com. The standard edition of WebPosition Gold is available for $149 and supports unlimited keywords and pages, and five different web sites. The professional edition supports unlimited Web sites and report customization for $349. WebPosition Gold helps Web site marketers to increase their search engine rankings in the following search engines: AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, Excite, AOL/NetFind, LinkStar, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, Magellan, Planet Search, and What-U-Seek. FirstPlace Software can be reached at 1-800-962-4855.
About FirstPlace Software, Inc.
FirstPlace Software, Inc., previously known by the trade name I.S.T. (Innovative Solutions & Technologies, Inc.), is based in the heartland of America, Joplin, Missouri, and has been providing software solutions since 1991. In June 1997 FirstPlace released WebPosition Analyzer 1.0, the first software product to measure a Web site's search positions. FirstPlace Software, Inc. is a privately held, family-oriented corporation that has successfully identified market needs and provided tools to meet those needs. FirstPlace Software recently gained national recognition as winner of Deloitte & Touche's Technology FAST 500, naming them one of the fastest growing technology companies in the United States.
