Battlegrounds Gaming Engine Suite Reunites Gaming Groups

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Battlegrounds Gaming Engine Suite Reunites Gaming Groups

Remember gaming night? You and a bunch of friends would gather around a table at someone's place and before long, a favorite pastime would emerge from a cabinet or a closet and everyone would be playing. Maybe it was classic boardgames or pen-and-paper RPGs. Perhaps you were the wargame type or preferred to take your chances with a deck of collectable cards. Good times don't last forever, though. Friends move away, jobs change and groups can find themselves split on opposite coasts. Fortunately, that doesn't have to spell the end of play time anymore. The Battlegrounds suite of software (various pricing, free demo) allows players and GMs alike to collaborate in a virtual, whiteboard-like space especially designed for gaming.

The Battlegrounds dice-rolling module supports standard modifiers as well as dice pools systems, open ended rolls, criticals and more.The suite is split into two packages, the Battlegrounds Gaming Engine (BGE) and Battlegrounds: RPG (BRPG). The former specializes in board games, card games, and wargames, whereas the latter handles the more complex task of managing a D&D style role playing session. Most of the action takes place on a shared virtual game-mat or scanned game board, where the players move digital representations of tokens or characters around using point and click or keyboard commands.

Battlegrounds' exhaustive set of tools allow the GM and players minute control over the gaming experience. In addition to the expected dice rolling and mapping functions, advanced organizational mechanics like the turn sequencer and the card deck manager allow fairly esoteric systems to be accurately translated, although there are diminishing returns past a certain level of complexity. Quick reference functions allow scanned and PDF game documents such as spell lists and character sheets to remain at everyone's fingertips during play. The Battlegrounds site offers artpacks for both free download and purchase, and the suite was designed to work from the group up with assets created with Dundjinni. Audio/visual triggers allow the use of background music, sound effects, video and stills to be shared at the click of a button, a tremendously useful feature difficult to effectively duplicate without interrupting the flow of play. In fact, there are so many layers to the package that it's easy to go overboard and find yourself spending far more time prepping for games than actually playing them.

For software produced by a single man, Battlegrounds' results are impressive. Careful consideration has been given to the details of a group-centered experience. For example, you can distribute your game's assets to players with a single, closed-format file that will prevent prying eyes from peeking ahead. The purchasing scheme is similarly thoughtful. You can buy traditional standalone licenses, but floating keys exist for game hosts with fluid groups so anyone can join in as long as a slot is open. Simply use the free demo; it will recognize the open playing slot and act as the full player client as long as it remains connected. Another example is the automatic sync function: tokens, tiles and other images up to 2 megabytes are automatically transferred to other players with no user intervention required.

Problems are mostly of the background-noise variety. I experienced a few error dialogs when restarting Battlegrounds after changing screen resolutions, and bumped into a few sync errors during testing, but nothing serious enough to question stability. The many contextual menus can take a little bit of familiarity to use, but the minimalist approach to UI means you see the game and the presentation, rather than the software framing it, which is a boon to the immersive atmosphere both BGE and BRPG strive so hard to maintain.

The price is a little high, but not enough to give pause. There aren't many packages out there that can pull all of this off, and fewer still have such specific support for board games which broadens the appeal considerably. You also get an actual, dedicated developer on the other side who will listen to your requests and who takes his gaming seriously. That alone is worth the cost for some. If you're an old-school tabletop gamer using Skype and email attachments to keep your group alive, you owe it to yourself and your friends to take a tour of the Battlegrounds and see what you've been missing.

Note: The BGE gamer client is available in various packages, from $15 for one player to $40 for fifteen players.

—Jim Norris

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Can't Decide What Search Engine Keywords to Pursue? Ask Market Samurai

Creating a money-making online venture is not a simple challenge. Market Samurai ($150) is a comprehensive suite of tools aimed at making the process easier by helping you track down lucrative keywords, buy the right domain for the job, and more.

To start a Market Samurai project, you must pick one "main" keyword.Some applications can be mastered (or at least learned) just by playing with their different parts; Market Samurai is not one of them. Market Samurai is a large application, divided into eight modules: Rank Tracker, Keyword Research, SEO Competition, Domains, Monetization, Find Content, Publish Content, and Promotion. Some of the modules display tabular interfaces brimming with arcane acronyms like RDD, DMZ (it's not what you think), and my personal favorite, BLEG. Thankfully, you can hover over a column header to get a more complete definition of what it means, and there is also an online glossary.

Hints and tooltips are nice, but the online documentation is absolutely essential. It is made up of a series of videos, each no longer than 15 minutes. The videos are well produced, with clear, calm narration, and very little techno-babble and jargon. Explanations are clear, and are as much about Internet marketing in general as they are about the application itself. The only point of confusion was that Market Samurai's interface has changed since the videos were made, and I was not always able to follow the procedures exactly as shown.

Market Samurai offers a host of tools for optimizing and monetizing keywords.Market Samurai is very different from most software in that it assumes a specific workflow. Microsoft Word doesn't care what document you're writing or in what order you like to write; Market Samurai doesn't care what market you're researching, but it cares deeply about the process. The application was built around a set of four assumptions called The Golden Rules: Search terms must be (1) relevant, (2) high-traffic, (3) not too competitive, and (4) "commercial" (meaning, people search for them with the intent to buy something). Assuming you get all four right, you should have an Internet marketing hit on your hands--or so the theory goes. Market Samurai contains tools to let you assess each of these metrics for the keywords you choose.

Using Market Samurai's Rank Tracker module is not a good idea: even the application will tell you so.In practice, even after watching more than an hour of documentation, using the application was not a silky-smooth experience. The very first module, Rank Tracker, popped up scary warnings: Google doesn't like it when robots submit search queries, and using Rank Tracker may raise alerts and force you to answer CAPTCHA prompts when you try to use Google later from the same IP address. Worse still, this could happen to other users on your network, too, because they share your external IP address. The same thing happened when I used Link-Assistant.com's competing product Rank Tracker--at least Market Samurai gave me clear warnings.

Market Samurai's Keyword Research module was more promising. To use it, you must have a Google AdWords account, which you can open for free. This module can be used to extrapolate many keywords out of a small initial set, much like you can do for free using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, but it then proceeds to evaluate those keywords using several custom metrics to help you decide if they're worth targeting.

Market Samurai's SEO Competition module lets you see at a glance how established the competition is for a given keyword.Once you have a keyword you want to rank for, the next step is to see how well-established your competition is. In other words, if you're trying to rank for something like "car insurance," you will have to defeat some very established competitors with deep pockets on your way to the top. Market Samurai's SEO Competition module lets you see who is currently ranking for the first ten results of a term, along with metrics about each competitor that indicate how firmly established they are (how many links point their way, etc.). Results are color-coded, so you can see at a glance how difficult or easy a term would be to rank for.

Other modules are equally technical, and include tools for helping you pick a good domain name and publish ads or find affiliate products to promote on your new website. The only ones I would advise you to beware are the Find Content and Publish Content modules. While Market Samurai's documentation stresses the importance of creating your own original content, these two modules make it very easy to copy and republish other people's content on your own blog without permission: Not a good idea.

You can use Market Samurai to find a good domain name for the keyword want to rank for.Online marketing is an increasingly complex industry, but the Market Samurai suite handles this complexity well for the most part. Although some modules are more useful than others, the suite itself helps you understand which ones are likely to help you the most. Used intelligently, I can see how Market Samurai could help an entrepreneur find lucrative keywords and make real money online.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you must register to download the latest version of the software.

--Erez Zukerman

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Improve Search Engine Rank With Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking ($99) is a cross-platform application with a beautiful interface and one major purpose in life: To help you get great search engine rankings. It does this using an array of different tools letting you inspect your website and search engine performance from various angles.

Advanced Web Ranking's Keyword Difficulty module is supposed to help you understand how difficult it would be to rank for a given keyword, but it is not simple to use. Much like Rank Tracker and Market Samurai, Advanced Web Ranking has a complex interface subdivided into several distinct modules (Rankings, Analytics, Links, Social, and more). Its interface feels remarkably slick and polished. Advanced Web Ranking is Java-based, and the controls used are not standard Windows controls, but they're large, clear, and elegant. Like Market Samurai, Advanced Web Ranking lines up the various modules on the left edge of the window, as a large vertical toolbar. But unlike Market Samurai, Advanced Web Ranking does not assume any specific workflow, or provide much in the way of search engine optimization tips and tricks. Online documentation exists, but it's mainly in the form of text, not videos.

The built-in Website Auditor shows broken pages, but doesn't help you find the broken links that lead to them.The Rankings tool lets you see how you or your competitors are doing on search engine rankings over time. Advanced Web Ranking lets you set up a scheduled search to run periodically and update your rankings. Unlike Rank Tracker, the search does not pop up a visible window on the screen--you won't even know it's running. Search runs from your own computer, which can affect the results (Google shows different results according to the location of the computer you're searching from). You can view results as rankings over time for specific keywords, but also as an aggregate called "Visibility Score," which is a single number meant to show your overall status. The formula used for computing the Visibility Score is explained in detail in the documentation.

CAPTCHA prompts are commonplace among SEO application, and Advanced Web Ranking has its own share of them.The Analytics module lets you plug into Google Analytics and provides comprehensive offline reporting. Once you plug into Analytics, you can display Analytics data alongside search engine ranking data, to try and find correlations.

Advanced Web Ranking's Links module lets you examine backlinks leading to your own website, as well as competing websites. It offers several reports, including one for anchor text distribution -- an important thing to keep in mind when you're trying to maintain a natural link profile. In other words, Google gets suspicious if 10,000 links with the exact keyword you're trying to target pop up overnight -- and this tool lets you keep tabs on that.

The Standard version of of Advanced Web Ranking doesn't include all features--for example, the Reports tab cannot be used. Annoyingly, those features which can't be used are still shown in the interface, and are not even grayed out or otherwise visually indicated. So you end up clicking buttons and constantly getting "Feature not available" alerts trying to upsell you the next level, a somewhat annoying software model we like to call "teaserware."

When you try to use a feature not available for your version, Advanced Web Ranking promotes more powerful versions.Advanced Web Ranking is expanding to cover other important areas of online marketing. Version 8.8 added Twitter and Facebook integration, allowing you to produce graphs showing your mentions and retweets over time; the new version 8.9 works social media metrics into some charts and reports.

If you are well versed in the sometimes-arcane art of SEO, you may like Advanced Web Ranking: The slick interface and minimal amount of handholding can help you get actionable answers faster. Then again, if you're just starting out with SEO, you may want to look at a tool that takes more time to cover the basics, such as Market Samurai.

Note: The Download button downloads the Windows version only. Linux and Mac versions are available from the vendor.

--Erez Zukerman

Checking your web site position is a very time consuming task. For example, if you have 10 keywords that you want to monitor, and you want to check the top 20 positions for 10 search engines, you need to perform about 200 (10 keywords * 10 engines * first 2 pages) individual searches to get the results. Then you need to compare the results one by one to find where your site is positioned. It may take you days to complete this task if you do this manually. That's where Advanced Web Ranking comes to help. Advanced Web Ranking is able to query over 130 search engines and quickly find out if you're moving up or down in the rankings, or if your site is listed at all. It will track the progress of your rankings over time and display that information in an easy to read and understand graphical and tabular reports. It can help you check not just the position of your website but the position of your competitors' web sites as well. Advanced Web Ranking has the ability to generate and email reports after an update was finished. Couple that with the Scheduled Updates ability, and you will be able to turn on your computer in the morning and find reports on your websites ranks waiting for you in your Inbox. As a SEO, you can have updates being run and sent to your customers every night without even lifting a hand. Various types of reports (Current Rank, Top Sites, Web Site, etc.) can be created in any of the formats Advanced Web Ranking supports (PDF, HTML, Excel, XML or Text). Then they can be emailed to any of the addresses you pick from the Address Book, or saved to a folder where you can access them over the Internet.

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Analyze Keywords for Search Engine Ranking With Rank Tracker

If you have a product or service to sell, you probably want prospective customers to find you. For that to happen, you need to rank well on search engine queries relevant to what you do ("Carpenter in Minnesota"). Rank Tracker Professional ($100) is not as comprehensive as the $149 Market Samurai, but it can help you plot and analyze your keyword performance on the path to search-engine stardom.

Rank Tracker lets you graph your keywords performance as compared to competitors.If you read "search engine" as "Google," that's understandable: Google is pretty much synonymous with search these days, and much of the search engine optimization (SEO) advice available online today revolves around the search giant's secret ranking algorithm. Still, Rank Tracker doesn't play favorites, and can search for your keywords across a staggering variety of search engines, starting from large international engines like Yandex (important if you're optimizing for Russia), all the way to obscure sites like Jafose.com (yes, that's a search engine). You can also search location-specific editions of the large engines, such as Google Romania or Bing Turkey.

Since search engines often change things to make automated searching more difficult, vendor Link-Assistant.com releases periodic "algorithm updates" for Rank Tracker, allowing it to keep using the engines even if they change things around. Rank Tracker comes with six months of free algorithm updates. Once those expire, algorithm updates are $7 per month (or less, if you subscribe for a longer period).

Due to Rank Tracker's activity, Google may display CATCHA prompts to users of your network when they try to search the Web.Setting things up is simple: Specify your website and the words you want to rank for, and pick the engines you want Rank Tracker to search. Rank Tracker will then run a search across those engines, and look for your website in the results. It's just like searching for your brand or name to see where you rank, only on a larger scale.

Rank Tracker can be used to search for multiple terms across multiple engines, but more important, it can automatically search for those terms day after day and plot the results on a graph, so you can see the gradual change in rank. You can also compare your ranking with up to five competitors. The scheduled search dialog is visible, and requires Rank Tracker to be running in the background.

The biggest problem with Rank Tracker is that it uses your own computer to submit the search queries. Some search engines like to tailor results according to your location, so what you see may not be what your target audience sees. You can ameliorate this by searching location-specific editions, but still, you should take the results with a grain of salt.

Another issue is that Google doesn't like it when you submit a flood of queries: When I tried to Google something manually shortly after using Rank Tracker, Google popped up an annoying CAPTCHA page and wouldn't let me proceed until I typed the word displayed, to make sure I am not a robot. Worse still, the same thing happened to a different user on my network a few minutes later (she wasn't using Rank Tracker--it was due to my own use). Rank Tracker includes features meant to emulate normal user behavior, but these are switched off by default.

Rank Tracker's scheduled task dialog box is large, and pops up whenever a scheduled task runs.Rank Tracker can also suggest potentially useful keywords: Enter a few keywords you want to rank for, and Rank Tracker would query online resources and come back with a list of additional keywords for you to consider optimizing for. It can also compute a Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI) score for each keyword, which shows the ratio between the competition for the term and the search volume (how popular the term is among users). The idea is to find terms that many people search for, but few websites already try to rank for.

Rank Tracker is far from perfect, but in the extremely competitive and sometimes messy world of SEO, few tools are. If you are looking for a way to analyze your rankings over time, this is one affordable option.

--Erez Zukerman

Rank Tracker Enterprise is an all-in-one rankings monitoring tool for webmasters and SEOs who need to monitor their most important keywords in major search engines. Here's what this SEO program can do for you: 1. Reveals site's rankings for an unlimited number of keywords Immediately see how well the site's ranking over time for the unlimited number of keywords you target in Google, Yahoo!, MSN and 367 other search engines. 2. NEW! Generates illustrative reports in HTML/PDF format, containing rankings, KEIs and lots of other relevant analytical data, and saves it to the local drive, e-mails it or uploads to a site via FTP. 3. Tracks an unlimited number of sites Unlike other software, Rank Tracker allows you to check site's rankings for as many websites as you need. 4. Supports regional versions of Google, Yahoo! and MSN The currently supported regional versions include UK, Germany, France, Australia, Spain, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, China, Switzerland, India, Brazil, Sweden, Singapore, Norway and more. 5. Keeps you updated on the rankings fluctuations Rank Tracker keeps a daily, weekly and monthly change record to notify you where the site ranks for any search term, at any time. 6. Creates eye-candy graphs that demonstrate your progress visually Images speak louder than words, so go ahead, view pretty progress graphs that will show you how well the site is ranking over any time period. 7. Runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Rank Tracker is cross-platform, and runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux and Mac. Meaning you can run it on your Windows XP-based home PC and your Mac laptop with no fuss. With all these features, monitoring search engines positions is a snap! Get a copy of this advanced search engine positions checker, and download a free demo instantly!

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