SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Learn To Check Your Web Site Ranking
First, go to the search engine where you
want to check your site’s ranking, and enter the keywords
you want to check. Your result pages will come up,
and you will need to look through them until you find your
website. SEO experts recommend that if you aren’t listed in at least
the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most
people won’t look any further than that. This is simply common
sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough
simply think to yourself, “Would I look for this long for
this page?”
You will want to do this with each search engine and directory
until you have some idea of where you are. Check
your website's rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms
can affect
them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands
of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively
trying to get ranked ahead of you. That’s right. There are
thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must
keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles
and using these same tricks!
If you can’t find your website in a search engine’s results,
you should enter “site:” your domain name in the
keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears
with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere
in the search engine’s index. If all you get back is a blank
page, then you’re not in the search engine’s database at
all – you need to wait longer. This trick of typing “site:www.yourdomain.com”
also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed
on each particular search engine. The more pages that are
indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.
It you find that your website is miles away from the top
20, don’t be discouraged – you can change that! You may need
to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that
are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have
human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for
phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good
content is the best way to increase your chances of getting
a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that
your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be
with search engines.
Search
engines are a perfect example of “the chicken or the egg.”
In this case, there is an answer! Search engines
attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important,
not the other way around. This is why it is so important
that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.
If you want to check to see if a single web page on your
site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter
the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.
If the search engine has indexed that particular page then
it will come back with a description of it. If it hasn’t
then you’ll see a message saying something like “Sorry, no
information is available for that URL”.
On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will
offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find
similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or
that contain your URL on the page.
You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods,
but we would recommend that you consider using online tools
or downloadable software that will allow you to check these
things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming
job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to
monitor.
Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You
can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi
and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results
of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving
your site’s ranking.
URL
Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings
in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search,
MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell
you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the
ranking if it is.
These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your
sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue
with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing
too.
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