Thursday, November 26, 2009

Keep Track Of Your Websites Placement

One important aspect is knowing where your website is within the serps and other stats which are important for your website. There are many different checks you can do for your website. First is the simple backlink check. Personally I use two different checkers which are Yahoo's site explorer which you use by going to Yahoo's Search Engine and typing link:http://www.yourwebsite.com Yahoo will bring up the number of links and a list of who is linking to you. The second website which I trust to count backlinks is Google's webmaster tools. To use this checker you will need to sign up for a Google account and then sign up and verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools. I use to use third party websites until I spoke with another experienced webmaster and asked him which counters he used and he told me the only two that matter. He said why use a website which does not decide where you will be placed in the serps when the search engines you are so worried about will tell you exactly which links they are counting and how many of your links actually matter. It seems pointless having a website which has no authority of your placement tell you how many links you have if they say 10 million and Google says 50 guess what you will be at the bottom of the SERPs.

Webmaster tools has become imperative for webmasters. Now only will they tell you how many links you have and give a list of the top thousand websites linking to you they go much more in depth. My favorite aspect of Webmaster Tools is the SERPs tracker which tells me my top hundred keywords I am ranking well for. They not only let me know what keywords I am ranked well for but the keywords which are actually getting the click throughs. Here is a little example of my top ten keywords which my website How To Make Money Online ranks well for:
# Query Position
1 make money online free 4
2 earn money online free 6
3 how to make money online for free 8
4 make money online for free 8
5 how to make money online free 5
6 make money free 5
7 make free money online 7
8 making money online for free 9
9 making money online free 6
10 make money free online 3
Updated Nov 26, 2009

Anyway you can see what I am ranked for so I don't need to actually go to Google and type in each and every one. What is also nice they make the query into links so I click on one of the terms and it will go right to my position proving to me that I am ranked for that word. Anyway I don't know what I would do without webmaster tools and if you are not using it you really need to start.

Now the next step is keeping track of your visitors. For this again I have two main sources first Stat Counter which is a free counter that will give you decent reports on how much traffic you are getting where it is coming from and where they are leaving. I also really like Google Analytics which is a great resource with tons of graphs and reports that will tell you anything you want to know about your site. Both of these are great alone I prefer to have both, but really it is not neccessary.

The last subject I would like to cover is the value of a search term. Now for this I have two resources which I use both are quite powerful and will provide you with excellent info for whatever term you are wanting to learn about. The first is Google Adwords Tool. This is the tool which will tell you the search volume of a keyword for the previous month. Not the best for a long term unless you check the keyword monthly for a couple months. Now this is usually what makes me decide on what keywords to go after since I can see how many times last month any given terms was searched for. Now for the long term I use a diffrent tool which is Google Insights which is STILL in its beta, but offers very valuable info. This tool will tell you the popularity of a keyword over a period of time (1 month - years). You will be able to find up and coming terms and if a term has spiked and went back down. In other words let say you go to the adwords tool and they say for last month the key term website marketing had 2 million searches. You think it is a good term with plenty of traffic, but when you go to insights it says that the term had a 1000% increase over previous months which means more than likely it was a fluke month and the term will drop back down to its average. Anyway a great tool for those wanting to know what terms are popular and what terms should be avoided.

I hope you guys liked the post if so please share it with a friend or on a forum/blog/website wherever. Also let me know what you guys think of the tools.

1 comment:

  1. In a forum where I am a member of, I keep reading posts with the mention of Google analytics but never cared to find out what it was for. I even thought that it was a downloadable with functions similar to the SEO toolbar.

    Then I started coming here and checking your tips on SEO. In one of your posts, you were telling your readers what you like using Google Analytics for so I decided to sign up for it and have been using it to check my progress eversince.

    This is Mel by the way ;-)

    ReplyDelete