How To Check Your Site's Ranking
Author: James Mahony

If you're seriously interested in knowing about SEO, you need
to think beyond the basics. This informative article takes a
closer look at things you need to know about SEO.

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.

Once you begin to move beyond basic background information, you
begin to realize that there's more to SEO than you may have
first thought.

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.

Don't limit yourself by refusing to learn the details about
SEO. The more you know, the easier it will be to focus on
what's important.


About The Author: James Mahony is the founder of
http://www.searchmama.com - A site dedicated to Search Engine
Optimization SEO Tips :: http://www.thedomaintycoons.com ::
http://www.articlesforwebsitecontent.com