Do You Know Your Website Rankings?

By Barry Harrison
Posted Sunday, November 28, 2004

Knowing where your site ranks in the leading Search Engines is critical. If you can improve your rankings, more potential clients will find your site. It's that simple. You need to find out if you’re serious about attracting new customers. Search engines are responsible for driving a huge amount of traffic. Knowing where your site ranks in the leading Search Engines is critical. If you can improve your rankings, more potential clients will find your site. It’s that simple.

HOW TO CHECK YOUR POSITION IN THE SEARCH ENGINES

You could, if you had all the time in the world and enjoy building Excel spreadsheets, check your site’s ranking in each Search Engine—for every one of your significant keywords and phrases. It’s not hard, it’s just incredibly tedious. And since rankings change, you’ll need to repeat the process…again and again to identify trends.

Fortunately, there are inexpensive, easy-to-use tools that eliminate the drudgery. Once you set them up, you can get detailed and comprehensive reports in just a few minutes. Which Search Engines to check? There are thousands of them out there, but most small businesses need to focus on just a handful: Google, MSN, Yahoo, Lycos and AOL.

INEXPENSIVE SOFTWARE and FREE TRIALS

The following companies offer web position software and free trials or money-back guarantees. I’m not making any specific recommendations, just providing sources for you to check out if you’re interested.

WebPosition Gold 2 [free to try; $149.00 to buy]
(http://www.webposition.com/)
WebPosition Gold offers 9 tools to help you monitor and boost your rankings. It supports 85+ search engines and directories. Features include: Submitter (to submit pages to search engines), Reporter (to generate different management reports of your site's rankings) and Scheduler (to automatically check your site's rankings).

Keyster [$149.95 with a 30 day money-back guarantee]
(http://www.keyster.net/)
Keyster automatically tracks your web site rankings on all the leading search engines, helps you create keyword lists, and improve your link popularity. It also offers a Market Share report generator that estimates how many visitors you and your competitors are getting each month from free search engine traffic.

Agent Web Ranking [free to try; $150.00 to buy]
(http://www.agentwebranking.com/)
Providing many of the same features as the other programs, Agentwebranking claims to produce more reliable and accurate positioning reports by emulating a manual search. They offer multi-lingual reports and a global perspective.

WHAT DO THESE REPORTS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

See a sample from our most recent report showing our rankings in Google for our most important keywords: (http://www.resolvedigital.com/common/search_pos.html?Id=143)

THE BEST WAY TO FIND NEW CLIENTS

Make it easy for them to find you. If you’d rather not go through the process of selecting, purchasing and setting up the software, Resolve can provide all the necessary reports for you.

About the Author
Barry Harrison and Jim Grady are the co-authors of REDiTIPS. REDiTIPS is a free monthly newsletter that offers simple techniques to market your Web site and grow your business. We provide practical, low-cost ideas to help you promote your small business and reach new potential customers.