Making Tracks

By Richard Bolduc
Posted Saturday, June 19, 2004

Checking your search engine placement progress can be a tedious job, and
quite time consuming.

Most articles and information on the subject will lead you to use a service
like position agent at bcentral, or another tool that will take a keyword
from you and let you know how your site is doing in the top engines under
that keyword or
keyword phrase. In most cases they only bring back results for the top forty
pages of the top 7 engines.

This is a common practice by many and often times it leads to search engine
frustration and lack of tracking. Many people fail to find their sites in
worthy positioning and constantly rework and resubmit. This is very self
defeating and can get you thrown out as a spammer.

People give up and move on to other ways of promoting their sites and leave
the hope of Front Page placement behind. Front Page search engine placement
to them seems like a waste of time and is often compared to winning the
lottery.

I track a little differently. It is much more revealing than any of the
usually prescribed methods. It is my goal to help you see the difference,
between where you "can be found" and where you are "being found".

Trying to find out where you *can be* found is the needle inthe haystack
approach I outlined above. This involves hours of guessing at what you think
the possible keyword
combinations are that you may be found under and submitting to the position
agents and waiting for a good results. The more indexes you build the more
time you can lose with these methods.

There's even more effort you have to put into inputting keywords to check the
progress of your possible placement. If no results yielded yet, then plan on
several sessions trying to track down where you can be found. They just don't
index them the as fast as they used to. This is a major pain and you can miss
so many keyword phrases that it is an empty approach to finding out anything
about your efforts.

Finding out where you *are being* found is a much more effective plan. It
tells you what's working, results come to you, and it tells you how people
are thinking to find you. You're not guessing how you think they should be
finding you. You're learning
how your clients think and how they already found you.

Okay, so how do I find out how my visitors find me? I use a simplestatistics
tracker on my sites. Your hosting company may provide stats for you check
into it. They should include a section for referrers or top referrers. If so
your all set. Find a way to access
those stats. Check the referrers section and they will tell you how you were
found. If it was through a search engine, click on the link and it should
bring you to the page you were found on, complete with the keywords used,
listed right there. You can check your progress every week and find out where
you are popping up.

If your host does not have tracking software go to (www.goldstats.com )or some
other FREE stats place and get yourself a statistics tracker on your site
right away!

For me, marketing without referrer stats is like...

...trying to catch a fly in the dark.
About the Author
Richard Bolduc, the webmaster for
The Rhinos Web, a featured speaker and the well known author
of "Front Page, a Webmaster Guide". Guaranteed front page
placement in all the major search engines for under $100.
Results Shown Here. (http://www.rhinosweb.com/frontpage.html)