How to Check Your Website’s Ranking.

The best way to find out about your site’s ranking is go to the search engine and enter the keywords you want to check. When the results pages come up, 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 optimizing because most people won’t look any further than that. This is simply common sense. Would you look through tons of pages or would you look at the first page or two then move on?

You should do this with each search engine and directory until you have an 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 others doing the same thing you are 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: www.yourdomain.com” 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 at least 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. 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 find your site.

If your website is not anywhere near 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 attempt to deliver sites that the population of web surfers 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.

Another thing you can do is to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed. Go to each search engine and enter the complete URL of the page 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 you should 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.

All of these tools, and many others, offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. It is important to know where you stand so you can continue with your SEO plan and move on to other aspects of marketing you site as well.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.com

m.p. Hill comes from the business, medical and insurance marketing fields. He is an information enthusiast writing about a general range of subjects from business, medical, internet and many general subjects. He is also the owner of Expert SEO writing numerous articles on good SEO techniques and low cost methods for driving visitors to your sites and also how to keep from getting banned by Google