Monitor and Tweak Your Way to Great Rankings

No one apart from the search engines knows which algorithms (the rules used to determine site rankings) are used. Each search engine algorithm is different. Therefore it is almost impossible to get all of the pages on your site ranked for your target keywords at the first try.

This is where monitoring and tweaking comes into play.

Part 1 - Monitoring Your Site's Rankings

You need to know where your site ranks in the various major search engines for your keywords. Currently the major search engine spiders are GoogleBot (Google), Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo!), Teoma (Ask Jeeves).

Sites generally do not get ranked instantly. It takes time for your site to appear. Sometimes one page will be indexed and appear in the search results before other pages. This is perfectly normal. Spiders generally index the home page more often than other pages.

Do not monitor your position on an hourly or even daily basis - search engine rankings fluctuate on a day to day basis. This is normal. You should be concerned with long term trends. Therefore leave a minimum of one week between monitoring your position.

You can check your site's positions manually, or use one of the various commercial or free monitoring tools.

Contrary to popular belief there is no way a search engine can ban your site if you running automatic queries. They can however ban the IP address of the machine making the query. Therefore, if you do decide to run an application to monitor your site's position. ensure you run the checks from an IP address other than the one your site is running on. This is not an issue when your site is hosted at a remote location.

Once you have a rankings report, check it against your previous report. You should be concerned with the trends, not individual rankings. Are my keywords going up or down the rankings? Are one or more keywords under performing?

When monitoring your rankings, don't forget to continue to check your log files for new keyword possibilities. Your site might be found for keywords you have never considered. Some of the keywords might be lower in the results than you'd like but can provide excellent secondary keywords to target.

In the next issue I will finish off this introductory search engine optimization series by going over a basic introduction to tweaking your site to maximize your rankings.

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