Member Avatar for AccurateAG

Hi All:

Just wanted to give you a tip on checking where your site ranks on the search engines.

DO NOT trust the automated tools; they are not looking for your site, they are looking for your URL. These are NOT the same.

Your URL will be something like example.com
Your Site is Your Company Name

How can you have more than one URL pointing to your site? Well, let's take a look.

Have you listed your site with any other sites, such as Manta, Yelp, Digg, MerchantCircle? Guess what--these can put your company's name in the search engine rankings. For example, one of my sites is on Page 1 of Bing for one of my keywords, BUT not the URL. In fact, that site has *3* listings on the first page of Bing: MerchantCircle, Digg, and Orange County Business Listings. These all point to my web site. My site is on Page 1 of Google, with my prime site. My site is on Page 1 of Yahoo, with Orange County Business Listings.

So what do we learn from this?
1. Do a MANUAL search every day.
2. Do the search on Google, Bing, and Yahoo; the results are not identical.
3. Look for your company, not just your URL

Keep track of where you rank every day. Personally, I keep track of:
Keyword ranking and site for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Alexa ranking and 5-day moving average
Google Backlinks
Yahoo backlinks
Pagerank

All this neatly fits into one spreadsheet page.

Remember the goal of SEO--get on Page 1 of Google, Bing, and Yahoo and INCREASE SALES! Don't focus on WHICH site is ranking for that keyword, just be glad it IS on Page 1!

I am interested in your responses.

John

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Member Avatar for MartinPlatt

Not really sure what you're getting at or what response you'd want.

A ranking is only ever for a web page. A web page has links, the only thing that is site related, loosely, is a count on the linkdomain.

I'm not really sure what you meant with of the Social Bookmarking part, other than that your site was listed?

Not sure I see the point of checking your rankings every day - for what purpose?
Once a week would give you a good indication of progress, as well as giving the search engines a chance to index the site, and find any new pages.

Member Avatar for AccurateAG

Hi Martin:

You asked a few questions. Here are my responses.

1. Why do I check every day? Well, I am self-taught in SEO, so I don't know what the usual standards are; I check on a daily basis because that seemed to be a good interval to check on the rankings. This way, if something severe happened to my site, then I would know quickly and be able to address the issues.

2. Why check by company name rather than URL? Because of my experience. I originally checked only by URL, but after a little while I found you could find my site through different URLs. These additional URLs are the result of my SEO work, such as directory postings, yellow pages listings, social media links, etc.

Since I have learned some things from Daniweb, I thought I would drop my $0.02 into the site. I was interested in other people's experience, to see how mine stacked up against other people's.

John

Not really sure what you're getting at or what response you'd want.

A ranking is only ever for a web page. A web page has links, the only thing that is site related, loosely, is a count on the linkdomain.

I'm not really sure what you meant with of the Social Bookmarking part, other than that your site was listed?

Not sure I see the point of checking your rankings every day - for what purpose?
Once a week would give you a good indication of progress, as well as giving the search engines a chance to index the site, and find any new pages.

Member Avatar for Dani

I think different things work differently for different people, based on the nature of the website. It *is* important to work on SEO daily, if that is a large part of your traffic. Long tail (ranking for millions of keywords that each don't get a lot of traffic) works better for some while short tail (ranking for a few keywords that each get a lot of traffic) works better for others.

DaniWeb focuses on long tail ... We get most of our traffic to individual forum thread pages.

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