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Step 11 - Check Your Website Ranking
One of the rewards of a well optimized website is the increase in search engine ranking. Website rankings can fluctuate a great deal almost on a daily basis, and keeping an accurate record of rankings over time is very important. Web marketers want to ensure they get an accurate picture of their own website's position in order to react to any changes in search engine algorithms or competing website strengths.
Websites that rely on visitor traffic from the search engines for leads, sales, and any other types of search engine marketing want to know how well their target keywords are performing. Whether you are in the middle of a campaign targeting new keyword phrases for a well established website, or your site has just passed the first month of being online, you want to get an accurate report of your rankings.
In addition to checking on your own rankings, you may also want to check on your competition from time to time to see if they are gaining or loosing positions compared to your own rankings.
The manual and automatic rank checking options
As you probably have guessed manually checking your search engine rankings is time consuming and tedious, not to mention the lack of accuracy and the record keeping aspect. The search engines can make searching for a specific site a little easier by giving users the ability to retrieve a larger search result per page, usually up to one hundred per page. Even with this advanced feature, the ranking check can take a long time to complete if you have hundreds of keywords in your list and a handful of websites. So, if you have a site that you are serious about, you can't pass up the ease and convenience of automated ranking reporting tools.
The search engines' view of automated rank checking tools
There is one main drawback to checking your search engine rankings with automated tools. The search engines don't like automated tools downloading their search results pages without an actual human visitor seeing them. Why, you may wonder? The answer lay in the search engine's revenue model. Search engine profits are driven by the number of "eyeballs" seeing not only the natural search results, but the dozens of advertisers' ads who are bidding on the same keywords the user typed in. It's no wonder, the search engines have taken steps to limit the automated robots querying their results.
Conclusion
Checking your website's ranking becomes necessary once your site achieves a minimum level of popularity and traffic. You need to get a detailed picture of your site's ranking by keyword and search engines so you can better target your optimization of specific sub pages of your website or increase inbound links to pages that needs some more "link juice" to get higher ranking. We recommend using both Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics to safely check your ranking without the risk of getting penalized.
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