Website Ranking -What's Your Position?
Website ranking is about your position in the search engine results for a particular keyword. Search engine optimisation is about making a Website/Web pages with a high ranking/position - (first 30 results) on the search engine results Page (SERP).
Website Traffic Rankings
Website traffic rankings are often confused with website position rankings (covered in website ranking ). Traffic ranking are a measure of how much traffic you website receives.
Traffic rankings can be used as a comparison to see how your site is doing compared with your competitors. The values for traffic are themselves to be treated carefully as they rely on your site visitors installing the Alexa toolbar (very few have). They are useful as a trend gauge to see if your site is gaining or loosing popularity.
Thus you can't attach much significance to the numbers when they are roughly the same, only when they are grossly different. Is a website with an Alexa ranking of 80,000 more popular than one with a ranking of 70,000?- Don't know. Is a website with an Alexa ranking of 80,000 more popular than one with a ranking of 2,070,000?- definite yes!!
Checking You Traffic Ranking
You can check you traffic ranking directly on the Alexa website or here using the online tool.
Why your Website Ranking/Position is Important?
Your Website ranking or position for a particular keyword is what determines whether or not you receive visitors from the search engines. It is generally accepted that if you are not ranked in the top 30 search results for a particular keyword then as far as the search engines are concerned you don't exist for that keyword.
Check your Website Ranking Manually
To check your Website ranking for a particular keyword the go to the search engine whose position you want to check and enter your keyword. You then need to go through the results and try to locate your Website URL in the results.
This manual method of checking your Website ranking position is both time consuming and tedious. It is however the most reliable and search engine friendly.
Software tools to check your Website Ranking
There are many Website ranking tools and software packages that will automate this process of position checking and they are essential to most webmasters. However despite their use and prevalence the major search engines do not allow them. They are however tolerated. So in respect to the search engines please don't overdo the use of website ranking software.
Online Ranking Tools
The following sites provide free online tools for checking your position at the major search engines:
Checking your Website ranking at Goggle is easier using the ranking page www.googlerankings.com which allows you to check your Website position in the first 1000 results. They also have a tool for Yahoo- Yahoorankings.com http://www.googlesearchranking.com/yahoo/default/
Prsearch.net also have a website ranking tool to check your position ( first 1000 ) at all the major search engines -You can even enter multiple keywords.
http://www.searchguild.com/rankchecker.php - This tool requires a Google API (free from Google link provided) and will check your position each day for a selection of keywords.
Offline Website Ranking Tools
Search engine positioning software like WebPostion Gold and Web CEO also incorporate tools for checking your ranking at the search engines. As you would expect they offer far more features than the online tools and will check your position at far more search engines than the online tools.
They are however expensive and I would only recommend to someone who need to check multiple websites for keyword ranking-like professional web designers. For most the online ranking tools are more than adequate.
How to Improve Your Website Ranking
Your choice of Website theme is the main factor determining the ease of achieving high ranking. A Website niche that very few Websites are targeting will be easier than choosing an area that has lots of competition.
There are two principal ways of improving your website position: Web Page optimization and website Link generation. Web page optimization requires you to carefully construct your Web page around your keywords whereas website links are obtained by getting other websites to link to your website.
There are are number of free tools available for checking your web page. The ones I use are online tools designed to check meta tags, they do however produce a basic web page optimization report which is more than adequate for most needs.
Improving your website position should increase your website traffic. Various reports and observations suggest that a number one position will receive twice as many clicks as a number 5 position. Unfortunately search engines don't provide these figures so its difficult to be exact.
Meta Tag and web page optimization report tools:
Measuring Link Popularity
"Which search engines use link popularity as a factor in ranking pages?" Well, that question has become pretty moot these days. Just about every spider based search engine uses link popularity as a factor. So, how do you find out how much link popularity your site has? And how do you know which sites are actually linking to you? In this article, I'll tell you how you can find out the link popularity of your site in some of the major search engines.
1. AltaVista
In order to find out the number of sites linking to the domain mysite.com in AltaVista, you would type in link:mysite.com in AltaVista's search box. If you wish to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type in link:mysite.com -url:mysite.com.
If you want to find out how many sites are linking to a particular page (say mypage.html) in the mysite.com domain, you would type in link:mysite.com/mypage.html. Again, in order to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type in link:mysite.com/mypage.html -url:mysite.com.
Note that you should not type in the "www" or the "http://" prefixes.
2. AOL
AOL is a directory based engine. It takes its results from the Open Directory. Hence, the concept of link popularity is not very meaningful in AOL.
3. Direct Hit
There is no way you can find out the link popularity of your site in Direct Hit. This is because Direct Hit does not return the number of sites which match the search criterion. http://www.directhit.com/
4. Excite
There is no way you can find out the link popularity of your site in Excite. This is because Excite does not have a special command to measure the link popularity of your site.
5. Fast (http://www.alltheweb.com)
In order to find out the number of web sites linking to the domain mysite.com in Fast, click on the Advanced Search link. In the "Word Filters" section of the Advanced Search page, select "Must Include" from the first combo box. In the text box besides the first combo box, type in mysite.com. In the combo box to the right of the text box, select "in the link name". If you want to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, type in mysite.com in the "Exclude" text box in the "Domain Filters" section. Then, click on the "FAST Search" button.
In order to find the number of links to mypage.html in the mysite.com domain, you would type in mysite.com/mypage.html in the text box besides the first combo box. Again, in order to exclude links from within the mysite.com domain, type in mysite.com in the "Exclude" text box.
Note that you should not type in the "www" or the "http://" prefixes.
6. Google
In order to find out the number of sites linking to mysite.com in Google, you would type in link:mysite.com.
If you want to find out how many sites are linking to the page mypage.html in the mysite.com domain, you would type in link:mysite.com/mypage.html.
However, there is no way you can exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain from being counted.
Google considers www.mysite.com to be different from mysite.com. This means that typing in link:mysite.com will not include the links to www.mysite.com. If you want to find out the number of links to www.mysite.com, you have to type in link:www.mysite.com. And typing in link:www.mysite.com will not include the links to mysite.com either.
This is in contrast to AltaVista which includes links to the www.mysite.com domain when you try to find the number of links to mysite.com.
7. HotBot
There are two methods of measuring link popularity in Hotbot.
In the first case, in order to find out the number of sites linking to mysite.com, you can type in linkdomain:mysite.com. In order to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you can use linkdomain:mysite.com -domain:mysite.com.
Make sure that you do not use the "www" or "http://" prefixes when you use this method.
However, this method cannot be used to find out the number of links to specific pages in your site, i.e. you cannot use this method to find out the links to the page mypage.html in the domain mysite.com.
In order to find out the number of links to specific pages, choose "links to this URL" from the "Look for:" drop-down combo box and then type in the complete URL (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html) in the search box. In order to exclude links from within the mysite.com domain, type http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html -domain:mysite.com in the search box after choosing "links to this URL" from the combo box. Note that for the second method, you need to use the "http://" prefix.
Lastly, you should note that in the second method, typing http://www.mysite.com will only find links to the home page of the www.mysite.com domain. If there are some sites which have linked to some of the internal pages in your site rather than your home page, this will not be included in the link popularity count.
8. IWon
The method of measuring link popularity in IWon is the same as the first method in HotBot. However, unlike HotBot, IWon does not have an alternative method which can be used to measure the number of links to specific pages in a domain.
9. Lycos
In order to measure link popularity in Lycos, first click on the Advanced Search link to the right of the search box. To find out the number of sites linking to mysite.com in Lycos, you would type in ml:mysite.com in the search box. If you wish to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type in ml:mysite.com -h:mysite.com.
If you want to find out how many sites are linking to a particular page (say mypage.html) in the mysite.com domain, you would type in ml:mysite.com/mypage.html. Again, in order to exclude links from pages within the mysite.com domain, you would type in ml:mysite.com/mypage.html -h:mysite.com.
Note that you should not type in the "www" or the "http://" prefixes.
10. MSN
The method of measuring link popularity in MSN is almost the same as that in Hotbot. The first method is exactly the same. For the second method, click on the More Options tab, type in the complete URL in the "Search the web for:" text box and choose "links to URL" from the "Find:" drop-down combo box. However, unlike Hotbot, you cannot eliminate links from pages within the same domain using the second method.
Note that the More Options tab is displayed only after you search for something in MSN. It is not displayed in MSN's home page.
11. Netscape
Netscape is a directory based engine. It takes its results from the Open Directory. If no results are found in the Open Directory, it takes its results from Google. Since it is a directory based engine, the concept of measuring link popularity is not all that meaningful. You can type in link:mysite.com to measure the number of links to the domain mysite.com. In this case, Netscape will simply take its results from Google.
12. Northern Light
There is no special command for measuring link popularity in Northern Light. To get a very approximate idea of the number of sites linking to the domain mysite.com, you can type in mysite.com. In order to eliminate the references to the mysite.com domain from within the domain, you can type in mysite.com -url:mysite.com.
To get an approximate measure of the number of links to the page mypage.html in the domain mysite.com, you can type in mysite.com/mypage.html in the search box. Again, to eliminate the references to the page from within the mysite.com domain, you would type mysite.com/mypage.html -url:mysite.com
Don't type in the "http://" or "www" prefixes.
13. Webcrawler
There is no way you can find out the link popularity of your site in Webcrawler. This is because, like Excite, Webcrawler has no special command for measuring link popularity.
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060 For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&newsletter.htm
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