How to Monitor your Search Engine Ranking
How to Monitor your Search Engine Ranking
Once again, with the kind help of BargainBrute.Com, America’s favorite place to shop online, we took a look at how you can protect your search engine rankings. Today we carry on with that theme by looking at what you should do to monitor your search engine rankings to ensure they do not fall down the index rankings.
As we have already learned, search engines determine how fast a potential client will see your product portfolio, so the higher up your website appears on these sometimes complicated engines, the better your site will do.
With the above in mind, once you have achieved the high ranking you have worked so hard to develop, you must continue to monitor your website’s health using all means possible.
Think of your search engine rankings as your online virtual portfolio; Is there any way you would let your stock be ruled by probability and market oscillations? Of course, you would not. After all, it is a no-brainer, not that much different from monitoring your search engine rankings.
I like to split any marketing campaign into two stages; Stage one is when you have finished designing and submitting your website to the main search engines, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and MSN, to name a few, and have witnessed your site climbing through the search rankings.
You will know when this stage has come to an end when, like most websites, your rankings are improving, but, although still climbing, they do appear to have reached a plateau. A plateau, which, if you do not regularly pay attention to it, will, like most things that have reached a plateau, have just one way to go, and that is down, which can only be avoided by prompt action by the webmaster.
It is now safe to move onto stage two, the actual monitoring and protection of your business.
In stage two, do not worry about your index position’s short-term variations, as short-term oscillations are an integral part of the search engine process.
However, the same cannot be said for any long-term changes you may notice, mainly if those changes signify a long-term downward trend. If this is the case, you should be prepared to act immediately.
How you accomplish this everchanging monitoring approach can be complicated; however, remember the process of analyzing the long-term trends of search engines rankings are imperative, as search engines can, at the drop of a hat, change their way of crawling your site, sometimes in such a subtle way, you may not even notice; That is, until one day, you click into your site via Google Analytics and discover the traffic to your website has dropped virtually to zero.
So how do I keep up with this ever-changing robotic world? There are many ways you can keep up with the ever-changing world of search engine “bots,” some better than others. The most straightforward way is by monitoring my search engine rankings by setting up a simple “Excel” chart that indicates the top rankings of any of my pages. Of course, if you go this route, it will not work if you do not remember to update the chart regularly, I do this every week, and it has become a regular fixture on my weekly outlook calendar schedule.
It has become quite clear that all search engines do not use the same formula when determining your actual website index ranking. Furthermore, it has also become clear that the major search engines, especially Google, will sometimes, without notice, change that formula to keep us, minions, on our toes and, of course, to stop their method from becoming overused. It is another illustration of how critical it is to continue monitoring your Search Engine Ranking if you want your website to succeed.
Now we get to the race. How do you keep ahead of your competitors? Apart from generating a top-notch website, which your dear old mother would be proud of, you do not have absolute control of your competitors. However, it is essential to realize that your website’s position in the index will fluctuate directly compared to your competitor’s ranking.
Bottom line, if your closest competitor rises in the rankings, the chances are is that you will be pushed back down the rankings ladder. I am afraid that goes with the territory; However, this does not mean you have to sit back and put up with it; on the contrary. By precisely monitoring their successes, you will learn from them. You will alter your marketing strategy to combat their now elevated position in the search ranking index.
Finally, just a quick word about the different search engines, all of which monitor your website. As mentioned, there are possibly 100s or possibly 1000s of search engines out in the internet land, and the popularity of each does fluctuate daily.
However, leading analysts are quick to inform us that most of the traffic you will receive on your website originates from just ten of them. I will not list them all, as a quick search will detail them in all their glory; however, your top priority for you, the webmaster, should be to find just who they are and check them out every week.
Well, my dear friends, I have come to the end of this short how-to narrative, and I thank you all most sincerely for taking the time to read it.
