Search Engine Positioning - What is your current position in them?

By Peter Keres
http://www.googlerankings.com

Greetings.

As a web designer and eCommerce solutions company, we are used to the good old "make us top 5 in this and that search engine" phrase. Keywords? Oh yeah, well keywords should be "business, computers and IT".

There it is, the most typical request that will either need a budget of at least a couple hundred thousand dollars, or be forgotten entirely.

You may not rank in the top five for widely used keywords. But then, people are used to the fact that the first 10 or 20 results for important queries are usually advertisements and bartel agreements, even if it not noted anywhere. If you enter a catchy phrase, and you are tired of the top few companies that dominate the market, you will likely to go for the so called "second page" of the search results, where enthusiastic amateurs await.

Thus in other words: if you can't make it to the top 10, you will still be found on the internet. It is nowhere equal to be the 11th or the 111th for a given keyword in let's say Google. People will visit the second page of the results, but will most likely never hear of companies found on the 11th page.

Where is your site? You have no idea. If it isn't in the top 50, you rarely have the patience to sit trhough the countless records and try to find your own.

You may use a keyword rank analyzer software, but it will most likely either ask for your Google API, or your credit card number.

Our company has found this to be quite problematic.

Thus we created a little tool that would look up our actual position in Google for a given keyword.

This is all fine, but then, we found the method we used, the plain query through http servers of Google to be against Google's policies. You wouldn't tell what happened next.

And no, you were wrong. We asked for permission from Google to be able to keep the service as long as it's free. And we got their approval.

So there it is, out on the web, a tool which you may use to determine where you page exactly is for a give keyword. ( the domain name is www.googlerankings.com ).

What to do with this information? Now that you know where you're at, what is the next step? You may either find that you are not even within the top 1000 sites for the keywords you'd like. You may not have the proper resources to score that high, unless your company is one of the leading brands of the net. However, you may be suprised how well you can be targeted with two word and three word phrases. Why is that so? For whenever you enter an additional word, Google will restrict the results to the websites that feature both, or all three, four, five words.

Thus this tool can be used to tell: what chances do you have with creating phrases on your website that lure traffic, and properly targeted traffic, instead of just catching the wind of ten times more people who are not interested in your services or products.

In case all you need is traffic and you don't much care for what keyword you get it with, this tool can be useful to determine small gaps in the search engine databases, words that people often search for, but no major sites register with. Once you see where you're on the list for such words and phrases you may decide to increase the number of occurance of these strings in order to reach a better position on the results page.

Please be careful,

you may need to avoid using words out of context or simply too often, for search engines and directories are created in order to filter out such attempts.

The tool at www.googlerankings.com will thus tell you where you're at but will not suggest you anything on what you may do to increase this rank.

You may access it freely on the URL above.

Good luck with optimizing your site.