Website Ranking - Check and Improve your Website Position

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 search engine ranking/position - (first 30 results) on the search engine results Page (SERPs).

Why is Your Website Ranking/Position 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 your search engine ranking isn't 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 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's position/search engine ranking 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 there 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 (requires API), Yahoo and MSN is easier using the ranking page www.googlerankings.com which allows you to check your Website position in the first 1000 results for each search engine.

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 ranking/positioning software like WebPostion Gold and Web CEO also incorporate tools for checking your website ranking. 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

To improve the search engine ranking of your website you need to understand search engines and what they are looking for, and how you provide them with it.

Starting with search Engines takes you through basic search engine principals and techniques designed to improve your website position and increase your website/search engine 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 it's difficult to be exact.