Everyone always wonders how their Web site is performing in the search engines and how they stack up against their competitors. They often ask questions like: What is my ranking in Google? How are my competitors doing in Yahoo? How many sites link to us?  To help answer a few of these questions, this week I thought I'd provide some initial guidelines to follow when starting to test your site's performance in the search engines.

Generally speaking, when looking at your search engine performance over time, allow time for any changes or tweaks to your Web site to take effect. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not a quick process and you definitely have to be patient when waiting for the average site to climb, even when you employ best practices. Rather than worrying about your ranking day to day, you should benchmark your Web site initially and then check back weekly, monthly, quarterly etc. I would argue that the longer periods will give you a better picture of where you stand than looking at short term results.

1. Do it by hand

I'm of the belief that when it comes to determining where your site (or your competitor's site) ranks for a particular term “right here-right now”, the best approach is to go to the search engines directly and just do the search. Although there are many tools out there that offer a quick solution via crawl-and-parse-type scripts, I have run into too many conflicting results on the same day at the same time with different tools. There are a number of reasons why these tools may appear inaccurate including location of the tool (i.e. a tool located in Canada might hit google.ca rather than google.com) or just plain poor scripting. Regardless, I believe the most accurate at-the-moment way to determine your rank is to do it yourself. I'm not saying don't use site rank or keyword rank tools, but do be careful what tools you use and always back it up with some good old-fashion searching.

2. Use your Analytics

Another obvious thing that you should be doing already is looking at your site analytics on a regular basis. Your analytics should show you vital search engine data including which bots are indexing your site and how often they are visiting, as well as visitor traffic directly from the search engine results pages (SERPs), what search terms were used to find you, and what pages they arrived at.

3. Use the tools provided by the big-boys themselves

Google and Yahoo! each provide a great set of tools for validating your Web site, promoting your sitemap and checking all of your vital stats such as inbound links, crawl errors and other items that if implemented incorrectly might affect the spiders and indexed pages, just to name a few.

• Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/)

• Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends)
  This is a great tool for determining popularity of your site (including a feed of indexed news items if applicable). Definitely something to be taken with a grain of salt, it is still extremely valuable as a “global view” type tool for determining things such as the popularity of certain keywords over others, traffic patterns from press releases, etc.
  

• Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)

Yahoo! also provides a number of extremely valuable search variables for researching site search engine performance. Most engines provide variable searches like these but Yahoo! appears to be the most accurate according to industry folk:

• Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
  Shows all pages that link to the exact page indicated. 
• Linkdomain:url.com keyword
  Shows all external pages containing the keyword listed that link to your site. 
• Linkdomain:url.com -keyword
  Shows all external pages not containing the keyword listed that link to your site.

4. Read it from the experts

There are obviously many great blogs and resources out there from some extremely talented SEO's, and we could probably compile a huge list of great ones. For now, here are a few of the ones I watch:

• searchenginewatch.com 
• searchengineland.com 
• seomoz.org

5. Keep up to date by reading it straight from the Horse's mouth

There are also some very valuable blogs for the average site owner looking to keep on top of the big search engines: 

• http://www.ysearchblog.com/ 
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ 
• http://blog.ask.com/

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