Q&A Spot: Good Tracking Tools
Question:
Is there an easy way of checking on a daily basis how I rank with specific keywords? I do this manually at the moment by typing some keywords into each major search engine but its time consuming.
Anita Baldrick, Web4U, Halifax
Answer:
Try this http://www.checkrankings.com
Its free, and it allows you to check up to 10 keywords daily with the major search engines. Better still it graphs out you results so you can visually see your trends over a period of time.
Another one is http://www.prsearch.net, this tools focuses only on Google but allows for the checking of 15 keyphrases and displays the results in an easy to see format.
Here’s some other interseting tools you may also find useful:
Robots.txt and tags
You can restrict what search engine spiders see at your site, which links they follow etc. using the Robots.txt file and the robots metatags. This is useful if there are content pages you dont want to be indexed – Your ‘contact us’ page for example, or pages you have dedicated to specific customers.
Google Mashups
…is the term given to the overlaying of data onto Google Maps. Many of you will have come across google earth and google maps. An interesting application is to look at a map of where your web visitors come from. All you need to do is copy a bit of javascript to your site and away you go; get it at http://www.gvisit.com
Want to track and map bird migrations, solar eclipses, pubs in London? – whatever you want to see graphically on a google map probably someone has already done it – see http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com
Link Building
A couple of tools related to this months topic..
Try – http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
A fascinating tool which allows you to see graphically how Google sees you in relation to similar sites.
…and another useful link tracking tool – http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php