Monitor your Search Engine Placement (Serps)

Your site is up and you can see in your stats page (www.yourdomain.com/stats) that you have visitors to your website.  How would you follow your position in the search engines without manually going to the search engines and typing in your search terms and wading thru the results. 

First of all, manually searching through the search results pages are less than accurate.  Google is moving toward personalized searches more and more.  You and I could do the same search and perhaps see different results.  Another reason you may see different results is various data centers (of the 700 at Google) may not be updated.  Our searches could come from different data centers.  Here is a very nice simple script to check your serps.  It gives the results for Google MSN,  Yahoo! and AltaVista.  This script just gives the average position which is fine for general checking.

Search for the placement of the broader search terms over a period of time.  Check singular and plural forms of the search terms. If you see a consistent issue with the same search term, a few simple adjustments could correct the problem.  Monitoring your position gives you an edge on the competition that has likely built a website and perhaps hasn't continued link building or updated content.  You can appreciate any little edge you may get in search results. 

The placement of your site in the results page is very important.  You should aim at the first page and if your market is not terribly competitive you should aim at the #1 spot increasing the traffic to your site by a huge margin.  In some markets just simply being on the first page is sufficient.

Don't expect to be in the #1 spot for your search term right off, these things take time with a lot of little tweaks.  Studying the results page positions help you to understand what actually is in need of attention.  Perhaps you need to adjust the title of your page, add some links to gain some rank or perhaps you just need to adjust some of your content verbiage.

Magnolia Web Design is presently working on providing an SEO solutions to meet the needs of Small Business as well as Church and non-profit organizations, helping you reach the first page or the first position with your search terms.