exclusive blogger templates: Monitoring and Analyzing Your Rankings

So now you have done all the hard work it's time to sit back and watch all those visitors come flooding in.

Well not quite. If you have got everything 'spot on' and Luck is on your side then indeed the above may happen on your first attempt. However it's far more likely that you will need to modify and build upon what you have achieved so far.

So how do you know whether the process has worked and what you need to do to improve the situation. The answer lies in Search Engine Statistics. You need to monitor both the visitors coming from the various search engines and your page's position against the keywords and phrases you have optimized your page for.

Finding your Ranking.
First of all test whether your page is listed. To do this simply go to each Search Engine and perform a search on your page URL. If your page is returned all well and good, if not then it is not yet in the engines database.

If your page is not yet listed, then perform the same test for your homepage. If after a considerable amount of time ( over a month ) has passed since you either submitted your home page or the date at which you knew your home page was listed then consider submitting your new page to the search engine.

If your new page is listed then all well and good. You now need to find out where in the list of results your page appears for your chosen keyword or phrase. There are a couple of ways to this,

By Hand
This is simple but can be a little time consuming. Simply enter your chosen keyword / phrase in the search engine and scan through the results. If by the time you get to the 10th page of results ( usually representing 100 results ) you haven't found your page, like me you will probably be bored and give up looking. Whether you are listed in position 6 or beyond the first 100 results make a note in your plan.

By Software
If you followed our advice in the Page Construction section and gave the WebPosition Gold software a try you may have already discovered that this piece of software will automatically produce a report of your Page's Position in all Search Engines against your chosen keywords and phrases. If you haven't already done so then we recommend again that you give it a try download a Free Trial without any Obligation,

To obtain your Free Copy click here.

Monitoring the Visitors arriving from the Various Search Engines / Directories.
This is where the TrafficFile Gold Service really comes in to it's own. By placing a Gold level tracker on your page the TrafficFile system will be recording many aspects of each and every visitor for you including,

which Search Engine they arrived from and
the Keywords and Phrases they entered to find you.

If you haven't worked it out already, here's why this information is more important to you than the actual position of your page in a results list.
Many people will talk about search engine positioning as the be all and end all of attracting visitors from Search Engines. In general it is true that for any given keyword or phrase the higher you appear the more visitors you will receive. However remember right back in the Keyword Selection section what said about going for Keywords and Phrases with high number of monthly searches. Well it's like this,

Ranking 15 on a phrase which searched for 1,000,000 times per month is better than ranking 1 on a phrase which is only searched for 100 times per month.

By ranking 1 on the 100 searched per month phrase you will be getting over 70% of the people clicking on your page. That's somewhere between 70 and 100 visitors per month.
( and that's the best you will ever get for this keyword or phrase - there is no room for improvement. )

By ranking 15 on the 1,000,000 searches per month phrase you will be getting only about 1%. But 1% of 1,000,000 equals 10,000 visitors per month. Now isn't that more like it !
What's more there is massive room for improvement. If you can now refine and move up you will get a bigger and bigger % of the 1,000,000. If you get into the top 5 you should be getting over 100,000 visitors per month from this one keyword / phrase.

Now within the TrafficFile Gold Reports you will see ( in real time ) the total number of visitors that each search phrase and search engine are generating for you. Combine this with your actual position and you will see in an instant the best keywords and phrases for you to pursue in your next round of refinement.

Not only that, you will discover new phrases which neither you or your competition have thought of, but which are now generating traffic for you. For instance if your keyword or phrase was "gardening books", with the TrafficFile reports you will see visitors using this phrase, but also other phrases such as "vegetable gardening books". Now because you haven't specifically optimized for this new phrase ( but only part of it ), you may well be ranked fairly low, but already you are receiving a significant number of visitors. From this information, if the new phrase still applies to your product, you may well decide to build a second page targeting this new phrase. In this way by monitoring the visitors form the search engines you can discover new profitable avenues which the early Keyword Research failed to turn up.

To review the full list of benefits and features of the TrafficFile Gold Service please go to,