As you begin to work on your search engine strategy, you should have certain tools available to help monitor your success and/or failure. Since we’re all about moving forward or should I say upward, we’ll keep things positive. Having the correct tools will help you monitor and achieve your goal of getting high rankings in the search engines. Most hosting companies will offer you web statistics. My host provides Awstats which provides some good raw usage data. I use it mostly for my daily unique visitors. This is a very important stat and we want to see this go up. This alone, will not make your site successful. I once read where a site received a tremendous short term hit of traffic because they had keywords/content related to two star’s who got married in a surprise wedding. It didn’t have anything to do with their business, so it was temporary useless traffic. This was not a typical scenario, so we’ll just agree that an increase in unique visitors will be deemed as a positive for your site. We need to go past this and look at other information that can help with our pursuit of high rankings. For this, I have chosen to use Caphyon’s very excellent Advanced Web Ranking software which by the way is compatible on both Mac and PC.
You can choose to use a competing product, but this will be a great investment. If it seems a little daunting at first, hang in there. Advanced Web Ranking will allow you to enter keywords and keyword phrases for your site. What’s more, it provides a Google look up tool that will provide you with information on the more popular keyphrases. If you looked at your stats, you might see only a few people came to your site for a specific keyword phrase. This doesn’t take into account that you might be 5 pages in, yet there are a greater number of searches for that keyword. AWR will let you know which keyphrases are important based upon numbers. Knowing which keyword phrases are important will allow us to increase our rankings and track them on a daily basis. Additionally, if you find a good keyword phrase, it’s recommended that you create an optimized page on your site for that keyword. We’ll get into the specifics of that strategy in later posts. For now, it’s prudent to use Advanced Web Ranking to understand the terms or keyword phrases of your target audience. Start out with 10-20 keyword phrases and start tracking them. You can choose from countless search engines. I focus on Google, MSN and Yahoo. If I can acheive higher rankings in those three, then I’ve done my job. Once you enter your top 2o or so keywords and keyphrases, you’ll see how you rank in the major search engines for these terms. It’s quite possible that you’ll notice a keyword phrase that has immense popularity among your target demographic, but your lack of traffic is due to poor visibility. Plug in your terms, allow AWR to scour the web and select overview. If you’ve ever wondered, “How am I doing?”, this overview will tell you. I use this tool every day. Matter of fact, it’s the first program launced and I review the daily results with a morning cup of joe. The green plus signs mean that you’ve been added to that specific engine for a specific keyword. Green arrows are good and red arrows are bad. SEO is a long term process, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see high rankings right away. If your strategy isn’t working, then it’s time to change. If it’s working, then keep moving forward. Either way, AWR and similar tools will help you monitor what’s important and keep you focused on your goal of acheiving high rankings.
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