Why The Microscope?

If you are running a proper business on the internet then you should have that business and traffic it receives under a microscope!

When it comes to checking your search engine ranking, you can go about this one of two ways. You can either do it manually or you can get software and have it down automatically. No matter which way you choose, you should start with about 10 keywords that you will use to see how well your site is ranking.

Picking the right keywords to use is probably the most important part of the whole process. Picking the wrong keywords will not get you the accurate results you are looking for. So here we go. Here is how you can check your search engine ranking.

To check it manually you will first need to go to one of the top search engines. It doesn’t matter which one. However, please note that you will get different results for each. For example, your site might be in spot number 3 on Bing and not show up at all on Google’s first page.

Now once you get to your favorite search engine just type in the first keyword you want to check your rankings for. Once the results appear, look over them quickly to see if your site shows up. For best results check the first 10 pages to see if you show up anywhere in the top 100.

The second way to check your rankings is of course with automated software. There are plenty of free ones on the market, just do a quick Google search and you will get a list of them. Using software to check rankings has quite a few advantages. The biggest advantage is that you can check your rankings on multiple search engines all at once. And usually you can plug in all of your keywords at once which makes the process much quicker.

Most of your SEO traffic will come from Google of course…

No matter which way you choose to do it, make sure you check your rankings on a regular basis. You need to see where that traffic is coming from so that you can apply the 80/20 rule to your hard work. The tool we use for that is Google Analytics because it will actually breakdown your analysis for you and track the keywords that people are using to reach your sites.

Another way to check your traffic statistics is with your cPanel (hosting site) and that will show some breakdown of the pages on your site that this traffic is reaching.

You see most of your efforts and your posts, that you will make to your blog or niche blog etc., will not be how the traffic reaches your site. What I mean by this is that you have to write killer content and use keywords on your blog posts to bring in your traffic. Take time in your posts and offer up valuable information that people can use or that is news worthy or just plain entertaining! The best is to use a variety of both of course.

Another way to see how you are doing is go to Alexa and check out your rating there and the many other useful things, like what kind of targeted audience you have reading your site and posts.

Well I hope this helps a little. If you would like for me to continue offering up advice like this and give you more insights then please leave your comments below.

Also if you feel this is worthwhile information that you think someone else would enjoy then hit the tweet button above or better yet tell your friends on Facebook or other social networking sites about this information.

I look forward to hearing from you as always. Let’s continue to grow our business together and I would love to have you share some of your ideas as well.

There are simple ways to increase your traffic for Free. I talk about 3 simple ways here.

Talk Soon,
Chris