Use Our Free SEO Tools to check your
Search Engine Optimization results
Up until this point, we have been builing our website with SEO as a consideration and getting our site noticed by the Search Engines. Now, we will take a look at how we can monitor our work to date, and additionally monitor the effects of making changes to our web pages.
The first place to look is your web server logs. Most web hosts provide access to at least 1 server stats package that produces various reports from your server logs. Log into your Hosting control panel and find what is provided and look at the reports that are produced.
Some of the useful information that you can see from most packages are things like pageviews, unique visitors, visitors, referers, search stats. All of these things give you an idea about what is going on and how (and how many) people are finding your site. Checking the logs on a weekly basis should only take a few minutes and help you plan your strategies for the next week.
We provide several tools on this website that will assist you in monitoring your progress. Here, we will describe a bit about what these tools actually tell you.
Page Rank Checker allows you to look up the Google Toolbar Pagerank of up to 10 sites. PageRank or PR is one of the most mis-understood measures about a website. In a nutshell, PR is simply a measure from 0-10 of the Popularity of a particular webpage. There are a few articiles that describe how it is calculated in detail if you are interested. Basically it is calculated where every link to a webpage is a "vote" for the popularity of that page. A vote from a higher ranked page can have a higher value. Summary - PR is an (approximate) measure of page importance based on how many other pages have "voted" for it with a link to it. Don't get hung up if after several months your site or page only has a PR of 2 or 3.
Multi DC PR Check allows you to check if the PR of your page is the same at all of Google's Datacenters. Sometimes, when there is an update in progress, some Datacenters show different information.
Internal Page Rank Tool shows you the PR for all the pages of your website that are indexed. This is probably the most useful PR tool of all of them. When looking at the results, it will give an indication of how many pages are indexed. Where the PR varies a lot, it may give an indication of how many links each Internal page has pointing to it.
Link Popularity is an indication of how your link-building has gone (or is going). This gives an indication of how many external sites link to you. This is a really useful tool to use to check up on your competitors and see what they have done. It may also reveal some possible sites where you could request a link from!
Indexed Pages will identify how many of your pages have been indexed. Quite often on a new website you may only get 1 or 2 pages indexed. By using this tool, you can keep an eye on when the Search Engines start to crawl all pages of your site and index them all.
The SERP Checker should be your most valuable friend. Once your site has been crawled and most of your pages indexed, you will want to see where your site falls in the SERPs for your keywords. By using this tool you can quickly see how well you are doing and how succesful your SEO efforts have been to date.
All of these tools basically run queries on the Search engines and allow you to see a lot of information in one place. The Search Engines vary in how long they take to update. Sometimes, a change you make will be picked up by the SE's and be reflected within a few days. At other times, it may take several weeks for your efforts to become visible.
As the results are sometimes slow to change you probably should initially consider a weekly strategy for your SEO efforts. Plan on doing an amount of work, then check in about a Weeks time as to the progress and effectiveness of your efforts. Once your site is more established, you will probably work on a Monthly cycle of adding content, building backlinks, modifying pages etc.
It is also worthwhile to take a snapshot of the results before doing any major work on your website. It is possible that if you make some drastic changes to your pages that your results will change. In cases like this, you will probably want to carefully monitor the progress of what you are doing.