Making Tracks

Checking your search engine placement progress can be a tedious job, and quite time consuming. Most articles and information on the subject will lead you to use a service like position agent at bcentral, or another tool that will take a keyword from you and let you know how your site is doing in the top engines under that keyword or keyword phrase. In most cases they only bring back results for the top forty pages of the top 7 engines. This is a common practice by many and often times it leads to search engine frustration and lack of tracking. Many people fail to find their sites in worthy positioning and constantly rework and resubmit. This is very self defeating and can get you thrown out as a spammer. People give up and move on to other ways of promoting their sites and leave the hope of Front Page placement behind. Front Page search engine placement to them seems like a waste of time and is often compared to winning the lottery. I track a little differently. It is much more revealing than any of the usually prescribed methods. It is my goal to help you see the difference, between where you "can be found" and where you are "being found". Trying to find out where you *can be* found is the needle inthe haystack approach I outlined above. This involves hours of guessing at what you think the possible keyword combinations are that you may be found under and submitting to the position agents and waiting for a good results. The more indexes you build the more time you can lose with these methods. There's even more effort you have to put into inputting keywords to check the progress of your possible placement. If no results yielded yet, then plan on several sessions trying to track down where you can be found. They just don't index them the as fast as they used to. This is a major pain and you can miss so many keyword phrases that it is an empty approach to finding out anything about your efforts. Finding out where you *are being* found is a much more effective plan. It tells you what's working, results come to you, and it tells you how people are thinking to find you. You're not guessing how you think they should be finding you. You're learning how your clients think and how they already found you. Okay, so how do I find out how my visitors find me? I use a simplestatistics tracker on my sites. Your hosting company may provide stats for you check into it. They should include a section for referrers or top referrers. If so your all set. Find a way to access those stats. Check the referrers section and they will tell you how you were found. If it was through a search engine, click on the link and it should bring you to the page you were found on, complete with the keywords used, listed right there. You can check your progress every week and find out where you are popping up. If your host does not have tracking software go to www.goldstats.com or some other FREE stats place and get yourself a statistics tracker on your site right away! For me, marketing without referrer stats is like... ...trying to catch a fly in the dark.