How can I track my keyword rankings in search engines?

Question

As an effort to SEO my website, I was wondering if there's a way to keep track of my keyword rankings. If so, how can I do it? What are some good suggestions to keep track of my website's rankings?

Answer 1

Not a programming question, but I'll answer it anyway. If you want to get many stats about different keywords, use Google adwords. They have a keyword search tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which will help you tremendously. You can expand each keyword to get more specific data by market, time of year, etc.

Answer 2

Assuming you really want to code something yourself (which would make this into a programming question), I'd suggest using wget or cUrl to periodically retrieve search engine results and check where you are positioned.

Obviously, being less detectable may sound like a good thing, too, in which case suites like Selenium allow you to do the same thing through your actual browser.

Answer 3

There are many good Analytics programs out there that are really helpful! Google's is a free one http://www.google.com/analytics but there a several if you type "Website Analytics" into any search engine.

They tell you things such as how people are finding you, what pages they're looking at, how long they stay there, your bounce rate, geographically info...

Answer 4

If you would like to track what searches your site is coming up in, I strongly suggest that you use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster tools shows you:

• what queries your web site shows up in (this is very interesting)
• how many impressions a query generated
• the (approximate) click through rate on each impression
• the average position where your site shows up (for each query)

It also gives you loads of information on the keywords Google found while crawling your site, some HTML suggestions (to make your page easier to crawl/search), and loads of other information that will make your life easier.

The only drawback is that, if you set it up today, it will take some time to start generating results. If you're looking for instant results on specific keywords, you might want to look at a Firefox add-on like SEOBook's Toolbar (which includes the Search Engine Ranking Checker).