Keeping track of keywords

Is there an easy way to find out your rankings?

[Tahmi]

Hi everyone!

First off, thanks to everyone for posting their knowledge here! I’m really a jewelry designer who decided to do her own website design and promotion – so I’m not a real webmaster. But I’ve learned so much from you guys – my site went live just after the July Google dance, and this time around I’m already in with a PR of 5! Yippee!

But now comes the polishing and the main content of my question. Short of going to Google and doing a search for every combination of words on my site, is there a handy tool somewhere that you could plug in your website address and it would tell you under which key words you are indexed for at the top of Google? I’ve been watching my logs for the past few days and noticed people reaching my site through some really interesting combinations of keywords. If you do searches on what I would think would be the main keywords for my site, I’m not found anywhere near the top of the list. But for finds on keywords that really have nothing to do with me (but, for example, they appear in the titles of some of my jewelry) I’m in the top 3 spots on google! Go figure...

Any direction would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Tahmi

[nancyb]

Hi Tahmi and welcome to WebmasterWorld! There are a number of us jewelry folk here doing it all :)

There are tools, but google gets extremely annoyed when you use any kind of an automated tool to search their database. A number of people here have had their sites penalized just because of that. So, I would stay away from any automated tool on G!.

I would recommend looking at your titles again and making sure that they actually contain terms related to how you want to be found. Titles are all important!

[Macguru]

Hi Tahmi,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
Did you read paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com]? She builded it to show the way around.

As nancyb, mentionned. Automated tools are not allowed on Google. You can check on their own site and they are very specific about this. Some sites got banned and some users got kicked from using google at all, under certain abusive circumstances.

Automated tools exist and there are some ways to use them. But you never know what kind of pot a search engine company is keeping on the back burner. When you learn, it's too late.

I do it by hand via dial up connexions (swithing IP and ISP for each query) for all my clients. Just to stay on the safe side. I charge for it and my clients understand why.

[kneelsit]

On this topic of tools - Has anyone out there any idea whether a tracker using javascript on each page would be likely to trigger a penalty response by G.??

[Tahmi]

Oooooh! Good points! I guess I hadn't really thought of it as an automated tool. I can understand why they wouldn't be so happy with someone sucking up all of their bandwidth with repeated queries. I was hoping that maybe out of the kindness of their hearts, there was some tool that Google had somewhere that might help (hahaha!)

OK, I'll figure out how to do things "the old fashioned way". I named all my necklace designs before I even thought of having a website - thanks for the hint nancyb, I'll think about renaming some of my designs now.

And thanks for the newbie post direction Macguru - I'll definately go read that next. :)

Tahmi

[kneelsit]

Please pardon my ignorance - Welcome to these forums Tahmi and as Nancyb said - be wary of any tools that are automated 2 very much in disfavour (is there such a word?) by google are WPGold and Zeus.