How to Find My Google Rankings?

[Howardg]

New to all this. Have a site that we have paid many people to optimise. It has many of the features that I am told lead to a high ranking such as links, static pages,relevant links, keywords etc. I just can't seem to get it up the rankings. More than that, I have found no way of measuring where I appear on google. If I knew that, at least I could measure our progress. Can anyone help me:
a) measure my ranking
b) tips to improve my ranking.

Incidentally, I use PPC to get a high ranking on sponsered links and that is working, but costing a fortune albeit, generating good revenue.

All help appreciated

[DerekH]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, HowardG

a) measure my ranking

One shouldn't use programmatic ways to interrogate Google -it's against their Terms of Use.
But one legal way is to set the number of results per page to 100 (via the preferences, or by adding &num=100 to the content of your browser's address bar having done a search). Furthermore, if you browse google.com/ie instead of google.com you'll get a compact, numbered list.

Google only presents the first 1000 results, but that's ten pages as above, very quick and easy to scan, with your position printed next to your listing.

Tips to improve your ranking?
Well, don't pay lots of people to get you high rankings and then ask us for advice - that's just a waste of money!
Ask them what they did for their money - you have a right to know!

Search through the forum3 postings - you'll see a common theme of
a) plenty of links to your site with keywords in the anchor text.
b) thoughtful <title> and <h1>
c) CSS and Javascript in separate files to reduce bloat
d) No dirty tricks
e) Good content.

I'll leave you to read up on them...
DerekH

[treeline]

AN interesting way to judge your website's ranking on Google is to find it in it's category in the Google Directory. They're listed in order of pagerank there, not alphabetically. You can see who's just above and below you.

However, results from searches are different because they're keyed to that exact phrase.

[lizardx]

You can try this site, googlerankings dot com

That's pretty close, although the actual position will change slightly if you were doing a standard 10 result per page search, that's the case for the 100 per page too by the way, it won't give you your exact ranking number, but it's pretty close.

I'm not sure that's a 'programmatic' type site, since I imagine all they do is construct a simple query to google, then retrieve it, and tell you where your page came in on that query.

[McMohan]

plenty of links to your site with keywords in the anchor text

Plenty of links - yes. But relevant ones.

Keywords in the anchor text - Not overdone. Let the theme/neighborhood of linked pages take over from what keywords in anchor text were doing before.

Mc

[newsphinx]

Try Digital Point's free Keyword Ranking Tool. But you need to have a Google API key to create an account.

[seolancer]

hi
there are many such online tools available on net just make search in Google for that...