Forum Moderators: phranque
I here there is an approved Google api an possibly a yahoo one too
Can anyone point me in the right direction
Note that your web data tells you not exact SERP, but that someone clicked on your SERP and which page of the SERPs it was (for Google and some other SEs).
So, if not in the top 20, spend time getting there rather than spending time looking deeper.
WBF
20,000 to 10,000 to 1,000 to 400, ahhh now you're starting to be visible
Otherwise there is so much speculation, you might be doing some thing thats working an then give up cos you cannot measure your progress.
Okay, you guys with PR7 & PR8 sites at your beck & call, you would rightly expect to get your site up an running an visible in the serps straight away, for me, that would be a dream, till then,,
I am hoping that the improvements in google webmaster tools statistics continue
as to the original title ..
How do you check your SERPS position, those of u not hugging page 1
Do you also laboriously click & scan thru 30 pages
life is too short to worry about such things ..
what you might do ( although making original content and getting links is a better use of your time ) is get a "dance tool" ..use it if you have nothing better to do ..but you do have better things to do :)
[edited by: Leosghost at 8:39 pm (utc) on Aug. 31, 2006]
Okay, you guys with PR7 & PR8 sites at your beck & call, you would rightly expect to get your site up an running an visible in the serps straight away, for me, that would be a dream, till then
Well, highest PR I currently have is PR5 - on a site that just barely made PR6 for one update back in the day...
A decent site targetting non-competitive terms will rank top 20 within 30-60 days, in my experience. I have accomplished this with a new domain/site in the past 6 months, and with only a dozen or so IBL's. That site currently shows a PR4, for whatever that is worth these days.
Good structure, paying attention to on-page factors, and a few good quality links go a long way to getting a site crawled and ranking.
The only thing I would add beyond that is the idea that relevant traffic is more important than high rankings, and the two do not have to go hand in hand. For instance, I spent an hour or so on the phone yesterday with a potential client discussing a $40k deal. The lead came via a sig-line on a forum post to one of our websites, which in turn caused the prospect to contact us via phone.
Personally, I would rather see traffic coming from hotmail, gmail and ymail accounts than I would from high serps. That traffic tells me we are being talked about, and getting some mindshare.
Current stats on our main site show about 60% of traffic from SE's on about 2800 search terms. The other 40% is direct traffic.
Our #10 on the main term singular and #5 on the main term plural have very little to do with our overall traffic.
Oh yeah, we don't do any paid advertising...
I think its important for the one to be abale to see improvements
I used to think that, but those years are gone. Too many variables now, and too many different rankings are presented under the umbrella called "Google". Did that change to the title text move you from #980 to #600, or was it simply the age of the page, and the movement would have happened regardless (or maybe you would have gotten an even bigger movement if you had left the title alone).
Worse, Google has lots of different rankings, so which "improvements" are you going to decide are the ones that matter? For example, in the past month, my weblogs tell me that URL X, which is "mostly" on page 3 has appeared on page 1 more than a dozen times. Treating your ranking as a concrete number these days can be a hefty oversimplification.
If you really want to try to discern the effect of page changes on SERPs these days, you've got to be in the data mining business and try to input just as many variables as Google does (age of page, for sure, for example). If you can then apply a change and roughly predict it's effect correctly on more than 50 of 100 pages, well maybe you've got something. Most people don't do any sort of such rigorous testing of their theories, and they're just fooling themselves as a result.
So, visitor pages thru to page 4 on MSN an then clicks on your url for some keyword, this is recorded in the server logs?
I am awed by that 2800 search terms, I guess that represents years of successfull content development
Might O hazard a guess a say that you're not in ecomerce but rather Professionals in a profession with websites promoting your business, perhaps with some adsense or affiliate marketing thrown in,
You certainly seem to have generated the famed "buzz"
Cheers
Think relevant traffic instead of relevant SERPs. It is a liberating experience to make that shift in perspective.
WBF
