(Day 2) - Discover Search Engine Rankings

It only makes sense to find out where Host Discussion currently ranks on the search engines. If we do not know where we stand, how can we plan on where we wish to be? Our goals are simple, increase participation in our forums and gain new posters. Gathering this initial data will make optimizing Host Discussion much easier so we can reach our goals.

This morning I loaded up RankSense and clicked ‘Discover Rankings’. 

I was greeted with a helpful tutorial explaining the bells and whistles the software provides. Pages like this are common within RankSense and really help with understanding the entire SEO process.

I then clicked ‘Start Task’ and the software went to work discovering keywords and how Host Discussion ranked.

You might grab a cup of coffee during this phase as the software is going through Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, and other search engines as well as your log files (if you provided them).

After watching the software work for 4 minutes it then came back with 187 keywords people use to actually find Host Discussion on the various search engines.

Not as many keywords as I was hoping for, but we are just building our content and this number will grow rapidly as new content comes online and is indexed. We hope to use RankSense to accomplish this goal.

Search Engine Coverage

The next part of the process is seeing not only what keywords are bringing visitors to your site, but where those visitors are being sent to for each keyword. Matching landing page to keyword will help you immensely in your optimization efforts. The software will also gather indexed pages, unindexed pages, visited and not visited and display them neatly under a tab system for each of the search engines. Current search engine tabs are Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask.com, and Gigablast.

I did not find any setting where I could customize my own search engine within the preferences. This is not a big deal though since the big engines are all covered. However, if you are looking to market within niche search portals, this would be a nice feature to have.

Since your website may have thousands of pages, an exciting feature is “Search Depth”. Search Depth allows you to select how many pages deep you wish to go to discover your indexed pages. Again, this is all automated and has been “Point and Click” and the author has suggested. I click Start Task and expect to wait awhile as I chose the maximum amount of Search Depth ‘1000′.

To discover your search engine coverage, RankSense sends queries to the search engines and also crawls your log files to discover which pages have been indexed. I clicked Start Task and decided to take a lunch break. 

After about 20 minutes the process is complete. RankSense has found and categorized indexed, unindexed, visited and not visited pages.

Detect Problem Pages

I now move on to detecting problem pages and click ‘Start Task’. Detect Problem Pages does exactly what you think it does. Checking for bad links within your web site, it hunts for errors that can prevent your website from being indexed altogether.

Problem Pages found:

../register.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/register.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/sendmessage.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/faq.php

tags/cell+phones.html

2008/08/case-study-review-seo-improvement-in-30-days-or-less-using-ranksense-software-getting-acquainted-day-1-of-30/blogs/

2008/08/case-study-review-seo-improvement-in-30-days-or-less-using-ranksense-software-getting-acquainted-day-1-of-30/members/list/

2008/08/rackspace-hosting-launches-ipo/blogs/

2008/08/rackspace-hosting-launches-ipo/members/list/

2008/08/hostingcon-2008-nintendo-wii-giveaway-goes-to-green-friendly-server-vendor/blogs/

2008/08/hostingcon-2008-nintendo-wii-giveaway-goes-to-green-friendly-server-vendor/members/list/

2008/07/web-host-friendly-hostdiscussioncom-launched/blogs/

2008/07/web-host-friendly-hostdiscussioncom-launched/members/list/

2008/07/iphone-20-blues-9383-error/blogs/

2008/07/iphone-20-blues-9383-error/members/list/

NEXT UP DAY 3……

Tags: ranksense, review, search engine optimization, seo, software

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.