Cattle Ramp SEO Resources

If you are involved in trying to get traffic from search engines, one of the things you need to do is monitor your progress with them to see how you are progressing.

There are many things you need to monitor with search engines:

• your Google Page Rank,
• your keyword ranking ie. where in the search engine results your site is listed for your targeted keyword,
• your backlinks: how many sites backlink to you, what is the page rank of the sites and pages that contain your backlink, what is the text displayed in your backlinks, are any of the sites that backlink to you banned by Google, and so on...
• which pages of your site have been spidered,
• when was the last time that the search engines spidered your site,
• and so on...

Google offers an excellent free service to help you monitor certain aspects of your site with them. This service is called Google Alert and you can find out more at its FAQ page.

We have been using this service for a few months now and are very happy with it. What it does, in simple terms, is this: you enter a phrase that you want Google Alert to monitor and whenever Google finds new information on your phrase, it will send you an email with the info + links.

We are currently using it to monitor just a few things:

• our web site addresses: www.meta-keyword-advice.com, www.cattle-ramp-seo.com and www.seo-analysis.com and whenever Google finds our URL's displayed in a new site or page, then we receive an email with the URL of these new sites and pages. This way we can monitor how many web sites are adding our link to their sites,
  
• the titles of 2 articles we wrote and whenever Google finds our title displayed in a new site or page, then again it sends us an email to let us know. We have found this service invaluable to see how many web sites are reproducing either of our 2 articles (which means that our number of backlinks is increasing because our articles contain our link in its sig).

The use of Google Alert is limited only by your imagination. We are using it to only monitor references to our sites + the articles we wrote.

If you likewise want Google to let you know when it finds new information relating to anything about your site, then give Google Alert a try - it's free!

Serge

PS. We would not recommend using this service to monitor your keywords. The reason for this is that you will get lots of links reported to you by Google that have nothing to do with your web site.

I have just come across the following 3 articles and thought that you might like to know about them:

• SEO for Google
  
• SEO for MSN
  
• SEO for Yahoo

I suggest that you read these 3 articles carefully as they will show you how search engines look at different things when spidering a site.

Also, once you know what each search engine looks for, you will then be able to edit your site to meet the right requirements so as to rank high with them.

Serge