• track where your websites rank in the search results for important keywords, and
• track those trends versus competing sites and/or
• against your own marketing efforts to better understand the effectiveness of your marketing

Rank Tracker Tools

Free Ranking Checkers

• Rank Checker – our free and fast Firefox extension which you can use to track your rankings over time. If you want to graph your progress, please install Rank Checker and the Site Rank Reporter add on.

Google Rank Checker Tools

These tools do not use the Google API, especially because Google rendered their API virtually useless unless you have one of their old keys.

• Free Monitor from Google – downloadable tool from CleverStats which monitors website rankings
• ParaMeter – scrape Google PageRank values in bulk with this downloadable software. Useful for viewing the PageRank profile of a competing site.
• Mapelli.info – calculates the % of your site stuck in the Google supplemental index.

Meta Search Engines

• Myriad Search – shows the search results from all 4 major search engines
• Zippy.co.uk – similar to above, but with more features

Install a Rank Checker on Your Own Site

• This zip file can be unzipped and installed on any web server which is PHP enabled. It includes a basic rank checker, an advanced rank cheker, a multi-keyword rank checker, a multi-domain rank checker, and a few other goodies. As Google updates their search results it may break these files…but fixing them should only take a couple minutes for a freelance PHP programmer.

Paid Rank Checking Tools

Tracking where you already rank does not alert you to potential areas of opportunity that you have not yet focused on, but it is easier to rank for keywords related to words you already rank well for than it is to rank for a whole new basket of keywords.

• Advanced Web Ranking – downloadable software from $99 per year, or in combination with Advanced Link Manager for $149. This is our favorite paid rank checking tool.
• Accurate Monitor for Search Engines – downloadable software from €99. Also has a lifetime license plan.
• Agent Web Ranking – downloadable software from $150 per year.
• Rank Tracker – downloadable software for a $89 6 month license.

From the Engines

• Google Webmaster Central – allows you to sign up for Google Sitemaps, shows some crawling errors, and a more complete view of your backlinks. Also shows keywords you rank well for and keywords that send you the most traffic.

Related Categories

• analytics tools – shows keywords that you already rank well for that drive traffic to your site
• keyword research tools – research new keywords to rank for
• competitive research tools – these tools will show you keywords sending traffic to competing websites

• http://www.suite101.net/
• http://goarticles.com
• http://www.thefreelibrary.com/
• http://knol.google.com/
• http://technorati.com/
• http://www.squidoo.com

• Impressions: 4,284
• CTR: 0.65%
• Clicks: 28 Avg
• CPC: $0.20
• Cost: $5.74

Facebook Experiment #1

This experiment made me realize to never take the obvious path whenever it comes to internet marketing. Why? Read about it below.

Trying to promote my children story website I decided to go to facebook and create a few ads. I figure the demographics are easy. I’ll target male or females with children 9 – 12 years old from spanish speaking country.

I started paying about $0.80 per click.

A few days later, I found myself with a few clicks and even less conversions.

Then, I found this facebook page;

Discover Facebook Pages

What Does This Mean?

Instead of using the continue paying the cost of marketing using the obvious path, I decided to target those pages that have already done the work of gathering potential customers.

This was incredible. The conversions were higher (not something incredible, but higher) for a reason. They have already “liked” similar pages, why no join my page as well.

By targeting users that have join pages instead of demographics the PPC went down to $0.35 cents.

Next time you want to market your blog or page, don’t take the obvious path, it is usually overpriced.

Introduction

Yeahh !! That’s right, 4 million searches/month for a keyword at $0.05 per click for a product.

Do the math;

If the product costs $15.00 and I get $3.00 per sale that will be 12 million dollars. Assuming 1% conversion we are looking at $40,000 / month

Now, if the domain name is availble I should not have any problem going to the top of the google rankings and just wait for the cash to flow in.

Guess what? I got the domain name !

Reality Knocks On My Door And Did Not look Happy

So I spend three days building a quick blog and a landing page with the orange button, product pictures and even video trailer of the movie product. Next step, I open my adwords account, build an ad or two and started pumping money into that campaign.

Day #1 – Zero Clicks and 45 impressions – What ??

Ok so I increased my bids to $0.50 per click. I figure google will at last try to increase my impressions so I can have a better chance and also pay them more.

Day #2 – 1 Click and 50 impressions – Are You Messing With Me?

Ok, so I decided to reaaaallllly go for it and go full blast CPC on Google’s Ass. So I went up to $3.00 per click

Day #3 – Zero clicks and 60 impressions

…  arrrggg  …. sleeping … looking at campaign …  arrrggg …

Day #4 – I’m still baffle and recovering from Day #3. I put the campaign in pause and hit the forums.

I received a very eye opening response to my question about why am I not getting impressions …

Keyword Research Properly Done

I was missing the fact that when doing keyword research, if it is a phrase, google will give you the results of the match that combines the words from your phrase. This is known as broad match.

To actually find the right amount of searches done by humans I need to use exact match.

The result;

2,900 Global Monthly Searches !!

What Did I Learn?

1. Google keyword tool is for getting keywords. That was my first mistake. I should have use google traffic estimator. Makes sense but I’m new at trying.
2. Use broad match instead of exact match to actually get the real monthly searches by humans
3. I did not optimize my landing page to get a QS of 10

What’s Next

Now with the real number I can try again and see if I can get one sale. Stay tuned

Ouch !!

The Slap

Last week Google decided to change their algorithm and my niche website when from position 31 to position 63 in one week.

Read more about this google algoritm update here;

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/google-algorithm-impact-niche-sites/

All the effort that I’ve put together since the beginning of December 2010 went back about two months behind.

Frustration Knocks On My Door

Frustration is not a pretty visitor but I always try to look at it naked. Everytime, I get frustration or nervius I imagine my audience naked. So, once again I traced back my steps and try to wear google’s shoes.

Where did I go wrong and why will google sent my site back?

The only tricky and kind of gray hat things I did was to buy backlinking services from fiverr.com . Duh !! That’s probably why google send me back.

To double check, I went to google results and notice the number 1 website was still number one. So, this google update did not affect that website.

What Is My Competitor Doing That I’m Not?

I know that my content and structure is pretty tight in terms of SEO.

• Meta Tags- Check !!
• Description – Check !!
• Content – Check !!
• Backlinks – Not Check

Backlinking

Backlinks. So far I have taken the lazy approach to this but that was about to change. I went and gather all the backlinks of my number one competitor using the following site;

http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker

Then I contacted the first six website owners from the results table asking them to exchange links with me.

I started to notice a trend. These websites did not have a link to my number one google competitor. How and where is the link to number 1 site?

Comments !!

Most of these websites are blogger websites. This means you can create a comment with anchor text to your site easily. Most of these sites don’t have an approval process. So I prepare something like this;

<a href=” [my site name] “> [ anchor text] </a>

and added an honest comment to each one of these websites.

Now, We Wait

Ohh !! There is nothing to write about here. I’m actually sitting and waiting until the next google spider passes through my site. Hopefully it will help with the ranking.

Follow The Leader

For many years I tried to be a good engineer and come up with original groundbreaking ideas and approaches to do something. Guess what? Life is too short to reinvent the wheel. There is a reason why there are more than one person alive at a time. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

http://adnetworks.net/uncategorized/ad-network-list/

First, I decided to use broad demographics and the ROI and CTR was terrible.

Then, while reading the twitter account of an expert online advertiser I found a link to facebook Pages Directory.

http://www.facebook.com/directory/pages/A

This was the trick. Instead of using a broad demographics I only targeted FB users that belong to an specific really targetted page. This increased my conversions and reduce the cost of customer adquisition.

Give it a try and let me know in the comments how did it turned out for you.

In my search to get better rankings for my dad’s website www.loscuentosinfantiles.com, I’ve been experimenting with different strategies.

Frequent Posting

Back in December 2010 I decided to post almost everyday to see if posting will improve my rankings. At the beginning of Decemeber the website was at position 126 under “cuentos infantiles“. A month later, google placed it in position 65.

Even though that is an incredible jump in ranking is not within the first page of google. The first position receives about 500,000 searches per month. Frequent posting did improve my ranking significantly but … there is always a but … I will continue later on this post explaining the but.

Backlinking

Basic back linking done for this site was mostly social media linking. I will go to five or six website and bookmark every post during that month after posting frequently. Twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, google buzz, delicious, etc. I didn’t see any big improvemnt. The site went from position 65 to 55. Then, I discovered fiverr.com

For five dollars I placed orders to add my site to different site aggregators and review sites. Also, I place orders to get links from .gov and .edu websotes. Yes !! for five dollars. This was amazing !!

At the end of february the site was in position 31 in google. I was impressed and also started to figure out this SEO thing.

But then, I decided to drop the ball.

Experimenting With Dropping The Ball

Typical engineer, I made a silly decision that I can recover easily from; I decided not to do anything to the website for three weeks. Nothing, nada. Just leave the thing alone. Results ? (… drull roll) google set the site back to position 62 within three weeks.

AAhhhhh !!!

Lesson Learned

In summary I learned this about google SEO.

• If your competitior are lazy, you are good. Sit back and enjoy the traffic coming in.
• If your competitor is passioned about what they do. They will post more. The more passioned competitiors the faster you get burried under google results
• Who wins google SEO ranking battles is the one that post quality and unique content, more frequent than competitors in the niche category and also backlinks constantly to the new content.

My SEO 3 Cents

Not really cents but three take-homes about SEO

1. Post Frequently – preferibly more than your google #1 position competitor
2. Create Niche Content – write about what people are actually looking for, not what you think they are looking for
3. Backlink – Use different techniques. Guest postint, social media, or fiverr.com backlinking services