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Search Engine Ranking Statistics
What The Search Engines Want (Part 2)
By Brent Winters
Originally Published: September 2004
Continued From:
<<< Search Engine Ranking Statistics: What The Search Engines Want (Part 1)
SEO Tools To Find Top Rank Statistics
WebPosition Gold 3
offers a number of tools within the
Page Critic module
to specifically address these issues. Among other things, it offers three different kinds of page comparisons:
1. Compare your page to the Top 5 Page Averages:
With this option, you can compare your Web page's vital statistics to the top 5 ranking pages across a wide array of keywords. The advantage of this technique is that since WebPosition analyzes hundreds of top ranking pages, the effect of individual cloaked or changed pages can be minimized. As there's less risk of "contamination" by changed or cloaked pages, I normally recommend people start with this option. These averages are computed and updated monthly as part of WebPosition's Page Critic Service so that the comparisons can be made instantly.
2. Compare your page to the Top X Ranking Pages for this Keyword search:
More competitive keywords sometimes require a more focused approach. Rather than relying upon averages across keywords that have nothing to do with your industry, you can do a direct comparison for the keyword you are targeting. With this option checked, WebPosition will average the results of the top ranking pages for the keyword and engine you specify. This will tell you what your competition is using to gain their top placement.
While this strategy carries a little more risk of running into changed pages, it is much more focused, and therefore, can be more effective for competitive keywords. In addition, WebPosition contains proprietary technology to scan for indications of cloaked or changed pages. It will then recommend these pages be excluded from your analysis, thereby increasing the accuracy of your comparison. While there's no full-proof way to eliminate every cloaked or changed page, WebPosition Gold 3 performs several checks that go a long way toward accurate comparisons.
3. Compare your page to a list of pages:
WebPosition's third comparison option gives you the ultimate in flexibility. You can choose to compare your page to simply the top-ranking page for your keyword, or even against a page on your own Web site. Or, you might focus your comparison to a specific list of pages, such as those occupying the 1st, 3rd, and 5th positions.
New to WebPosition Gold 3 are other accuracy improvement features such as the ability to exclude areas of the page that the engine is known to ignore. For example, why waste time optimizing the keyword meta tag for Google if Google is known to ignore that area of the page? Also new to Version 3 is the ability to ignore "noise words." Most search engines have a specific list of words it filters out such as "a, an, about, are, as," etc. If the engine does not index these "minor" words, then ideally you should ignore them as well.
As you become more proficient in SEO, you'll find WebPosition Gold 3's added power and flexibility in page analysis invaluable. Simple "search engine readiness checkers" may give you some basic pointers in regard to search engine optimization, but they will only take you so far. To truly compete in today's competitive environment, you must arm yourself with the "industrial strength" tools favored by search engine marketing professionals. Those tools include
WebPosition Gold 3, WordTracker, and WebTrends.
Continued From:
<<< Search Engine Ranking Statistics: What The Search Engines Want (Part 1)
This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.
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