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How Visible Is Your Business? Top Three Google Tips to Measure Your SEO Visibility
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Google is undoubtedly one of the first places many customers look to find new services or products. Looking for a new tax accountant in Seattle? Google it. Looking for a Bed and Breakfast in San Francisco? Google it. Looking for the best digital camera? Google it. Google visibility is critical for most small businesses, and the first step is to measure your visibility for your target keywords. In this article, we explain three top SEO tips for measuring your business Google visibility.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: January 18, 2010
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Contents:
Rank Checker by SEObook.com
Your Google rank, not to be confused with your Google PageRank, simply means the position your company website comes up in on a target search. If you are an Online SEO Training company, as is the JM Internet Group, then simply type your target keyword phrase (i.e., Online SEO Training) into Google and count your position. The so-called natural, organic, or free results usually occur just beneath the Google search box. Be sure to exclude the sponsored links, which sometimes appear first but are always in a shaded box, and labeled sponsored links. So for the target phrase, Online SEO Training, the website jm-seo.org occupies Page 1 Position 4. Change that target keyword search to SEO Training Memphis and the Page 1 Position 1 result is jm-seo.org. Change it again to SEO Class Los Angeles, and it is Page 1 Position 5.
Why is your Google rank important? Studies show that most customers go no farther than page one, and the lion's share do not go much beyond the first three results. So, for practical purposes, you must get your business website to page one and even better to the top three positions for any given search. Realize, of course, that your target searches might be Hypnotherapist Dallas, Cheap Digital Cameras, Buy Home Blinds Online, or any of the million goods or services for sale in the USA or global economy. It is obviously critically important to identify the potential target searches your customers do. (Something we will not go into in this article; just realize that you must identify your target keyword / key phrases as your Google rank clearly varies based on the search inputted!).
One simple way to measure your company's Google rank, therefore, is to input a target keyword / keyphrase, and simply count your numeric position on that Google search. That number is your Google rank, the smaller the better. What's wonderful, however, is an amazing free SEO tool from the folks at SEObook.com. It's called Rank Checker and can be downloaded free at their website (seobook.com). You must be running Firefox, but simply download and install the tool. You can then input your target keywords and website domain, and the tool will automatically measure your Google rank.
The Site Command on Google
Before you can show up on Google for a target search, however, your website must actually be in the Google index. Not every website is actually indexed by Google, and certainly not every page on every website is indexed by Google either. Another major marketing goal for your Internet / SEO strategy is to get your website into the Google index and also to get Google to index as many pages as possible on your website. But how do you know how many pages of your website are actually indexed in Google's internal database?
It's actually quite easy. There is a special syntax search that you can input into Google, and learn how many pages of a website are in the index. Simply follow this syntax:
site:yourdomain.com
For example, to find out how many pages of the jm-seo.org website are indexed, we simply type into Google: site:jm-seo.org and hit enter. Underneath the search box, Google will return a number as in About 433 results, which indicates that at least 433 pages of the website have made it into the Google index. Google also lists every page that it has in the index.
Curious if a particular page is in the Google database? You can find that out as well. Simply take the full URL of the page, and type the word site: in front of it. For example, to see if this page is in the Google index, our syntax would be:
site:http://www.jm-seo.org/seo-tutorial/google-seo-tips.html
If that URL is in the index, Google will tell you so. If not, it will say, Your search ... did not match any documents. So, in sum, the site: command on Google will tell you not only how many total pages of your website have been lucky enough to make it into the Google index but also whether a particular page has made it. How heavily indexed your site is is a major metric for your Google / SEO success. What's even cooler? Put in site: and a competitor domain and you can compare / contrast your Google success with that of a competitor!
The Google Toolbar
A third critical measurement of your business Google visibility is what is called PageRank. PageRank is often presented in a very complex way by the SEO community. But let's be simple. PageRank is Google's measurement of your website's authority. Higher authority, as expressed in higher PageRank, for a website catalyzes its rise to the top of Google searches. If Website A is competing to get to the top of a Google search for Personal Injury Attorney New York vs. Website B, and they are completely equal in their on page SEO aspects (such as web content and structure), the website with the higher PageRank will score higher.
There's a lot to PageRank, but basically think of it as a measurement of how authoritative Google views your site. The higher the better. Fortunately, there is a great free tool that will give you a rudimentary measurement: the Google toolbar. Go to toolbar.google.com, and download it. It works on all major browsers. Then, once installed, click on the wrench icon (Options) on the toolbar. Enable PageRank.
Once the Google toolbar is installed, go to any page on your website from your home page to any subordinate page. A little green icon on the top appears, similar to a cell phone battery icon. Simply hover your mouse over this icon, and Google will give you a score for the PageRank for that URL. Higher is better, with ten the maximum. You can also go to competitor's websites, hover your mouse over the icon, and Google will tell you their PageRank as well.
Measurement-wise, you can now measure how your business Google PageRank stacks up vs. competitors. How do you improve it? Links. The more inbound links to your site, the better.
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