Visibility in the search engines is one of the most important things to consider as a webmaster, but the ugly truth is that most webmasters don't do well at it. It's a good idea to periodically measure your search engine visibility, and compare it to the search visibility of your competition.
An inbound link is a hyperlink transiting domains. Links are inbound from the perspective of the link target, and conversely, outbound from the perspective of the originator. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).
In addition to rankings by content, many search engines rank pages based on inbound links. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.
Increasingly, inbound links are being weighed against link popularity and originating context. This transition is reducing the notion of one link, one vote in SEO, a trend proponents hope will help curb linkspam as a whole.
Measuring inbound links: Google and MSN both support the link:www.mydomain.com command, which tells the search engine to list all the sites that link to yours. Yahoo! requires linkdomain:www.mydomain.com. What you're looking for are the total numbers reported, displayed near the top of the search.
Saturation is a count of the number of pages from your website that are indexed by a particular search engine. The more pages indexed, the more potential matches become visible for any given search, greatly increasing search visibility. In other words, a site with 10,000 pages indexed is statistically more likely to return a relevant match than a site with only 10 pages indexed.
Measuring search engine saturation: Use site:www.yourdomain.com as the search query. This one works in all of the big three search engines.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.
The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.
Measuring rankings: The Google toolbar can provide PageRank data. Keep in mind, it's usually lagged by a couple months or so. Alexa.com provides the traffic data that can be safely compared against your competition. The number you're looking for is revealed with the traffic rank button. Lower numbers are better.
Keyword visibility is a measure of your website's actual performance, for a set of generalized keywords. You should pick six or seven keywords that might be used to find sites like yours. The best way to collect these keywords is to ask your clients how they would search for your site, or to dig around in Google's Keyword Sandbox. Also, Wordtracker provides an online tool as well but, it will cost you to subscribe.
Measuring keyword visibility: Once you've collected the keywords, perform searches and check to see if your website shows up in the top 20 results. There are plenty of great standalone tools to help automate this task and run reports giving you a lot more detail on your progression..
You should collect data from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search. Between them, the top three search engines account for 96% of all search traffic on the web. Google still holds the largest search audience, but Yahoo! and MSN have both made significant strides, and both have large shares of the search audience. It's important to factor all three into any search visibility analysis.
Knowing the numbers for your own site can be useful, but what really helps is knowing the numbers for competitive websites, as well. Make a list of two or three direct competitors, and then throw in another site that performs very well in your general industry or information space. Ideally, all of the sites should be able to attract an audience from your target market.
In Conclusion, you can analyze the data all you want but, the real goal here is to get on the first page for whatever your searchers are searching for. There are many factors that go into making this happen. I hope the information I've provided for you helps you in creating greater search engine visibility for you and your customers web sites.
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