Gaveltek SEO Blog

Effectively measuring and increasing your websites ranking

This question comes to me quite often; the answer is not a very simple one. Based on your understanding of how search engines transact their business, you can either:

1. Understand
2. Form an opinion and walk  away
3. Get completely confused
4. Hunger for more knowledge (obviously this is the one we are going for)

An SEO’s job is to take what is a very complicated process and explain it in such a way that everyone can understand a modicum of the process, and more importantly the “why.” So to understand why it is that your page is kicking some serious butt in the SERPs from your favorite search engine, but no one seems to be able to find you. It’s a matter of two pieces, local results (based on your geographic location when the search is conducted) and Personalized results (which use your browsing history and your online habits to adjust the results to suit what is believed to more useful to your taste). Keep in mind I am writing as it relates to Google. While there are similarities between the others, Google’s is most relevant  (I am going to make the wild assumption that your site is designed, and populated correctly, in a perfect world I know).

So, you may be seeing a skewed report (generally) based on your geographic location and personalized search being active. In order to get a better picture of how you rank (I have put together a really simple experiment that I’ll post later) there is a very simple solution, “&pws=0”. If you are not familiar with advance search functions, or SEO in general that strange group of letters and symbols probably means as much to you as the Rosetta stone. Let me explain the “what” and “how” of this funny little string.  It shuts off “Personalized Search” in Google only. Other search engines have similar strings but you will have to identify them yourselves. By shutting this off you are allowing for pure results, the disparity between the two might be alarming, but rest assured our little experiment will hopefully help you fix whatever issues your site has.

Experiment:

1. Locate and define 10 keywords relevant to your site. You can do this by utilizing Google insight, Google keyword research tool, Word Tracker, ETC…
2. Create an excel spreadsheet and set it up with following headers

Be sure to place your single word keywords in positions marked keyword. After you have completed this step, create another page in your excel workbook and set it up as follows:

After both of these are set up its time to do some searching, for the first spreadsheet just conduct your search by entering the keyword in the corresponding search engine. After locating where your site is located place that number in the empty spot. For instance: I search for my company name Gaveltek, I search for SEO and count how many results are before my site actually show up (a ton of work, but you can use rank tracking software toolbars from seobook.com and rank-tracker to make it much easier) I would catalog that number. Continue to do this until the entire ten search terms are counted on each of the search engines you select (you don’t have to use mine). The next part is going to utilize our non-personalized search term string, that weirdo line of “code” that I showed you earlier: “&pws=0” so, this only works with Google, you would have to research to turn off the personalized and local search functions on your chosen search engines.  So, in Google, your first search for your second page should look like this:

&pws=0 keyword, for instance: &pws=0 SEO. Now continue to populate your spreadsheet with the data you are finding by counting all the results ahead of yours, I would suggest that if you are not in the first 100 to simple enter +100.

Assuming you have gone through this painstaking labor of love, you will now have some empirical evidence which will very quickly allow you to see the vast differences between searches conducted on your home computer vs. another searcher for the same term. One very interesting “test” that you can do quickly is have two people on two different machines connected to the same internet connection and in the same office / home search for the same exact term. You will notice that there will be a disparity in the rankings as well.

The reason we have gone through all of this is to demonstrate that while search engines utilize their algorithms to “rank” your site, there are other unseen factors, factors that aren’t so easily changed or controlled as they are tailored to the individual searcher.

I would ask that anyone participating in my little experiment continue with the following pieces:

1. Choose a page on your website that you would like to rank for (I would suggest that you use a page that you have already identified in the keyword portion of the experiment).
2. Create well and naturally written content on that page tailored to the keywords you would like to rank for and implement it. Be sure to identify a separate page each week so that you can test different variations of content. There are multitudes of SEO writing guides available. I will provide a link for an SEO friendly writing guide from Gaveltek.
3. Over the next three (3) months continue to track each keyword once per week and pay particular attention to the rankings either increasing or decreasing on the page you have started to “SEO.”  You can even go so far as to create a separate workbook page to track this page.
4. After the three month period create a graph in Excel that displays the data in such a way that it can compare the separate charts available (be sure to create a new table for each week and be sure to label the dates).
5. Analyze your findings, and begin to understand how the search engines are working. You will want to (again) pay very close attention to the pages you created the content for, this is where the real work starts to show. Make a graph in excel (only if you took the initiative to create the separate graphs) and notice a trend week by week with the changes in the content. Making sure to understand each of the unique methods you employed. Those methods in content creation can include:
   1. The amount of internal links based on relevant keywords to pages within your site
   2. The amount of keyword linked external pages relevant to your business and that keyword
   3. The title of the page
   4. The <meta> description of the page (being sure to use  this SEO guide when writing them)
   5. How many times you bolded keywords
   6. Proper use of H1- H5 within document, making sure that you only have one H1

i.      One polite suggestion would be to make sure your footer (or the bottom part of your site that appears on every page) contains your companies name, address, and all relevant contact information)

1. Once you have identified trends that work, and trends that don’t you can begin to tailor the content of your site using the results of this experiment and (hopefully) watch your site climb the rankings.

You must always be mindful to utilize only white-hat or ethical SEO techniques. We all understand the prospect of the quick win is tempting, especially in these economic times. I cannot stress to you that you will pay the piper if you use Black hat or un-ethical SEO techniques. It may not happen now, tomorrow, or even in a month. But it will happen, that is the only definite promise I can make to you regarding SEO.

Please keep in mind this is a beginners guide, we hope that this information helps you in effectively marketing your site using some of our White-Hat SEO techniques. Please feel free to ask any questions by emailing Gaveltek