• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Basic
• Google Toolbar and PR
• Alt and Title
• Funny Names
• Google Dance
• Googlebot
• Google Sandbox
• Trust Rank
• AdSense
• Google Ads
• Google Search
• AdSense for Content
• Earning Reports
• Channels
• Policies
• Filter Ads
• Promotion
• Keyword Optimization
• Information Rich Pages
• Link Exchanges
• No Tricks
• No Spam
• Web Forums
• Web Directories
• Other Ways
• Checking Up

Checking Up on Your Site

Page Rank

To check how you site is doing. The first obvious thing to look is to check the PR ranking using the Google toolbar or other website tools. Don't worry too much if it is still at PR0. Because of the sandbox effect, it may take some time get over that hurdle. But once out of PR0, it should be fairly straight forward to go to PR3. And then because of the logarithmic nature of the PR scale, it becomes increasingly difficult to get to the next hight level PR.

Query Your Domain

Then do a query by typing in your domain name (such as "yourdomainname.com") in Google, MSN, and Yahoo (the three major search engines). More precisely, you can also type in "site:yourdomainname.com" into the Google search field. Your site should come up as number one position in the search engine results page (SERP). That means that the search engine knows about your site and your site is said to "have been indexed" by the search engine.

If your site doesn't come up, it could be one of a few things...

1) Your site is so new and has no incoming links, that Googlebot has not visited your site yet. If you want to tell the search engine about your site so that it can visit it, you can submit your URL to Google or get listed on some high PR directories.

2) There could be server fluctuations. Check again in a day or two. I know it is hard to wait.

3) You would hope that that you case is either of the above. But a third possibility is that your site might have been banned by the search engine for using tricky tactics.

Do Some Realistic Queries

Quering your domain name is not a realistic query that users would do if they do not know about your site. Instead, users are more apt to do queries on generic keyword phrases. And you have learned how to use Overture's Keyword Selector tool to find which are are the more popular keyword phrases. In a previous lesson, you have optimized your pages for some keyword phrases. Do a seach of those keyword phrases in each of the three search engines and see where your site comes up the search engine results.

Checking Incoming Links

Most search engines have a way of showing who is linking to your site. For example, on Google, it is by typing in "link:yourdomainname.com" But I would not put much weight on these results. They do not show all the links.

You can enter your domain into LinkPopularity.com which will give you a rough idea of how much each search engine thinks is linking to you. Again, these results are not too accurate. But it can be used as a rough estimate.

You can also look at Alexa.com traffic rank for your site.