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Website ranking is about your position in the search engine results for a particular keyword. Search engine optimisation is about making a Website/Web pages to rank highly (first 30 results) on the search engine results Page (SERP).

Your Website Ranking/Position is Important

Your Website rank or position for a particular keyword is what determines whether or not you receive visitors from the search engines. It is generally accepted that if you are not ranked in the top 30 search results for a particular keyword then as far as the search engines are concerned you dont exist for that keyword.

Check your Website Ranking/Position Manually

To check your Website rank for a particular keyword the go to the search engine whose position you want to check and enter your keyword. You then need to go through the results and try to locate your Website URL in the results. This manual method of checking your Website ranking position is both time consuming and tedious. It is however the most reliable and search engine friendly.

Goggle have made Checking your Website ranking at Goggle easier with a ranking page www.googleranking.com which allows you to check your Website position in the first 1000 results.

Exactseek also have a very similar feature at http://www.exactseek.com/srank.html

Because Exactseek usually index within a week I use it as a quick check for my web page. If I cant get it to rank at the top or near the top in Exactseek it is unlikely to rank high in Goggle or Yahoo.

Check your Website Ranking Using Software Tools

There are many Website ranking tools and software packages that will automate this process of position checking and they are essential to most webmasters. However despite their use and prevalence the major search engines do not allow them. They are however tolerated. So in respect to the search engines please dont overdo the use of website ranking software.

Online Ranking Tools

The following sites provide free online tools for checking your position at the major search engines:

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-position-checker.shtml

www.gorank.com/seotools

www.netmechanic.com

Offline RankingTools

Search engine positioning software like WebPostion Gold and Web CEO also incorporate tools for checking your ranking at the search engines. As you would expect they offer far more features than the online tools and will check your position at far more search engines than the online tools.

Get a good Website Ranking

Your choice of Website theme is the main factor determining the ease of achieving high ranking. A Website theme that very few Websites are targeting will be easier than themes that have a lot of competition.

How to Improve Your Website Ranking

There are two principal ways of improving your website position: Web Page optimisation and Link generation. Web page optimisation requires you to carefully construct your Web page around you keywords whereas link generation involves getting other websites to link to your website.

For information on how Meta tags affect your website ranking see Meta
tags explained.

Any updates to the Website Ranking article and simlar articles are available at the making a website site.



About the Author
Stephen Cope is a freelance trainer and the Webmaster at - making a website and
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