One of the most common mistakes a newbie webmaster makes is the constant tracking of the SERPs. Yeah, I agree there is something magical, something hypnotic in it - seeing as your site slowly climbs up (oh, yeah!) the SERPs or suddenly falls down (oh, no!) and then raises again. It is a very captivating for sure, but absolutely useless process. Believe me, you don't need to check how well your site is doing every 10 minutes. Moreover, you should not do that even once a day. I am sorry for such rude comparison, but checking your website rankings is just like masturbation - when you're ok you simply don't need it.
Of course, you do want to know the positions of your website. But that info is not crucial, you better spend your time writing another page for your site, or contacting another blogger for links. Checking your SERP positions once a week is ok. And you also do not want to check them for all 100 result pages down. Forget it. If your SERP is located below the first 30 results - nobody will open it ever. There're billions of websites all over the web and the number grows constantly, why would I spend my valuable time to digg into SERPs below the first page? Well, may be if I'd be very eager to find something, I'd probably looked two or three pages more, but that's all - afterwards I'd either open one of the top sites, or paraphrase my query.
The other popular question here is - whether one should use some tool to check search engine position or do that manually? Both points have its strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, you cannot afford to track the results manually if you have a bulk load of keywords. Let's suppose you can check one keyword in 30 seconds: open Google, type the keyword, hit enter, quickly screen the SERPs, proceed to the next keyword. Then, for 100 keywords it would take 50 minutes! Almost an hour of tedious repeating work. No, thank you. From the other hand, checking the ranking with some tool also has its disadvantages: tools often lie, show incorrect or inaccurate info, they also may lead to a ban of your IP address if the amount of terms to check is significant. So, what to choose? That's depend on your vision and the needs of your business. You may prefer rare and accurate manual checks if the amount of target keywords is rather small, or choose some tool to save a couple of hours if the list of keywords is rather long.
The summary of this part is simple:
- Check your web rankings rarely, once a week or so.
- Check the first 30-50 results only.
- If your website is not found within that depth - you're not performing well and need to double your efforts.
- You can check your ranking by hand in a browser, or prefer a tool or software - that depends on your business needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment