May
29

If you are serious about Search Engine Optimization, you should be knowing this already. But for the blogging enthusiast readers, this might come in as a news - useful and handy.

Finding your measureables in Search Engine Optimization is a hurdle. It’s difficult to find out what gave you the results.
Many a times, people just go on adding links, exchanging them, commenting, link buying and so on randomly. And the time frame involved(mostly 2-3 months or less) in getting a significant result makes it even more harder to find out what is that one particular thing that you did - that pushed you through the ranks.

As, I’ve always told, it’s always a good idea to keep track of what you are doing, your statistics that is. Well, I’m not talking about the web statistics, but the SEO ones. There are Search Engine Optimization softwares that help you do this, but if you can’t afford one, or want to do it the manual way - cheers to you, i prefer that way too.This way you can know what factor helped you most to increase your rank or what combination of factors helped you through the SERPs. Because in many cases, it’s not just one factor that will help you earn your rank, but a combination of factors like backlinking, indexing and landing page optimization.

Keeping a track of these factors will not only help you in finding the measureables but also help you to predict your rank even.

Here are a few things that you have to constantly keep track of. Also listed is how to get them done easily.

1 - Number of backlinks

As everybody knows, quality backlinks matters most when google ranks you on the SERPs.So keep a spread sheet with the tabs updated daily/weekly.Check your statistics o Google and Yahoo.

To check your backlinks on google type, link:www.yourdomain.com on the Google search and this will give you the list of websites that’s linked back to you, in particular order.

2 - Number of pages indexed on Google

This factor has less importance in judging your rank but, if you have optimized all the pages that’s on the index, then it sure helps. It won’t hurt you anyway.

To find out the number of pages indexed on Google type, site:www.yourdomain.com , on the Google search and it will show you all the pages from your site that is on Google’s index.

3 - Number of .edu backlinks

Edu backlinks are a crucial factor that will help you to cut the competition on Google SERPS.These backlinks are considered as authoritative by Google as they are difficult to get. Well, to check the number of edu backlinks, use yahoo search. Type this i the search bar - linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.edu

This will give you all the links from .edu domains to your site.Remember Yahoo also counts the NOFOLLOW links unlike Google.

4 - Rank for a particular keyword

This is rather obvious, keep a track of where your site ranks for a particular keyword when searching for it on Google. It is better to do the search on various regions like Google US, Google UK etc so that you can get an idea of the rankings there too. Trust me there are major changes in the ranks depending on various regions.

5 - Number of .gov backlinks

Just like the number of edu backlinks, gov backlinks are very difficult to get and for this reason, Google values them very much.If you can manage to get a couple of them, nothing like it.To check the number of .gov backlinks to your site, type the following in Yahoo search bar.
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com site:.gov

There are some pretty cool free online tools and third party softwares that help you with all or part of these 5 SEO factors. I’ll be reviewing them soon as well.


Related SEO Tips and Articles:

  1. [...] 5 vital SEO stats that you should keep track of - If i were to suggest you 5 SEO metrics that you should constantly keep track of so that you can keep your positions in tact, here are they. [...]

  2. i never of heard anyone saying about .edu and .gov backlinks.. interesting.. but it is too tuf to get :( for non-academic and non-governemntal stuff :(
    ravishankar’s last blog post..FireFox Add-ons that I use

    [Reply to this comment]

  3. [...] 5 vital SEO stats that you should keep track of - If i were to suggest you 5 SEO metrics that you should constantly keep track of so that you can keep your positions in tact, here are they. [...]

  4. [...] opinion about which statistics are the most important to manage in order to increase your ranking. This article, by Mani Karthik, discuss 5 metrics that are a little unusual compared to most SEO resources - but his reasoning and [...]