Control Your Visibility On Google, MSN, And Yahoo With These DIY SEO Tools

This is the second part of a series of articles in which you will find many tools that you can use to monitor the search engine position of your site and see how your search engine optimization efforts are progressing on your own.

The following tools are used to monitor your search results on the top three search engines. It is not a complete list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)

Use of the information page of your Google site

I covered this in a previous article, but in case you missed it, we’ll go over it briefly here. (If you need more help following it, you can listen to one of my recent podcasts for a convenient audio tutorial.)

Open your browser and go to the Google home page. Enter info: youritenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com, you would type info: exactseek.com. You can also use site: yoursitenameanduffix to find out which pages have been indexed by the Google search engine.

This search will tell you the pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show the sites that it considered linked to you, and it will show the sites that carry your full URL, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate in telling you all the sites that are linked to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks are important.

From here you can also see the last day Google scratched your home page.

To see this in action, click on the first set of information links, “Show yoursitename.com’s Google cache.” If you search next to the word “cache” in the first line, the date is also expressed.

Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and http://www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure to check both.

Find information about your site on Yahoo!

[http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-08.html]

This document will tell you how to find out which sites are linked to you, give you the results of how many pages of your site are on Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page, you will be able to see your cached pages, etc.

Discover the status of your site on MSN

http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

As the help section page indicates, you can use site: www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document on your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of the last caching.

Google rankings

You will need a free Google API key for this, and the site has a direct link that tells you where to get one. You will need to enter this key to consult the site for information about Google.

With Google Rankings, you can see where you rank in the top 40-1000 results on Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also shows results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine.

They also have a few other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call the “Ultimate SEO Tool” that will measure your site’s keyword density.

Google backlink checker

http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php

The LilEngine.com Backlink Checker will measure the number of links you have pointing to your site against competing sites. Useful if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have with others, although the number of links that will help you retrieve them varies, depending on other factors.

Yahoo search rankings

[http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/]

From the same people who brought you Google rankings, using Yahoo search rankings, you will be able to see where you rank in the top 1000 results on Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo ranking, this is very helpful.

You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API on their developer’s site: [http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList]..

In the next part of the article, we’ll take a closer look at other tools that give you more specific information on links pointing to your site, keyword research, and more.