Of search rankings & inbound links
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Franz in Announcements, General
Yesterday on Twitter, @blogjunkie (David of Buzzmedia & also Editor of MyMacBuzz.com) asked if there’s a tool that he can use to track his search rankings automatically, together with inbound links.
David Wang's Twitter Post (@blogjunkie)
Before I start,
What’s search ranking & inbound links?
Search ranking literally means “a chronological sorting of what website comes first on a search engine results page (SERP), for a particular search query based on importance & relevance in the view of a particular search engine” and can be found also on this recently posted blogpost.
Inbound links is a little more complicated. It means how many links are pointing back to your website from other website(s) or webpage(s). Generally, it’s also called “incoming links”, “inlinks”, “point-in links”, “backlinks”, “link ins” and so forth. They all mean the same thing.
Why care?
This is the thing. Going technical on this post would be easy, going not technical isn’t going to be. Because I worry my post would be written politically incorrect, I hope general remarks that I make would make you want to question ‘WHY’ this happen: Then I can explain further.
Because it’s more difficult for you to understand how ‘Search Optimization Services’ work in technical terms, I’ll explain it in a simpler way.
- Search rankings are important because that’s how visitors find your website (or web profile) through a particular search engine when they make a search. The common understanding is: “The higher your rankings are, the better off your site is.” But don’t put that in your head. There are many factors to why high rankings isn’t something you should put all your eggs at, too.
- Inbound links are one of the MAJOR ways search engines measure your value & performance on the web (for certain search terms & queries). There are two main characteristics of inbound links: Quality & Volume. But this isn’t the end of the story. There are also things like content targeting, keyword term usage, pointing and diversifying, etc.
A lot of companies may tell you this – On & off page optimization for every of our SEO package. First off:
- There should never be an SEO package. All work should be highly personalized. Every business’s marketing needs & targeting should be different.
- On page optimization literally means optimizing ways search engines would ‘rate’ your site then make them ‘love’ your site. Of course in many scenarios & technicalities, this is a very head-banging, shirt-tearing part. (It means difficult)
- Off page optimization literally means pulling resources and values from outside of your website (all over the webspace) into yours, thus delivering ‘high’ search value and make search engines ‘love’ your site.
- Search values isn’t something you can explicitly measure in terms of tangibility and ‘value-as-each-Robot-sees-your-website’. High ranking doesn’t mean your website performs better in sales.
If you need additional information on why SEO isn’t everything, you can tweet me and ask about it.
Answers to David Wang
On inbound links
It’s great to know that you’re tracking things like ranking and inbound links. Of course, there are tools to where you can use like the infamous WebCEO (back in 2008, it was a blast!) to do many things. They can even run reports and see things you would love to see. But wait, that’s not really the whole point. Why?
Different search engines value you differently
Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. If you look into your Webmaster’s Tools (both Goog and Bing), you can see that the amount of links they report to you as a backlink is quite different in terms of volume and type. Of course, heavily crawled sites (or more prominent ones) are relatively similar. But if you run enough sites and campaigns, you’ll notice the difference.
Now goto Yahoo Site Explorer. Type in your website and check out the amount of ‘indexed pages’ and ‘inlinks’. Notice the difference. That doesn’t end there. I also use two other tools called Domain-Pop and Backlink Checker. Check with them, too. In some cases, I find different results also.
You may ask why. In layman terms, different trackers track different things and not all trackers are built similar. Some may miss, some may have higher results. Even with reporting tools such as Google Analytics, Wassup, SiteMeter, Yahoo! Analytics or SiteCatalyst; they may yield very different results – Error rates sometimes hit 75%.
If you want to check who’s pointing to you
Then just use the two tools called Domain-Pop and Backlink Checker.
Verdict
Now that you know different search engines views you differently, the only thing to know now is: “How would Google/Yahoo/Bing/Cari see me?” One of the ways to ‘guess’ it out is to check Webmasters Tools, where they have the “Links to your site” for Google’s and “Backlinks” for Bing’s Webmasters.
Other tools such as Domain-Pop may report that you have 100 links, but Google may not see it as 100 really valuable and quality links. Discounting often happens, and we shouldn’t look ultimately at the sandbox or algorithm; but how are they going to provide us with more value.
On search rankings
If you’re doing SEO for yourself, you can use WebCEO’s reporting tool. It provides on-the-spot reporting of your selected keywords every time you connect and go online. Remember, there’s a WARNING to this: If you check your ranking too many ‘automated’ times, you tool can be ‘banned’ from Google, thus needing you to wait for maybe a day or a week for your ban to be lifted on a fixed IP.
It’s always better to do it manually. If you want to check it automatically, give it a span of 15-30 seconds interval on keyword sets of 1, 2 and 3.
If you’ve hired an agency to do it, they should provide you with a daily report from their tool – Automatically sent to you every other day or every three (3) days with a link that looks like this.
I’d recommend you to read this post on “Why SEO companies shouldn’t guarantee search rankings” for you to understand better. Ranking is something you’d want to check, but think about it: There are too many keywords to track.
- If you were to measure only your targeted keywords, you may not know your ‘OTHER’ converting keywords (and that could matter a lot).
- If you measure only specific keywords, you’ll also miss out on other ‘longer tail’ keywords that could be converting, and may not notice. (A lot of tracking tools do not give you a breakdown of what’s converting and what’s not, CTR rates and so forth.)
- If you check your analytics for converting keywords, you may need to test and run keyword targetings on your pages (then wait for the results to pop). Time is gold – So you could just do that “in the meantime”.
Verdict
Once you’ve set up WebCEO for yourself, that should be sufficient. I think what I’ve said above is more than I should’ve said – But it’s always good to keep in mind on things like that.
Cheers, buddy. You can tweet me if you need to ask any more questions.
