Common Website Monitoring Tools

In the Internet world, website ranking is important.  It is an integral part of what makes a website presence known to people all over the world.  Page ranking is a simple yet complicated concept.  A person enters keywords into a search engine for what they are looking for.  The search engine then compiles a list of websites that are related to those keywords, and puts them all in the form of a listing page.  The ranking of a website determines where on these results it will be located.  If your website is ranked high for that particular search engine, it will be listed high as well.  For example, if you are ranked within the top ten, your website will be listed on the first page.  The goal is to get within that range, but if you can get your website ranked within the top three to five you’re on a roll.  

Getting your website optimized for better page rankings is half the battle.  The other half is monitoring.  Watching your website’s rankings is important too.  You need to be constantly aware of where you rank so that you can make adjustments to your website to keep your rankings high.

There are two very popular search engines that we will deal with here: Google and Yahoo.  Each of these search engines offer tools that help webmasters monitor their page rankings.  You need to learn about these tools so that you can use as many of them as possible.  The more help that you have the better off you are.  In general, each search engine’s tools only help with that particular search engine.

Google has quite a few webmaster tools at your disposal.  Of all of these tools, one of the most overlooked one is the search box itself.  If you type a URL into the Google search box, you get a huge amount of helpful information.  By doing a search, you can find out what the competitor sites are, any other sites that have that URL on any of the pages, and all of the sites that are backlinked to that URL.

Another helpful tool from Google is the Spider.  It is an automated program that crawls the Internet and catalogs all of the websites that it reads.  This program can provide you with more information, like when the website in question was last cataloged.

Yahoo has as similar way to checking the information of a website.  Again, the search box is the most valuable tool.  By using the Yahoo search box, you get information about the website and Yahoo’s crawling.  In addition to the links, you can find out when the website was last crawled and what pages are in the cache.

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