Right now, Google is updating the data it reports for PageRank.
TIP: If you’re new to SEO, here’s why PageRank is important…
PageRank is a measurement that Google uses to rate the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web page.
The higher the PageRank score (out of 10), the better the links, the more likely you are to rank well in Google.
Although Google measures and recalculates PageRank constantly, it only shows up-to-date PageRank data to the public roughly once every 3 months.
The last update was around April 3rd 2010. The next one will probably be in September 2010.
So this is a rare opporunity to get an up-to-date snapshot of the PageRank scores of all the pages of your sites.
If you’ve been using Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker, make sure you monitor your Rank Tracker data over the next few days to see how your PageRank changes. (Does your PageRank rise? Does it fall? Does it stay the same?)
By updating your ranking data regularly inside Market Samurai, you’ll be able to keep a historical record of PageRank for all of your sites’ pages – as well as Backlink data, Indexed Page counts and [of course!] your search engine rankings.
Market Samurai will turn all of this data into pretty graphs that make it easy to see changes in PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages and Rankings over time – like this one (showing rankings):
(To view these graphs, or historical data, just click the graph icon beside any result inside Rank Tracker)
Obviously, if you’re going to monitor your site’s performance over time like this, you’ll need to have access to Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker module – one of the advanced tools only available to paid users of Market Samurai.
So if you’re using a trial version of Market Samurai, or have an expired trial, you will need to upgrade to the full version to use this tool.
Recommended Rank Tracker Resources:
If you’re new to using Rank Tracker, or if you would like to use it more effectively, here are several free resources that we’ve recently released to help you:
Market Samurai Dojo Tutorials: Rank Tracker – Here you can find training (written and video) on all Market Samurai tools. (Rank Tracker training is at the bottom of the page.)
Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker module provides you with the tools you need to monitor your website rankings – in all 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing).
Because of this huge wealth of information, it’s one of Market Samurai’s most popular features.
In support I receive a lot of questions about how to use it effectively. So today, I want to answer the most common questions people have around using Rank Tracker – including “how do you use all of the tools inside Rank Tracker to your best advantage?”
I also want to share with you some advanced analysis strategies for using Rank Tracker. And give you some time-saving insider tips for pinpointing some of the valuable insights Rank Tracker is sharing about your website.
(Note: If you don’t have access to Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker, you can sign up for a free 12-day trial of Market Samurai here. If your trial has expired, you will need to upgrade to the full version of Market Samurai to access the Rank Tracker module as it is one of the advanced Market Samurai features only available in the paid version.)
Why Should I Track My Rankings?
There are 4 reasons why you should check your rankings regularly:
It tells you whether your SEO techniques are working. This helps you to fine-tune your SEO strategy. When you are able to see tangible feedback on whether your SEO efforts are having an impact on your site’s rankings it allows you to determine what works for your particular niche. This allows you to spend more time on the things that work, and less time on the things that don’t.
It alerts you if you have made changes to your site that are negatively impacting your search engine positions. Sometimes you’ll make a small change to your website structure, or modify your site’s meta-tags and it will negatively impact your search engine rankings. If you are not monitoring your rankings then you won’t know what’s happened until you start investigating why your traffic has dropped. By monitoring your rankings you are able to see this change early, and correct the problem before it has a significant impact on your traffic and income.
Watching your sites move up the rankings keeps you motivated. When you first start working on a site it can be a lot of hard work without any tangible rewards. Watching your sites improve in ranking is fun, and allows you to see your hard work paying off. This helps to keep you motivated in those early days and keeps you working towards your goals.
It helps you to prioritize your SEO efforts. Few of us have the luxury to dedicate as much time as we’d like towards building our online businesses. In the end you will need to decide which areas you are going to focus your limited time on. By looking at an overview of where your sites are ranking for your keywords you can prioritize your work and focus on the areas that are going to bring the most value to your business.
How Should I Select Keywords To Track?
There are a number of ways that you could decide which keywords to track.
A common approach is to select a large number of keywords in your niche or keywords that you think it would be nice to rank for. This gives you a large list of rank data with many keywords showing no rank or ranking on page 30 where you have no hope of getting any traffic from it. This means that it’s harder to spot the truely valuable keywords and as a result it doesn’t give a good snapshot of how your SEO campaign is going and what you need to work on.
A better approach is to track only the keywords that you are actively optimizing your site for. This includes lower traffic long-tail keywords that you might target with a single blog post or article. In addition, you may like to track the keywords that are currently bringing traffic to your site.
How Often Should I Check my Rankings?
Google is constantly tweaking and updating its search data, over a network of thousands of computers.
This means results can fluctuate greatly throughout the day, particularly when a site has only recently been indexed. So it isn’t necessarily helpful to know your exact position at any one time.
What is more important is the trend in how your site is moving through the SERPs for your keywords.
As a general rule of thumb checking your rankings weekly is plenty to give you the information you need to know about how your site is performing.
(If your cache age tells you that Google is indexing your site more often then you can increase the number of times per week you check your rankings. This knowledgebase article explains cache age further.)
The most powerful interface in Rank Tracker is the historical data. You can access this by clicking the graph button to the right of each row. This allows you to view a graph of how your positions have changed over time giving you powerful information that can help you to adjust your SEO strategy.
The brilliance of this is that it filters out the noise caused by small fluctuations in ranking and allows you to easily see the overall trend of how your site is performing in the search engines.
This means that you are not distracted by the small adjustments that Google makes throughout the day so you are able to see exactly where your site is heading and whether the SEO efforts that you are applying are working or you have hit a dead end.
What do I do with My Ranking Data?
So you have all of this historical, and current data on your sites and your rankings, what do you do with it?
Your ranking data is likely to tell you one of three things:
If your position for a keyword is improving then you know that whatever SEO techniques that you have been applying are working so you should continue as you’ve been going.
If your position for a keyword has stopped improving then look at your site and see what you could be doing to improve your optimization. Try something different and see if that helps.
If your position for a keyword is falling – don’t panic! Think about the recent changes you have made to your site. Could any of those have damaged your SEO? Have you been updating your site less frequently? Have you stopped building backlinks? Are your competitors fighting back? Try to determine what has caused the fall in ranking and correct the problem.
By keeping track of how your SEO efforts have impacted your position in the search engines over the long term you can develop your own understanding of what helps, what doesn’t help and what might harm the SEO of your site, allowing you to build your own expertise and give yourself the best chance of success.
If you’re a keen internet marketer, performing SEO on your site is something you will do frequently – whether you’re updating title tags, publishing articles or building your backlink network.
But how do you know if your SEO is working?
You could be wasting your time and effort on SEO that doesn’t improve your ranking.
Analyzing the impact of your SEO is difficult. You need to record your position for various keywords, check your PageRank and record your backlink network. To do it manually would take hours.
Unless you track your site with Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker.
Rank Tracker scours search engine results for keywords you specify, to record your site’s position, storing the data so you can get an easy “Before and After” snapshot when you update your site.
By comparing these results you can see which methods of SEO are working, and stay alert for any changes that might lower your ranking.
This week, the training team have put together a fantastic update to the existing Rank Tracker Training.
Boot Camp
In the first video, Dr Anthony takes you on a Rank Tracker “Boot Camp” – showing you how to set up Rank Tracker to start recording your site’s data.
Analysis and Interpretation
The second video shows you the next step – analyzing and interpretting your data.
The Cluster Model
Finally, for the SEO Masterclass section, Dr Anthony introduces you to the more advanced “Cluster Model” or website promotion and shows you how to use this model within Rank Tracker.
Once you have watched these videos, you’re ready to start using Rank Tracker and begin to fine tune your SEO efforts to find the best and most effective method for you.
Alex
P.S. Rank Tracker is a fully paid module for Market Samurai. To get your hands on a free trial of Market Samurai, you can click here.
In the recent batch of updates, we made some changes to the data that some of our international users receive.
These changes have improved the quality and accuracy of non-English and non-US results in the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules.
What’s Changed?
Previously, Market Samurai wasn’t able to “read” or “understand” Google results pages in languages other than English.
This meant Market Samurai had difficulty working out where sites rank for a keyword (the main function of the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules) when it had to read results in Arabic or Tagalog (for example).
So to get around this problem, Market Samurai would search English-language versions of Google for non-English keywords.
Unfortunately, this meant Market Samurai would often report slightly different results.
So… We taught Market Samurai how to “read” 41 languages.
With this improved language and region support, Market Samurai is able to give you full SEO Analysis and Rank Tracking for all languages and regions – (9,594 different language and region variations in total – 234 countries x 41 languages… and that’s BEFORE you look at Market Samurai’s multi-Search-Engine and multi-Match-Type options for Rank Tracking).
And this means smart Samurai who are doing SEO in multiple languages, or attacking foreign and non-English-language niches (where the competition is low, and the pay-offs high) can get even more accurate keyword data.
Brent
P.S. – If you don’t have access to Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module or Rank Tracker, you can get a 12-Day Market Samurai Trial here, or Upgrade To The Full Version and get lifetime access at the discounted price of $149.
By now, you’re already using Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker to monitor the rankings of your websites and their subpages down to the 1,000th result in the search engines.
But Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker can do much more than this.
What I’m going to show you today is how to use Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker to monitor the rankings of content that you put on 3rd Party sites – like YouTube videos, Squidoo lenses, Hubpages.
Watch the video below and read on.
Google loves content from high authority sites such as YouTube, Squidoo and many others.
As a result, you can often be awarded very generous rankings, and quickly for content hosted on these sites.
In many cases this content can rank higher and faster than a seemingly more relevant self hosted website page.
In the case of videos, Google will often reserve a prominent place in its search engine results specifically for videos (as you see below.)
If we can get content on these sites ranked highly and quickly, we can use it to drive traffic to our main site, ultimately making more happy, paying customers.
This is known as “feeder content” and high authority web 2.0 websites are perfect for it.
However in the past the tricky part has been tracking this content in the search engines.
Well that is until now. With Market Samurai it’s a cinch, requiring only a few clicks of the your mouse.
Today, I’m excited to be releasing the Mystery Module to you.
Monitor Your Site’s Rankings with the Market Samurai Rank Tracker
Just like every other module inside Market Samurai, our Rank Tracker’s function is simple.
It doesn’t just monitor and track your position in the search engines…
It helps you to make more money, with less time, and less effort, from your online business.
Let me show you what I mean, and reveal 2 specific strategies for cutting down the time and effort that you put into your web-site, while you get better rankings, traffic and sales:
If you don’t own Market Samurai yet, click here purchase your copy now to get instant access to Market Samurai’s new Rank Tracking module.
The Importance of Rankings
In simple terms, the reason you should monitor your rankings is because every tiny increase in rankings that you receive gives you a substantial increase in traffic.
These are the top 10 results inside Google, and the percentage of times that they get clicked.
Rank
% of Clicks
Visits per 1,000
1
42.1%
421
2
11.9%
119
3
8.5%
85
4
6.1%
61
5
4.9%
49
6
4.1%
41
7
3.4%
34
8
3.0%
30
9
2.8%
28
10
3.0%
30
What Do You Notice About The Clicks?
It doesn’t take much more than a glance to see that the closer we are to the top of the listings, the more potential customers visit our web-site.
Visitors select higher results far more often than they select results below.
So if the search engines were sending out 1,000 visitors per day for a keyword, the #1 result would receive 421 of them.
But each time you step down that ladder, there’s a massive drop in the amount of traffic that you get.
Here’s where ranking matters – big time!
Position #1 might get 421 visitors…
But position #2 might only get 119 (just over 1/4 of the visitors of position #1);
Position #3 would get just 81 visitors (1/5th of the visitors of position #1);
Position #6 would receive just 41 visitors per day (1/10th of the visitors of position #1);
So to step up from position 2, to position 1, could result in 3 or 4 times more sales for us.
Or to step from position 6 to 1 could mean we earn TEN TIMES more sales.
These are tiny steps in rankings – but GIANT LEAPS for your bank balance.
STEP 1: Know Your Rankings
You can’t improve something if you’re not tracking it.
And this is the first thing that Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker module will do for you..
With the click of a button, you can now get up-to-date data on:
Where all of your web-pages rank in your market;
In all 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN);
Tracking your rank in any one of 234 countries and regions;
For as many keywords as you choose;
Including the details of all multiple listings that you have – not just the first listing;
Right down to the 1,000th result – the deepest rank tracking analysis of any rank tracker available today
You’ll also get up-to-date PageRank and Backlink data for all of your ranking pages
You will be able to see how many pages are indexed by the search engines on your site…
You can monitor the rankings of ANY Web 2.0 content alongside your website’s rankings – including your YouTube videos, Squidoo lenses and Ezine Articles…
AND – most importantly – you can see at a glance which pages are rising, and which are falling in the search engines, with color-coded charts, and graphs that show your site’s rankings over time:
STEP 2: Focus on the areas of Maximum Results
Once we see where our strongest rankings are, we can focus our efforts on these pages and get the maximum return from our efforts.
That’s because you will have two things working in your favour:
1) The Search Engine Numbers
Remember how we saw that a site ranked #2 in Google could get THREE to FOUR times more potential customers from that keyword if they were ranked #1?
Or if we were ranked #6, we could get a TEN FOLD increase by hitting that top spot?
In both cases, we’re making small improvements to already strong numbers – and seeing BIG returns as a reward.
That’s because it’s not going from position 900 to position 100 in the search engines that gives you the biggest returns – it’s going from position 2 or 3 to position 1 that creates the biggest results for us.
2) SOMETHING must be working already!
The second reason you want to focus on improving already positive rankings is because it’s a great sign if you’re ALREADY getting good results from a keyword…
If you’re already ranking well for a keyword, you’re either doing something right – or you’re in a weak market.
Whatever the reason is, this is a good sign. From here, it’s easy to go the next step – and rank even better.
This is the first thing you should check in Rank Tracker
So Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker tells us where we should be focussing our efforts – by identifying the keywords we rank well for, we can create substantial increases in profits through tiny shifts in our rankings.
That’s the first obvious step to maximise your profits with the minimum amount of effort – to focus on where we can get the maximum profits.
Now, it’s time to be lazy…
Let’s get those results with the minimum amount of effort…
STEP 3: Only Do The Things That Create Results
If you’re an engineer you’ll know that one of the best ways to avoid unnecessary work and delays is to avoid waste.
We want to avoid wasting time and effort on things that don’t work and don’t give us results.
But the problem with SEO is that there are SO MANY conflicting opinions on what works and what doesn’t – and the truth is, many of the “opinions” and “theories” out there are dead wrong!
So let me cut through the confusion, and give you one simple rule…
One Simple Rule for Getting Rankings
Just take one strategy – it doesn’t matter what it is – and do it.
Pick something simple, something that doesn’t take much time and effort, and do it.
Then track it in Rank Tracker.
If your site’s ranking rises, keep doing it.
Do it over and over again until that one thing stops working.
Then, try something else.
Simple, common sense thinking – isn’t it? But it’s only possible if you are actually tracking where you rank in the search engines.
It’s the END of “Hoping” to Rank
That’s the beauty of Rank Tracker… It takes the guesswork out of SEO strategies.
You’ll see search engines as they discover your backlinks – and see whether or not those backlinks result in better rankings.
You can put up lots of fresh, new content – and find out whether the volume of content on your site affects rankings.
You can monitor the affect of new backlinks on your PageRank – then monitor the affect of PageRank on your rankings. Is it SEO voodoo?
You can test different link building strategies – which ones work, and which ones don’t?
And whatever you do, you can see almost instantly.
It All Comes Down To This One Simple Question…
“Did this increase my rankings in the search engines?”
If it does, keep doing it.
If it doesn’t – stop and try something else.
It’s THAT simple.
The Samurai Edge for Tracking Your Site
Not only are we launching a Rank Tracker inside Market Samurai today – we’re leading the market – launching the most fully-featured rank tracking tool available ANYWHERE.
While most other search engine rank tracking software costs between $99 and $389:
No other software will track your rankings as DEEP as Market Samurai’s rank tracker – which can monitor down to 1,000 results.
No other software will give you as much data on your rankings
No other software will track the rankings ALL of your sites, and ALL of your content – including content on 3rd party sites – like content that you upload YouTube, Squidoo and Ezine Articles.
PLUS – Most other search engine rank tracking software will make you pay to stay updated.
So you might pay $250 to get started for the first year – but to keep your software running 12 months later, expect to pay $250 again (or worse, get locked into a subscription plan!) to get required upgrades every year that you do rank tracking – for as long as you’re running your online business.
But we’re NOT going to do it that way.
As of today, our Rank Tracker is being released as a core part of Market Samurai.
That means there are no subscription costs to pay.
You get full access to the Market Samurai Rank Tracker for a single one-time payment.
So if you already own Market Samurai, you’ll pay no more to get access to this feature – it’s already yours. Just download the latest update, and begin using it right away.
This is something that we can only “give away” for a limited time.
The reason all other rank trackers make you pay ongoing fees for updates is because those updates come at a cost.
Right now, we’re absorbing these costs ourselves…
But this can’t happen forever.
Sooner or later, we will need to raise our costs, or begin charging subscription fees in order to keep up with our exponentially-growing user base.
So if you want the benefits of Rank Tracker, full access to all other Market Samurai tools, and free lifetime access to all updates – make sure you purchase your copy right now, while the price is so low.
Click here to get your copy now – and begin using Rank Tracker right away.
We have created a series of short videos for you view there, designed to take you through how to set up Rank Tracker and begin tracking your rankings.
Brent
Edit: Competition winners from our “Guess the Mystery Module” competition have not been announced yet. Unfortunately, with an incredible 1,338 responses, it’s taking us longer than we expected to read all of the responses submitted. We will be announcing winners ASAP.
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beside any result inside Rank Tracker)
In the recent batch of updates, we made some changes to the data that some of our international users receive.
