Here are reviews of some great search engine ranking tools put together by guest author Tinu Abayomi-Paul.
The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use.
Using Your Google Site Information Page
Open up your browser and go to Google’s home page. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So, if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks matter.
Figure Out When Google Spidered You
From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your home page. To see this in action, click on the first group of information links, Show Google's cache of yoursitename.com. If you look next to the word cached on the first line, the date is expressed also. Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.Find Information About Your Site In Yahoo
Yahoo's Search Meta Words help page will tell you how to find out what sites are linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page, you’ll be able to view your cached pages, etc.Discover Your Site’s Status on MSN
MSN Search has a good section for site owners, including information about MSN Search's web crawler and site indexing. As the page in the help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of last caching.Google Rankings
Google Rankings is a great site for checking your rankings with Google. You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and the site also has the direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query the site for information on Google.With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine. They also have some 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.
