Monitoring Your Progress

Okay, so you’ve decided on your keywords, inserted your links and submitted your sites. Now all you have to do is wait for the cash to start pouring in, right?

Well, not quite. You might get lucky with your first shot, but it has never happened to me that way. Once you’ve submitted all your links, you need to keep a close eye on them, and see which need improving and which can be dropped.

The crucial factor here is to keep track of your Search Engine Statistics. These will tell you how many people have come from the various search engines and how many of those become customers. But it’s not enough to know how much traffic you’re receiving. You also want to know how you’re doing in the rankings. There are two ways to do that:

Manual Searches

Dead easy, simply log on and look. First enter your URL to make sure your site has been approved and listed. That can take a little while. Once you can see that you’re online though, you want to see how you’re ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. This works, but it takes a while.

Computerized Searches

It’s been a long time since I did a manual search. If you’ve got ten sites and you want to check ten keywords for each once a week, you’re going to lose at least a day’s work a month. That’s too much for me. To automate this task, I suggest using a software program found at WebPositionGold.com. You tell the software all the keywords you want checked and it gives you an automated report.

When you look at your statistics, pay attention to which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. In general, the higher you are, the more traffic you’ll receive and the more sales you’ll make. But that isn’t always true. It might pay more to be fifteenth on a keyword that gets a million searches a month than first on a keyword that gets just a thousand. And if you’re fifteenth, you’ve still got room for improvement.

It’s the improvement that’s the key. If you see that your link is stuck at the bottom of a list somewhere, try adding more links, putting that keyword in more pages or adding keyword-rich content.