	Building Traffic from Internet Search Engines: Monitoring Your Presence
Alma Mater Software, Inc.

Contents

How Am I Doing?

Now that you're in the search engines' databases, it's time to see how you are doing.

The best way to do that is just to go the search engine and try some queries. Some search engine sites allow you to restrict your search to a particular domain name - this makes easy to see if you show up at all.

Example

On AltaVista, do this query:

    +host:mydomain.com some key words

where you replace "mydomain.com" with your domain, and the words "some" "key" and "words" with some keywords that you know to appear on your site.

On InfoSeek Ultra, the query is:

    +site:mydomain.com some key words

That is, it uses "site" rather than "host" to specify the domain.

If your site is not near the top ...

If your site is near the top, go out and party. However, if other sites are ahead of yours in the "relevance" list, you should figure out why. Are there words you are not mentioning? Try a more sophisticated query that includes your location and more key words about your product and/or service. If you are still not there, you need to make your pages more relevant.

DON'T succumb to the temptation to "load" your pages with repetitive keywords. This will make you look dumb and "desperate" in the long run.

NEXT: Indexing Your Own Site

Building Traffic from Internet Search Engines: Monitoring Your Presence

Alma Mater Software, Inc.

How Am I Doing?

Example

If your site is not near the top ...