Let’s say you have a website that is focused on selling guided walks around Derbyshire. You would create content focused pages about specific walks following all the SEO tips you’d find in our Understanding SEO article.

As your website is indexed by the search engines you would want to start checking on each of your web pages performance in the search engine result pages (SERPs), as we all know, being on the first page for a search term is where you want to be (and at the top being the optimal spot).

So, a website about walks in Derbyshire may have pages optimised for:

• walks with children in Derbyshire
• Ghost walks in Derbyshire
• Country walks in Derbyshire
• Hill walks in Derbyshire

Checking how each page is performing in the search engines for each of those particular keywords can be performed in a few ways but I want to share with you one of the coolest little desktop applications that I have come across in a while.

I’ve be fortunate enough to have access to CuteRank Pro, a Website Ranking Checker that sits nicely on my desktop.

You can download a free version and discover how to get CuteRank Pro by visiting the CuteRank website. The following will walk you through how to quickly set up your profile and monitor your rankings.

Visit the website and follow the instructions to download a copy of the CuteRank software.

After you have successfully downloaded and installed CuteRank you will need to load the software for the first time.

When you fire CuteRank up you’ll want to start by adding the domain you wish to monitor. Click on the ‘New’ button and select ‘new profile’ from the drop down menu.

This is where you input your the domain you wish to monitor.

1. Enter your URL that you wish to monitor.

2. Select the keyword you wish to monitor.

3. Select the search engines you wish to track your ranking in.

Now click OK.

1. This shows the rank for ‘polite seo‘ in the following search engines.

2. This indicates the same info but in graph format (techies love their graphs) allowing you to track your progress over a set timescale.

You would simply now add more keywords to monitor.

As you build up a collection of keywords that you are tracking you can start to export your data in pdf format or CSV.

CuteRank will only allow you to monitor a limited number of keywords unless you are using the PRO version.

Follow the link to discover how you can get your hands on the PRO version for free.

I would say that CuteRank is good at what it does, it doesn’t eat into your computers resources while it is running and it pulls back the results that you want quickly (I tested this up to 50 keywords approx).

Who is CuteRank for? Having tested CuteRank for over a week now I would say it is good for website owners who wish to monitor the performance of their website in the SERPs and it is also good for SEO Consultants who are managing multiple domains.

What’s more, with the current price tag being free and with the ability to get your hands on the CuteRank Pro version by following some simple steps then you really have nothing to lose; CuteRank gets a two thumbs up from me!

Here’s the link again: CuteRank Website Ranking Checker

To your success,

Karl Foxley

The services I am referring to are:

Search engine submission services for small businesses.

If you have come across these services, don’t stop, keep moving. If you are paying for such a service then cancel your payment immediately, you are wasting your money.

Let’s take a second to look at the claims that come with these services and dispel the myths that they are selling:

“We submit your website to 1000s of search engines increasing the chances of people finding your website.”

1000s of search egines? Get real!

If you are tracking your visitor statistics using Google Analytics or similar you will have very useful information at your finger tips. What I want you to do right now is to go to your Analytics account and look at your ‘Traffic Sources‘ and find the ‘search engines‘ data.

The screen-shot below was taken from my Analytics account:

How many search engines can you see?

Other than the different country variants (we are happily read across the globe) the search engines in the list are Google, Yahoo and Aol. Google has the largest share of the search engine market so having them as the main referring search engine in our site statistics is typical.

Now, can you see these 1000s of search engines in your referral stats?

I didn’t think you would!

Last question, the last time you used a search engine… which one did you use?

Returning to the claims of the search engine submissions services:

We submit your website to the search engines on a monthly basis.

Oh come on!

The big players of search, Google, Yahoo and Bing, do not need to be reminded that your website exists. If you are paying an on-going fee for such a service please terminate your payment!

Continually submitted your website to ‘anywhere’ may get you and your business website listed as a spammer.

I don’t want to confuse anyone and I understand that you may be left wondering what you should do to alert the search engines when you launch a new website .

The simple answer is that you can do NOTHING!

Google, Yahoo and Bing are powered by super computers that WILL find your website.

You can speed things up by getting some quality inbound links from authority websites pointing directly to your website. You can learn more about securing quality inbound links by following the tips in our newsletter and mini-course.

Another thing you should be doing is adding your XML Sitemap to Google so that they know what pages on your website are important to you.In doing this you may also make Google aware of pages that they have not yet indexed.

You can add your Sitemap by registering your account with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not have an XML Sitemap you can use this free tool to have one created in a very short space of time.

You can also do the same with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center.

With this information in hand please do not pay for a search engine submission service for your business website (or any other website for that matter), the search engines will find you.

Final words, read what Google have to say about submitting your website to them (this does not include registering your site with Webmaster tools but is talking about the sumbit URL method.)

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Today I want to show you exactly how to submit your website to Yahoo’s search engine. A lot of emphasis is placed on Google because the Goog have the biggest slice of the search engine pie but you can make a great income from Yahoo’s search engine alone.

Here is the link directly to the submission page: Yahoo Website Submission Service

You can also submit your website’s RSS feed. Just like with Google, I would say that Yahoo’s search engine is smart enough to find your website without having to submit your site to them. However, if you really want to do it then you can do it yourself without having to pay for the service like some companies recommend you do. You can use Web CEO (it’s free) to submit your website to Yahoo and to find other search engines and directories for additional submissions.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Let Matt Cutts explain this further by watching the video below.

So as you can see, some links are going to be much more effective than others.

Here are some directories that you should be on.

DMOZ.org (free)

BOTW (paid)

Yahoo Directory (paid)

To your success,

Karl Foxley

You need to read this post if you are paying for a ‘website submission service‘ that ’submits your website to the search engines and directories’, or, if you are paying for a monthly website submission service.

Before I tell you how to easily do this for yourself I want to explain why monthly website submission services are not a good idea!

If you submit your website over and over again to the same search engines and directories you can have yourself listed as a spammer. You may even be reported to your hosting company and have your account put on hold, meaning no more website in the search engines and no more visitors. What a great service you are paying for!

So how do the SEO Consultants submit your website to the search engines and directories? They use dedicated website submission software.

Now, there is nothing wrong with submitting your website using software but here lies the problem, how can you tell good software from bad software? If you only have a faint grasp of search engine optimisation then you probably wouldn’t know where to start and this is the same for some ’so-called’ SEO experts.

I’ve used and tested way too many SEO software packages and the only desktop application I would ever recommend is Web CEO.

Download Web CEO (it’s free) and submit your website yourself and follow the instructions given. Here is my recommendation: only submit your website and blog to the suggested directories (not search engines). To put it simply, Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough to find your website without you ever having to submit your URL and the same goes for the other major search engines.

You can boost the ‘findability’ of your site by getting links from authority websites to point back to your website (such as article directories, EzineArticles, GoArticles, etc) – sidenote: join our newsletter to learn more about article marketing in day 1 of the Website Promotion Success seven day mini-course!

You can learn a lot from playing around with your website within Web CEO but please do not use it as a substitute for hiring a SEO Consultant, I’m just alerting you to the fact that you do not need to be paying for a monthly submission service. A reputable SEO Company may recommend you take out a monthly package but this will be for on-going on-site SEO and off-site SEO (inbound link building) and NOT for monthly submissions.

Web CEO has many other features that will walk you through how to optimise your website. I recommend you download the free version of Web CEO and give it a try. You can monitor your website from within the dashboard area and you will gain a free trial to a lot of extra features (at your request). The one thing that I really think Web CEO is great for and that is finding, otherwise, undiscovered website / blog directories.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss your website’s SEO performance and to get a personalised quote for your website.

Further reading:

Google’s word on submitting your website to Google’s search