Search rankings and "where you stand"

Search engine rankings are one of the concepts that I think is vaguely understood. It's amazing to me how a subtle change in a series of search terms (or quoting a pair of words) can so drastically alter the results. Let's say you're searching for discount shoes, there's a difference between a search for discount shoes and "discount shoes"... Of course, if you're hosting your own site.... it's awfully nice to be able to get an idea of where you turn up in the search results for given terms. The biggest problem is.... most search engines give a chance for you to see if pages on your site are found with the terms, but that doesn't tell where in the rankings you compare to other sites. The hard way of course, is to type in your search term and go from page to page until you finally encounter your site. This can be painfully tedious though.

Fortunately there are some tools that do the hard work for you....

http://googlerankings.com/ and http://yahoosearchrankings.com/

They make it pretty easy to find out where your site stands in a search for any given keyword (or keywords). For the google search results test you have to get a Google API key (free) in order to find out where you turn up in the results. But it should really save most webmasters a bit of time in determining just where their site ranks for certain keywords.

I'm going to put the googlerankings.com link on the sidebar. From that site you can do yahoo and msn searches as well.