SEO techniques are usually the domain of web design professionals and internet marketing specialists. Many people are happy if they can get some basic information about their sites by randomly typing their site's url in a search engine box. There are however, many excellent and FREE tools available online that helps the novice webmaster monitor and track their site's search engine position.
All search engines maintain an index of pages that appear in their results. A particular site may have all their pages indexed or only a few pages indexed - the important thing is that every single page indexed is a potential landing page for visitors from search engine results. Here are some ways in which a webmaster can check the number of pages in their site that has been indexed by a search engine crawler.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site=DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site=DomainName.com
The above two examples are for finding site information that includes the number of pages indexed in both Yahoo and Google. It should be remembered that search engines index www.DomainName.com and DomainName.com separately, so both variations should be tested.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:www.DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.DomainName.com
Incoming links are another important factor in optimizing a site for search engines. The more links a site has from other leading sites, the higher its search engine position. There are many ways of achieving this, namely from the FARM method that involves finding the top sites for a given keyword and asking those site's owners for a link exchange. The above two query examples are ways in which webmasters can check how many sites have links to their website from Yahoo and Google. It must be remembered that these are not exact figures, but estimates.
These incoming links are known as backlinks, and knowing how many backlinks a site possesses is an important SEO tool for webmasters.
Researching statistics on the number of pages that are linked to by other sites and which pages are indexed by search engine crawlers is vital for webmasters who want to stay ahead of the game. This type of data, along with a lot of the other statistics can be found for free in various online SEO tools and web monitors.
Richard Blom is the creator of The Google Monitor Tool, this is a great tool for people who would love to know what his competitor is doing and don't really want to be busy all day analyzing data, if you want to know more about Richard check out his personal page on everything about How to Google Monitor your way up in the rankings, he gives away some nice tips, check it out.
