Knowing your keyword ranking is one of the most important aspects of ensuring your website is optimised for the search engines in the most effective way possible. One of the biggest mistakes that many website owners make is to assume that by stuffing their website full of relevant keywords, by some miraculous chance of fortune their website will appear high up Google’s results page. Unfortunately this is not the case, and it is unwise to leave your choice of keywords to mere chance.

It is certainly true to say that Google is no longer a search engine which can be fooled easily through keyword stuffing and excessive use of key words in meta tags. Using its highly developed latent semantic indexing, Google is now able to analyse and identify the overall contextual relevance of a website without having to rely purely on the existence of half a dozen specific keywords.

However don’t be fooled into thinking that because Google no longer relies upon the existence of specific keywords, that you should ignore including those keywords on your site. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because Google relies more on context then keywords, it is no longer important to focus on the use of those keywords. This is to misunderstand the difference between keyword stuffing and keyword optimisation.

If your website is all about selling and repairing watches, then it is certainly important to make sure that as much of the content of your website as possible uses key words and phrases which relate to the subject of watches, and which helps to build up a broad contextual picture for Google. But this is only the first stage in optimising your website fully.

Working on the search engine optimisation of your website it is sometimes very easy to lose focus, and forget that at the end of the day everything that you are attempting to achieve is for one very specific goal. That goal is to make sure that when a potential customer carries out a search on a major search engine, your website appears as close to the top of the results pages as possible. But search results pages only exist after a potential customer has actually carried out a search. Understanding what potential customers are actually searching for is the most important aspect for you to understand.

Google is just one of the many providers able to help you identify the most popular key words and phrases used by potential customers who are searching for the sort of goods or services which your website is offering. This will allow you to tailor the content of your own website to include these key words in the most relevant places.

But how do you know whether all that hard work has paid off? If your sales figures suddenly rocket skywards, then that’s a pretty good indication. It is also hopelessly optimistic, and in the short term it will be important for you to be able to analyse where your own website is situated in the search engine results for specific keyword searches.

There are a number of tools on the Internet that allow you to check exactly this, but the one I used most frequently is on cheekygreenmonkey.com. They have a key phrase ranking tool which allows you to enter your domain, and a particular key word or phrase, and they will be able to immediately tell you where your website ranks within the major search engines. If your site is listed in the top 20 or so domains, you’re on the way to success.