The Market Samurai folks just revealed a new Rank Tracker module which is a pretty awesome way to keep track of how your sites rank over time. Rank Tracker allows you to input in the domains you would like to track along with a set of specific keywords. Market Samurai will then go out and tell you where your sites rank for all three major search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing for each keyword you specify. You will also see the specific page(s) that are ranking for that keyword, the number of page backlinks, and the page rank for the page. Rank Tracker also gives you a plots view which allows you to compare your rankings for these various metrics over time.
Using Rank Tracker on SEObook.com
I think Traffic Travis also offers similar functionality, but one feature I really like about Market Samurai’s implementation is that it can search deeper down in the search results for your pages, instead of just looking at the first page of results. By default, it looks at the top 100 search results, but it is capabable of drilling down to the top 1000. Of course, that causes it to take much longer to fetch its data. The Rank Tracker module does allow you to input in multiple domains to track, but I am not sure that I like how it’s implemented. It seems to only show the top domain for each keyword, instead of showing you how they all compare to each other which is what I want to know. Also, it looks like you currently have to manually update the rank data yourself, instead it being fetched automatically on a daily basis for example.
With Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker, I can see how various SEO link building strategies are actually affecting the rankings of my sites. That’s potentially very powerful as it will allow me to focus my effort on what works and stop wasting my time on what doesn’t. All paid Market Samurai users will get access to the Rank Tracker module for free, so just update your copy of the software on your next launch. If you buy before June 19th, 9:30pm PST, they are having a Market Samurai discount where you can buy a copy for $97. Otherwise, the regular price for Market Samurai is $149.
