Researching Your Web Site Popularity

How does your web site traffic compare to your competitors?
How does your site stack up against your competitors in terms of link popularity and number of pages indexed? It’s easy to find this out. You can analyze your web site like a search pro using a “advanced search" techniques.

On Yahoo, type "linkdomain:yourwebsitename.com" in the search box.
The results will show all links to any page within your domain.

The same command will work on the MSN Search Engine.

On Google, you can search for (quote) “www.yourwebsitename.com” (close quote) to get an idea of the quality of links you have on the engine. Google has a tendency to under-report, so the value of the information you'll see will be what Google considers to be the most relevant links with repeating links excluded.

To see how thoroughly your site is being crawled by a certain engine, just type "site:yourwebsitename.com" in that engine's search box. More to the point, to see if specific pages on your site are indexed and showing certain keywords, type "site:yoursite.com keyword."
So for example in Google I would type (site:www.visionefx.net web design) or
(site:www.visionefx.net marketing)

On a more advanced level, if you want to get an idea of what anchor text different sites are using in their inbound links, type "allinanchor:keyword." This allows you to research those links and try to imitate the high ranking web site's anchor combinations.

Last but not least, there's the ever-popular "inurl:keyword." This can be useful in finding out if other sites are using your brand in their domain names.

If you are looking for a content feed for your site, type "feed: keyword" on MSN. You'll see a list of topical RSS and XML feeds you can link to. To find out whether a specific site has a feed, type "has feed: www.websitename.com.

The results will show pages, which have links to feeds.

Enjoy the search.
No rest for the weary.