

Ask HN:  What do you use to monitor SEO Keywords? - rcavezza

I was looking for a tool to make it easy to monitor keywords today, but came up nearly empty.  What do you guys use?
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sagacity
I believe all such automated, bulk SERP checking tools are usually frowned
upon by the SEs and these are also probably in violation of the search
engines' TOS.

Having said that, I've seen a number of such tools come and go in the past
decade or so. Since I don't use such a tool, I don't know of any currently
active ones but if your check with/ask at the WebMasterWorld forums, I'm
nearly sure you should be able to dig something out.

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flignats
There are many online services you can use to track your keyword positions
without violating the T&C of the se's. They have API specifically for this
purpose, you just need to find a service that uses the APIs legit.

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storborg
Sorry, but I think you're wrong. Google has no APIs which will give you the
rank of a given site for a given keyword.

If I'm mistaken, please correct me, I and 100,000 other developers would love
to use said APIs.

~~~
flignats
Let me rephrase... They have apis in place for people that use it to make the
service you are looking for... not that Google has developed an API for people
to use to retrieve their serps.

I forget that I sometimes need to be very specific when posting on the
internet...

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rcavezza
They stopped services for their web search api and web search ajax api - so
there's really no way of doing this anymore unless you scrape the results
pages - which will probably get shut down sooner or later.

~~~
flignats
In any event, there are many services out there that you can user to check
your SERPs. As mentioned above, Ginzametrics and SEOmoz are two services. They
don't get banned.

You can also go the market samurai route if you want to, or use many other
services out there that track your SERPs

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il
Ginzametrics (YC startup) seems very well reviewed.

~~~
flignats
+1 for Ginzametrics. Also, SEOmoz has a service for serp tracking.

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rfergie
You can get some ranking information in Google Analytics.

<http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/> has the basic setup,
but this only tracks which page the keyword ranks on.

To get the actual ranking, you need to track the "cd" parameter from the
referrer string rather than the "start" parameter as is given in Yoast's
example.

Google doesn't put the cd parameter in all their referrer strings, but it does
it often enough to be moderately useful.

This method also shows you how your ranking for a keyword is variable rather
than a fixed number.

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flignats
Market Samurai does a decent job of that.

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bee
monitor keywords as in keywords position in search engines?

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rcavezza
Yes - sorry about being vague. Specifically keyword position in Google.

~~~
sagacity
> Specifically keyword position in Google.

A word of caution: be _very_ careful using _any_ automated tools to run
queries on Google (unless they use the official Google search APIs). For
easily understandable reasons, the folks at Google are generally not very
happy about such things and this could lead to some harmful consequences for
your site if you're found violating their TOS.

HTH

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chaithsc
try spyfu.com

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ddemchuk
I use sescout.com for all of my SEO sites, it's great

