What are the Search Engine Positioning Reports?

They are a quick and easy way to check the status of a site on selected search engines.

How do I use it?

Just enter the name of a domain along with any search phrases that you want to check and wait for the results to be returned.

What's a search phrase?

A search phrase is any word or phrase that a Web user might enter into a search engine. No site can appear high in all searches, so the aim with search engine optimization (or whatever you want to call it) is for a site to appear high in the results returned for a few carefully selected phrases.

What do all the numbers mean?

The first row is the number of pages indexed by a selection of search engines. This tells you how many pages on the selected domain are indexed in each of the search engines listed.

If no pages appear, then the domain has probably not been listed yet and it needs to be submitted to the search engines in the normal way.

If you have selected search phrases, then results will appear for each phrase. The numbers under each search engine indicate the position in the search results of the first result from your domain. Lower numbers are better, obviously. Only the first 100 results from each engine are measured.

What do the green and red bars mean?

The bars give an approximate order of magnitude measure of the popularity of a search phrase (i.e. four bars indicate 1,000 times the popularity of one bar). The green bars indicate the volume of searches (as measured at Overture) for a given phrase and the red bars indicate the number of sites containing the words in the phrase (as measured by Google). These bars give a rough idea of which search phrases are worth working on. More green bars and fewer red bars are likely to indicate a good search term to target.

What is the Archive link at the top of the page?

The Archive link takes you to a list of previously generated reports, ordered by month.

What's happened to my archive!?

To keep disk space usage down, old accounts are periodically archived. If you want to retrieve old data, contact help AT sitecook.com

What is the Google time series?

The Google time series offers a view of the position on Google of your selected search terms over time. In order to make use of this report, you will need to generate a new report on Site Cook at regular intervals.

What happens when I delete a phrase?

It is removed from your report, but any searches previously made on the phrase will be retained in the database. A phrase can be recovered, by re-entering it in the form at the bottom of the report

Are there any restrictions on the use of this site?

Results are stored until the end of the month, so that frequent repeated searches of the same domain and the same search phrases are not possible. However, new search phrases and new domains can be added at any time. The restrictions are in place to ensure that we are minimising the number of requests being made to the search engines. Over-use of their search interfaces for research purposes may end up getting this site blacklisted, which would be a shame.

I still don't understand how I can use these results.

Try reading A Quick Guide to Search Engine Positioning, which provides a useful summary of the issues, and the Search Engine Marketing FAQ.

What is Site Cook?

Site Cook is a free service provided by Danny Sofer who among other things sells antique boxes online.

Further questions can be addressed to help AT sitecook.com