A Better SEO Measuring Stick	Visited: 1131 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Dan Wegner November 23, 2006

I was thinking the other day that we need a better way to track our SEO progress. We need to find one measuring stick that we can use to measure all the hard work we do to improve site positions for any given keyword across all the top search engines. So I created one.

I call it SEO Rank (I hope I didn't step on anyone's toes there)and it measures the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. SEO Rank is a number from zero to 100 that indicates how well you are positioned in the top five search engines which account for 91.5 (see:Nielsen NetRatings) percent of all search traffic. Those search engines are Google with 49.2 percent, Yahoo! with 23.8 percent, MSN with 9.6 percent, AOL with 6.3 percent and Ask closing out the top five with 2.6 percent.

The next closest search engine has less than 1.0 percent and so for expediency's sake, I stopped at five. Next we need to identify our SERP position for each of the above, up to position 200 - I think that's generous. So my tool goes out to each search engine and identifies the position of a base URL (like www.danwegner.com) for a selected keyword (like "SEO Video").

Now if my math serves me, we can take the respective share of each search engine and put the SERP position under it like this: 49.2/11 (that's Google's market share, over my position for the term "SEO Video" in Google). So for my less than stellar performance in Google I get a score of around 4.47 out of 49.2. Compare that to MSN's number 1 position for the term "SEO Video" using the same URL which gives me 9.6/1 or 9.6.

Now all I need to do is add all those numbers together and I get a number between zero and 91.5 (the percentage of total searches using our five search engines). I like round numbers so I do a little cross multiple and divide and I get a number between zero and 100.

So there. Now you can go build your own SEO Rank Calculator or you can get mine absolutely free, including source code, at danwegner.com.