How do you know how well you are doing in search engines? What should you be looking for? The number of pages your site has indexed in search engines, your rankings on your keywords over time and your traffic statistics are three essential elements you should be considering.

Once you have a link building approach in place, how do you monitor how well you're doing? Here is a short checklist of things you can be monitoring to gauge your progress with search-engine-optimisation.

• The number of pages you have indexed on Google. Go to Google and type in site:www.yourdomain.com.au. Record the number of pages indexed over time in a spreadsheet and graph them. If there are any downward trends there may be an issue in your site or your competitors may be providing content that is considered of better quality and pages from your site are being marginalised. Investigate.
• Look at the number of incoming links to your site. Go to Google and type in link:www.yourdomain.com.au. This is not an up-to-date listing of the number of links to your site, as Google only periodically updates its published records (sometimes only every three months). However, it does give you a good indication of whether your site is building indexed links or losing them. For a more accurate list of the number of links you would have to use the Yahoo search engine instead.
•  Compare your traffic to the number of sales. What percentage of visitors to your site actually buy? Do you know what percentage of your site's visitors are competitors versus real customers?
• View your traffic stats. There are a number of stats programs available, and you may even get stats programs from your hosting provider. Look at: the referrers (what site visitors were at before they came to you), search engines (where are you getting your traffic. If you are going to advertise, advertise on the sites you are getting the most click-throughs from to start with), downloads of favicon.ico (an effective measure of the number of people who have bookmarked your site) and the number of page views.

The better quality information you have about your visitors and how well your site is ranking, the better quality decisions you can make to improve your rankings in the future.