A lot of the traffic to YLF comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com. This is easily the highest volume source of new readers right now. So it is important how YLF “ranks” for keywords that relate to YLF subject matter. For example, when someone goes to Google and searches for “smart casual style”, www.youlookfab.com is the often the first result at the top of the page. This is excellent. For other keywords, like “body type”, the ranking is less impressive.

One way to find out how your site ranks is to do a search on Google and see where you end up. This is time consuming, however, and there are online tools that make things a lot easier. The SEOBook rank checker is one such tool. Just type in the keyword and your site URL (in my case, the URL is “www.youlookfab.com”) and click “Check Rank”. The result comes back pretty quickly.

Here are some examples this morning (rankings in parentheses):

• smart casual style (1)
• structured clothing (1)
• what to wear to a black tie event (7)
• pretty tops (9)
• smart casual (10)
• how to get rid of deodorant stains on darks (10)
• dress over leggings (10)
• clothes to make you look slim (28)
• body type (44)

There are some mysteries about Google keyword ranks. For example, the keyword “what to wear” doesn’t rank at all for YLF. It only appears in the paid results on the right hand side of the page (because we pay to put it there – more on that in a future post).

There are many other tools like the one I used above. Some of them will also check other search engines, like RankChecker, which gives results for Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live). Note that most of these sites are covered in advertising for products and services that promise to improve your rankings in the search engines. Be very wary of these promises – there are a lot of good search engine optimization (SEO) professionals out there, but there are also a lot of snake oil salesmen.