Well, that’s what they would like you to believe.

We’re gonna be posting up a series on hints and tips on here over the coming months as we tackle the sacred cow of SEO.

And here’s a little starter for ya.

To improve anything you first need to be able to measure it. And you don’t want to be trolling around the Search Engines all day to find out where you appear for certain keyword phrases.

Thad has come across a neat little free tool called ‘Rank Checker’ (or RONK checker to be more precise).

You can grab it yourself here. (Note: You will have to opt-in to get it… and at this point I’ve no idea as to the quality of the follow ups, etc. Whatever…small price to pay) Also note: It’s a Firefox plug-in so you’ll need to be using FF (which you should be anyway.)

Here’s what it looks like:-

So, you just add in your domain and the keyword phrases you want to check for. It checks Google, Yahoo & MSN. You can save a set of keywords so you check how you are doing over time. Neat!

In the example above I used the following keyword phrases:-

• wealthy affiliate trial offer
• affiliate niche club
• niche market research
• seo fast start by dan thies

You can see we’re at #1 for ‘affiliate niche club’. No surprises there.

At #8 for our ‘wealthy affiliate trial offer’ blog post which was higher when the trial was running. Sweet!

At #8 for yesterday’s blog post on ‘seo fast start by dan thies’. WP blog posts get indexed fast when linked to an authority site like ANC.

But we’re at a very poor #50 for the more generic phrase ‘niche market research’. Must do better!

And we will!

Stay tuned for more hints and tips as we go along…

But in the meantime give Ronk Checker the once over yourself.