Help, Tips and Tricks

Rank Angel’s core feature is telling you where your website ranks when someone performs a search in a search engine using specific keywords. The easiest way to find out how your website ranks, is using Rank Angel’s Quick Search, which is available on the Homepage and My Projects page.

Using Quick Search has drawbacks as Rank Angel does not store your Quick Search results. To periodically check your websites search ranking and see its' results graphed, Create a Rank Angel project.

Choosing a search engine

The "search engine" drop down list contains the names of the search engines that RankAngel can submit your query to. You use this list to select which search engine you want to test.

RankAngel currently supports Google's main search engine (www.google.com), 15 of Google's country specific search engines as well as Yahoo's Australian search engine. Additional support will be extended to other search engines over the next 3 months.

What do I type in the keywords box?

These are the words and phrases that you want to submit to your selected search engine. Normally these will be the words that you expect your potential customers, subscribers and general public to use when looking for your page.

For example, if you had a business website selling clothes for small children, you might be interested in knowing if your site ranks when people search for "toddler clothes". In this example you would type 'toddler clothes" into the keywords text box.

What is the target URL?

This is the URL of your page that you would like to see appearing in search results. For example "www.myurl.com". RankAngel will scan through the search results looking for this URL. Note that you do not need to prefix this URL with "http://" - but if you do - it doesn't matter.

How many search results should I check - what does this mean?

Note: this feature is only available from the My Projects page.

A search engine can return as many results as you ask it for. It can give you only 10, or it can give you 500. Filling in this field this tells RankAngel how many search results to ask the nominated search engine for - and how many results to scan through for your target URL.

It is worth noting that most people will only look at the first page, or if they are patient, the first couple of pages. This means that if your page URL is not in the top 10/20/50 search results - most people won't find it using a search engine. It is still useful however to know your ranking event outside of these "top" results, particularly if you track this over time, as this will tell you if search optimisations that you make to your site are effective.

What does 'exact match' and 'similar or related matches' mean?

An exact match occurs when the target URL you supply exactly matches a URL in the search results. For example, if you target URL was http://www.myurl.com/ , and the search results returned http://www.myurl.com/ - this would be considered an exact match.

If the search results returned http://www.myurl.com/mypage.html - this would be considered a "similar" match. Similar and related matches often occur when a search engine has indexed content within your site that resides 'below' your target URL. Normally a similar/related match is good news, but not as good as an exact match.

The real advantages of Rank Angel become apparent after setting up a project that automatically works for you. Once you tell Rank Angel which websites, keywords and search engines to monitor, it goes ahead and periodically checks your rankings. You can then come back at any time and view how your website is performing over time. Here is an example of what a project looks like:

Building a completed project

A complete project is one that contains at least one search engine, one website and one keyword. All three elements are needed to perform a "search test" as Rank Angel needs to know what website you are interested in, what search engine to submit the query to and which keywords to use in your query.

Note: you can add multiple search engines, multiple websites and multiple keywords to a project. In this scenario Rank Angel tests all the different permutations and combinations. In other words it will look for all the websites using each keyword against each search engine in your project.

Adding, Editing and Deleting Search Engines

See adding, editing and deleting search engines to a project

Adding, Editing and Deleting Websites

See adding, editing and deleting websites to a project

Adding, Editing and Deleting Keywords

See adding, editing and deleting keywords to a project

Search Tests / Test frequency / Next test run / Last test run / Force test run

A search test (or test run) is when Rank Angel performs all the queries resultant from the keywords / search engines / website combinations for a project in one hit.

You can tell Rank Angel to perform search tests daily, every two days, every three days or weekly. This is called the project's "test frequency", which you set when you create a project and can change by editing a project.

"Next test run" tells you the last time Rank Angel performed a search test and "Last test run" tells you the last time Rank Angel performed a search test.

If the last test run did not occur today, Rank Angle lets you to force a search tests to run immediately by clicking on the "Force test run" option in the project summary.

Note: search tests can take up to a few minutes, so you will need to click on the "Refresh page" option to update your projects graphs to show results from the forced search test.

Editing a project

To edit a project, simply click on the 'Edit project' link on the project summary page. This will allow you to change the name, description and test frequency of your project.

Deleting a project

To delete a project, simply click on the 'Delete project' link on the project summary page.

Note: deleting a project will also delete ALL search results data and graphs associated with a project. Only delete a project if you are 100% sure you are no longer interested in any information associated with the project. An alternative to deleting a project is pausing a project

Pausing a project

If you no longer want Rank Angel to continue performing search tests for your project, but are still interested in historical data, you can pause a project by clicking on the 'Pause project’ link on the project summary page.

To un-pause a project, click on the "Re-active project" link.

Graphs

Rank Angel can only show you graphs if it finds exact matches for your website. If you are not getting results, and you try edit your search engines to look at a greater depth.

What is search depth?

If you are still not getting any results, this is a sign that your website needs search engine optimization. Although Rank Angel does not provide these services, you may view our improving your website ranking section for some pointers.

Rank Angel offers a free website analysis which includes diagnostics information relevant to how your page gets indexed by search engines, which in turn effects how highly your website rank in those search engines.

Page Title

This is the text that appears in the top blue bar of your web browser. It is also the text that appears as the link in a list of search engine results that humans read when deciding to click or not click onto your website.

Size of Page / Server Response Time

The size of your webpage is important because search engine web crawlers only spend a limited amount of time reading and indexing your page. If you page is too long, it will only pay attention to the first part of your page.

Info on server response time coming soon.

Internal links and External links

When a search engine web crawler hits your homepage, it doesn’t just stay on your homepage, it also travels to all the pages, both internal and external to your website that are linked to from your homepage.

An internal link is a link that points to another page inside your website. For example a link on www.rankangel.com pointing to www.rankangel.com/help is an internal link.

An external link is one pointing from your website to another website. For example www.rankangel.com pointing to www.preparty.com is an external link.

Note: it is recommended by search engine optimizing professionals to keep the number of links on any given page below 100 links.

Images / Bookmarks / JavaScript

Info on Images / Bookmarks / JavaScript time coming soon.

Your suggestions and problem reports help us make Rank Angel better. We read every item submitted and take your opinions seriously.

Supplying an email

You may supply feedback anonymously by leaving the email field empty, alternatively if you would like us to reply to your feedback or keep you updated on how your issue is being resolved, enter you email address into the email field.