Google is undeniably the king of search, and the majority of SEO efforts are geared toward ranking better in Google. However, Google does some funny things when it calculates where a page will place when someone searches for it. It considers pages that person has previously clicked onto to be more relevant than a page that user has never visited, for instance. Recently Google also began returning Google+ posts in search results. If you perform a typical Google search to view your site’s rankings, you won’t see very accurate results, simply because you’ve visited that site before. Google is taking your own browsing preference into account when calculating how valuable you’ll find any given site for a search.

You can use SEO tools to get an accurate picture of how your site is ranking for various terms, but there are some drawbacks to using these tools. For one thing, they actually cost money! If you’re just getting started with SEO, your budget may not allow for paid tools, such as SEO Moz Pro Tools or Raven Tools. Paid tools are often not quite up to date. For example, SEO Moz Pro Tools updates your keyword rankings once a week. This schedule is manageable, sure, and dedicated SEO tools are definitely easier to use, but sometimes you want a quick overview of where your site is ranking for certain terms. Here are a few ideas for quickly getting an idea of where your site will place for users that have never visited your site before.

Using a Private Browsing Window

This is my favorite method of quickly determining where a site I’m working on will place. Simply open a private browsing window and perform Google searches through it. Private browsing windows are designed to hide your web browser activity, but they have the added benefit of not tracking where you’ve been. This means that searching with a private browsing window will give you similar results to ones that are performed by a user who’s never visited your site. This method also saves you the trouble of clearing your cache and history every time you want to check your rankings.

Should You Use Search Engines Other Than Google?

Of course, there are also alternatives to Google, such as Blekko or DuckDuckGo. These search engines don’t take any user preferences into account when returning search results, which can quickly give you an overview of where your site is ranked. DuckDuckGo has recently seen a big boost in popularity, but clearly it’s still nowhere near as popular as Google. However, the drawback to using a search engine that isn’t Google is it won’t show you where Google is ranking your site. Most of your search traffic will come through Google searches, so it makes sense to concentrate your efforts on optimizing for Google. Search engines like Bing, Blekko and DuckDuckGo have been gaining market share, but Google is still the most popular.

However, this shouldn’t suggest there’s no value in using alternate search engines. Blekko and DuckDuckGo don’t take user browsing history into account when calculating rankings, and they also operate differently than Google and Bing do. Performing searches with these engines may also clue you in to different sites for building links than if you’d always searched using Google.

Tyler Moore works at Expected Behavior, a web development company in Indianapolis. Expected Behavior built a product called DocRaptor, a web tool used to generate Excel files from easy to write HTML code. DocRaptor interprets CSS more accurately than similar programs. Expected Behavior has provided full API documentation to make it easy to integrate DocRaptor into your own web applications.

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