Being listed in search engines and ranked high on searches is the overall goal a webmaster is trying to achieve when dealing with search engines. Search engine optimization is probably one of the most commonly used words among webmasters. In the Internet sell becoming much more critical to business success this is almost natural.

While the professionals know how to verify search engine rankings and listings, the normal user or startup webmaster might not know how to verify these things. The commonly just type their domain name into the search engine of choice and are happy if they get a result back that includes their domain title . But there is a little more these startup webmasters should know about.

Every page indexed by a search engine is a possible landing page for visitors to enter the web site. As more pages get indexed the higher number of possible entry points to the web site. But how might a webmaster verify how many pages are currently in the index of a search engine?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=page =omainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site=omainName.com

Replace "DomainName.com" with the actual domain name that needs to be verified. A webmaster should also run the following variation to get an impression of what is really out there.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:www.DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=page :www.DomainName.com

The next thing a webmaster should check is to see how many other websites are linking to his/her web site at all. As almost every one knows nowadays - the higher the number of links pointing to a website (incoming links) as higher the possible search engine ranking on search might be (and we all want that number 1 spot, right