Are you tired of spending time typing in your preferred keywords on Google or Yahoo to see where your real estate web site is positioned on the search engine results page (SERP)? If you’re below page two, this can be a real time drain and take up a lot of your search engine optimization (SEO) time . If you have several keywords to check, it can be an even BIGGER hassle. Whenever you want to see if your efforts at SEO are paying off, simply use Rank Checker to get the data.

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.