Every website owner dreams of seeing their websites on the first page of Google's listing. Shower of laser-targeted traffic, never-ending flows of visitors, skyrocketing sales – that is what placing a website on the top of Google's pedestal brings. But hitting the forefront of search results is a hard task to complete. You must always be a step ahead of online competitors, know what's going on in the rivaling camp, where your online rivals' websites rank for the same keywords etc. Only this way you can beat the immense online competition to the draw.

Once you picked up the keywords and applied great efforts to optimize your website for them, it's vitally important that you watch these keywords rankings. Monitoring your website ranking fluctuations is crucial for several reasons:

1. It gives you a clear pattern of competition landscape in a particular keyword niche and lets you evaluate how far you are from of the coveted Google top placement.

2. Rankings check lets you be ahead of the game and trace search engine algo tweaks and updates before they negatively influence your websites traffic. If your website rankings drop for some keyword you will be able to quickly react and take the right steps to fine-tune your website. In this way you will avoid a long-term negative effect on your traffic and sales.

3. Knowing where you and your competitors websites stand in search results can help you maximize the effectiveness of your SEO campaign and minimize your SEO efforts by more rational use your SEO resources.

There are two ways you can check your website positions for targeted keywords: manually or bringing into play SEO tools for rankings check.

The first way is baby-simple and doesn't cost a single penny. All you have to do is just go to Google, enter your keyword and find your website in search results. Sounds easy, isn't it? But if your website has just gone live and isn't even in top 100 yet? Just imagine how many pages you'll have to look through blinding your eyes in front of the monitor before you bump into your site. Besides the results you will pull may be largely inaccurate. The point is that Google serves a personalized search, so no matter whether you are signed in your Gmail account or not, your search results will be affected by your previous search history. That's why you may get the results that are rather different from what most of other users see.

SEO tools for rankings check offer more effective and accurate way of tracking your website positions. A good rank checker lets you slash SEO workload big time and quickly get accurate rankings data. There are lots of free and paid rank checkers out there. And here are the most poplar ones:

Rank Checker by SEO book (free) is a Firefox extension that lets users easily monitor website rankings for targeted keywords in Google (US and international versions), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search. But sometimes the results this free rank checker provides may be rather inaccurate. The point is that the Rank Checker clusters 100 results per page to minimize scraping on Google. Such kind of clustering can cause a shift in ranking if compared to only seeing 10 results per SERP.

Market Samurai (paid) is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market that also lets check website rankings in the Big Three: Bing, Yahoo! and Google. This application allows users to compares the results with the previous checks and draws progress graphs that illustrate website's rankings progress. But sometimes, for an unknown reason, this SEO tool fails to provide users with correct rankings data and shows the results that are rather different from what most users get in Google itself.

Rank Tracker by Link-Assistant.Com (free and paid) lets users monitor website positions for unlimited number of keywords in more than 700 search engines. Tooled up with "Competition Tracking" feature this rank checker lets users compare their website's rankings to the ones of their main competitors so the users can benchmark their search engine presence and the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns. Besides this SEO tool provides only laser-precise ranking results and nicely arranges rankings data in highly-customizable ranking reports.