Checking whether your website ranks for a specific keyword is important if you’re using or planning to use a SEO strategy, because it helps you keep track of your progress.

So, how to see if my site ranks for a specific keyword?

Do You Know the Keyword?

Before you can check your website’s ranking you need to know the keyword. If you’re already running a SEO campaign or use expert SEO services all your content will be centered around keywords.

Google plans new algorithm changes in the near future that will decrease the ranking of spam sites, while favoring websites with valuable content. If you think you’re at risk, improve your content by using organic SEO services.

Google’s Upcoming Changes

With the rise of social media websites, especially Facebook and Twitter, Google search has ceased being the only tool available to users who want to find products and information. Many Internet users are now increasingly relying on their friends on Facebook or Twitter for product recommendations or for answers to the questions they are asking.

After the Google algorithm change known as Google Panda, introduced in early 2011, many low-quality sites have been blacklisted, simply because they contain many ads and little to no valuable content. If you think you’re at risk, add high-quality content to your website, and do it fast.

There are many other reasons why a website gets on the blacklist, besides low-quality. Here are the most common reasons.

In 2011, Google Panda has sounded the death knell of many SEO techniques that until then were much used and abused, including link exchange, backlinking, and, to some extent, non-organic SEO. All of these are now slowly dying.

Organic SEO is the norm in SEO trends, which is why websites and blogs using organic SEO services instead of paid listing and other non-organic strategies will thrive.

The SEO trends you can’t ignore are:

There are a dozen or so positive SEO Google ranking factors related to keywords that you need to keep in mind when optimizing your website for search engines. When you tweak your website, you should consider all of these factors.

What’s important to remember though is that the SEO trends are suggesting that keywords, while still crucial for any website that wants to get more traffic from search engines, are making way to more user-centric ranking factors.

Here’s a concise keyword check list for when you tweak your website, sorted according to the importance Google gives each factor.

Avoiding Google penalties for your website is easy, provided that you focus on high-quality content and that you rely on organic SEO techniques.

Here are some tips that will help you avoid Google penalties.

•    Do not overuse keywords for your website’s content. While a keyword-based SEO approach is recommended, the keywords you use should appear naturally. High keyword densities are no longer as important as they once were.