I meant to blog about this yesterday, but being on dial-up in the middle of a thunderstorm kind of put the kibosh on that idea. A blog search-analysis tool called Enquisite — which I have been testing for a little while now on this blog — launched on August 1, and is well worth a look if you want to drill down into the details of where your site shows up on the various search engines and why. As my friend Mark Evans notes, it isn’t the type of tool you’re likely to use if you just run the average blog. But if you are running a business site and want to fine-tune your search placement, my sense is that Enquisite could definitely help.
There are plenty of search-analysis tools out there that will tell you what keywords people typed in to get to your site and that sort of thing, but Enquisite (which is based in Victoria) gives you an incredible amount of detail about everything related to search and your site, including what page of results your site turned up on for various terms, and allows you to compare the positioning on different search engines from a bunch of different perspectives. Enquisite also says that it is able to do this without actually querying the various search engine indexes, as many tools do (something the search companies frown on). How it does this is a closely-guarded secret, and the subject of several patent applications.