When optimizing your website, so that your visitors can find you in the search engines, the first challenge you run across is finding keywords to target in the search engines. There are many great tools out there, and theories on the best ways to develop lists of keywords to use in your content and backlinks.

KeywordEnvy helps you track your ranking for those keywords, but how do you measure the quality of each keyword? You can use analytics packages to view your top search terms, but how to you compare your incoming searches with your rankings?

KeywordEnvy now does this - and we track this every day, to let you know how many searches each of your keywords is generating, and how your ranking changes are affecting your search volume.

Watch this video for more information.

This video tutorial shows how to use KeywordEnvy and your robots.txt file to prevent Google from indexing unwanted URLs and querystrings in their index.

Yesterday we released an update to the Keyword management page, which now allows you to manage keywords for all search engines from one page, rather than managing each search engine separately.

This is a big time saver, that even I’m enjoying when tracking my own websites. It is now also easier to keep track of how many monitoring jobs you’re running.

This new change is the first in a series of usability upgrades that we will be issuing, now that the core KeywordEnvy functionality is complete. A new navigation system is also in the works.

Leave suggestions in the comments.

KeywordEnvy started as all good ideas should - a solution to a problem. In 2007 I was building new websites at a rapid pace, experimenting with various niches and trying to break into the top 10 on Google for each one. At the beginning, I watched my rankings passively, waiting to crack the top 20, and normally it didn’t take long to have some success.

What I quickly started to realize was that search engine rankings are very unstable - they can fluctuate on a daily (if not hourly) basis. Keywords that I’d achieved top 20 or even top 10 rankings for, were suddenly lost as quickly as they’d been gained. I’d stop paying attention for a week and suddenly they’d be gone.

For that reason, I started to track my rankings daily. I found a downloadable tool and started to run it daily, keeping note of any big changes. Soon, this still wasn’t enough, it was too much to keep track of, and too much to remember. I also lacked the ability to create milestones, to track when I’d made major changes or written made major content additions. I couldn’t quantify my efforts, and SEO started to overwhelm me.

In mid-2007 I started to build KeywordEnvy to do the work for me, and I’ve been using it personally for the last 5 months. It is able to track and chart my rankings every day, and report back to me on big shifts and movements. I can add milestones to keep track of when changes occur, so that I can remember what caused the spikes and valleys. It can also give me a live feed of searches as they happen, and report back on top keywords and landing pages.

Over time, the tool has grown more sophisticated, as I’ve added more features to the “launch requirements”. Currently we are working on new features, like competitive analysis, and alerts, to make KeywordEnvy even more useful.

As we head into launch, please enjoy testing the current version of KeywordEnvy, and send feedback through the blog an email. We hope that KeywordEnvy will become a “must have” SEO management tool.