Over-optimization may have played biggest part in dropping of seo-guy.com from top 50 Google results. Filtering out web sites that have had readability sacrificed for optimization is a growing trend at Google. It started with Sandbox Effect in late 2004, where relatively new sites were not being seen at all in Google results even with good keyword placement in content and incoming links. Many thought it was a deliberate effort by Google to penalize sites that had SEO work done. It's a few months later and we see many of 'sandboxed' web sites finally appearing well for their targeted keywords.

Perhaps you may be thinking why do I need to check my website? Do you remember going to doctor for an illness? Hopefully, your doctor performed some tests to diagnose your illness before prescribing your medication. If not, you may have gotten some very undesirable results. In case of your website, you need to diagnose patient and determine extent of your website's search engine visibility. Based on your findings, you can decide to focus on standard search results or paid search results.

Your checks should be done in Google and Yahoo search engines since they are major search engines in today's marketplace. As an option, you should consider MSN since they have recently released their search engine. It is only a matter of time before they are considered a player, if not already. Your first check determines if your website is indexed in Google or Yahoo. Think about card catalog in your library. Each book has a card in card catalog signifying indexing of book in library. In this exercise you'll check if your website has a "card" in Google or Yahoo card catalog.

The first exercise is opening your web browser to Google - www.google.com, Yahoo - www.yahoo.com or MSN - www.msn.com website. Enter your website's URL, www.yourdomainname.com, in search box and review search results. Your website's domain name or URL should appear in search results if your site is indexed.

If just domain name or URL is listed, website has been indexed but not crawled by search engine spider. A domain name and several lines of descriptive text indicate website has been crawled by search engine spider to determine website's content. Also, look for link "Cached Page" or a similar phrase. This is another indication website has been crawled for content by search engine. Now, you should know if your website is indexed and has a "card" in search engine card catalog. Your second check evaluates extent of your website's indexing by determining which website pages are indexed by respective search engine.

The second exercise is opening your web browser to Google, Yahoo or MSN website. Enter "site" command and your website's URL in search box in format "site:www.yourdomainname.com" (quotation marks not required) and review search results. All of your website's pages indexed by queried search engine should be listed. At top of search results screen look for "Results X - Y of about Z from www.yourdomainname.com" or a similar phrase. The value for Z indicates total number of pages indexed by queried search engine for your website.