Contrasting with the strategic value of SE Positioning, there is no published index or method for measuring SE positioning results. We did not find any such measure, while searching for these and related terms:

measure SE positioning 'SE positioning measure' 'SE positioning results' 'SE positioning index'

So, if someone created some wise SEO Rate or Index, he did not know enough SEO to make it appear in Google... Bad sign.

(I might be including relevant keywords in this article for indexation sake... sorry for that ;))

SEO companies do not share a standard, and when they need to compete, they run positioning contests with a fixed, arbitrary keyword. So, if you search under mangeur de cigogne (stork eater) you will be surprised to see 153,000 results, mostly arising from a well known SEO contest. The real world SEO contest is the word SEO, which is the top prize for most SEO companies, and has 28 million Google SERPs. Getting to the 20th post of those is much harder than being on top of the 10 million that search for optimized page, as we are. Or getting first out of the 2 million that search in Spanish for promocion de sitios (site promotion), which was comparably a piece of cake.

As you see, I am using the number of Google indexed pages as a measure of popularity. If you are 1st among one million that is good. But, is it better to be 2nd among 2,000,000? How about 10th among 20,000,000?

What we all know is that being 20th among 100,000 beats being 50th among 1000 million, just because nobody ever cares to search for a 50th positioned website.

So, we first suggested:

Keyword SEPI - Search Engine Positioning Index = Total page number / Position ^ 2)

The Google Positioning Index for my page positioned 1st under Google First Place would be:

185 / 1 ^2 = 185

This is a usable index, but it is still incomplete.

It happens that being first under improve womanhood (240,000 results) seems to be quite easy for experienced SEOs, while improve manhood (500,000 results) seems almost impossible. Why? Because the first 100 results under Womanhood are there by pure chance, while the first 100 under Manhood are there because savvy SEOs trying to sell Viagra made a hard-to-beat effort to be there.

For a quality estimation of positioning difficulty we need to analyze the first 10 sites in the SERP, look for PageRank, backlinks and optimization status, among other factors.

To detect if a keyword is very competitive and searched for we have several methods. We can count the number of AdWords, which reflect the interest of webmasters for that keyword. Also, when SEOs fail positioning a site in the organic (free) SE results, they pay a PPC campaign such as Adwords. We also use the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which provides statistics on monthly searches.

The market variables are a different story. If our client wants to be first among 'stork eater' we will have a very hard job getting him there, although there is not commercial value on that keyword whatsoever.

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