Ever wondered what pages on your site rank highest in google by a specific keyword but never been able to see them in a single group or list? Its actually really simple to do and can lead to some interesting and surprising results.

In order to check your pages against keywords go to www.google.com and in the search bar add this search query:

KEYWORDS site:(Yourwebsite address)

so for example if I wanted to see what my most important page is for “twitter” I would do a search for:

twitter site:www.justinparks.com

I get this  results page with all the pages on my site that use the word twitter and their order of relevancy. (Dont forget keywords are not necessarily singular, they can be terms and phrases as well).

What do these results mean?

The results allow me to see what google considers to be my most important page on my blog for the specific keyword on a single page. The great thing about this is that it allows me analyse these pages to understand the reasons why they are more important than the pages below them.

But theres more.

Compare the competition.

What this also allows is a powerful way to compare pages across different sites and specifically the competition pages for the same keyword to understand where I am and what needs to be done to aim for target rankings.

Here’s an example with the keyword “twitter” on Mashable.com:

twitter site:mashable.com

(** you will note that in the search above mashable.com has no www. This is because the root of the site is http://mashable.com/ NOT www.mashable.com, so thats worth bearing in mind if you get a strange set of results back)

And the results page shows they have 92k pages listed with the word twitter and the most important page is an article called Twares: United Airlines Offers Special Fares to Twitter Users .

Out of interest, if I jump into Google and search for the keyword twitter as normal, this very same article appears in the SERPs at number 7. (At least it does for me, I wouldn’t count on it being the same for everyone!) This reinforces the information for me that this is the most important twitter related page on their site, is ranking highly and is meeting certain requirements to be in that position, figuring out what those requirements are though, is the fun part!

This is a pretty extreme example, but at least I now know I will have to work pretty damn hard to knock Mashable of the top spot for that particular keyword! (yeah right, dream on Justin).

* Thanks to Conor O’Conor for pointing that little titbit out on twitter today.