I know its no big deal to most of you... but I just checked and for my #3 keyword (I have 3 that I am shooting for with my main page) my site is listed 35th! PLUS its not even my finished page... the cache is showing the page as it looked when it was transfered from my other domain (I started work on the site from my old domain and then transfered it over)... the page looked like crap and wasn't even set up right yet! I can't wait til those bots come by again! Hopefully I will rank for my better searched keywords next time by... I am still waiting for them to check my site again... it was the 22nd when they last visited... hopefully it will be soon! yiiiipppeeee(sorry... but I am really excited!) I'm sure you all remember that first time seeing your site listed on google! BTW how come my site hasn't even been visited by MSN or Yahoo yet? Whats up with that?
how do you all check for google bots and such? How do you know when your page has been visited? is there some free software or something?
Most hosts have a way of checking stats. If you have a hosting control panel you can usually find some kind of "web stats" link. Another way to check is to use the Google sitemaps interface. It has a "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on:" statistic on it. You don't even need to have a sitemap set up to use this feature, you just have to verify your site.
Another way is if you have a web analytics software that utilises your weblogs. It should be able to give u a report on all the robots that visit your website, along with general traffic stats
Wohoo. Congratulations. I usually use AWStats to check for visitors, plus at the end of the month I have a closer look at my logfiles. In order to check your SERPs you can use http://linkvendor.com AWStats also tells you what search terms your visitors used. I spent quite some time with my stats, as this is very instructional and lets me optimize better.