Search engine optmization is the efforts to increase a website’s ranking in the various search engines.

One site that I have been using, mostly for fun, is http://www.googlerankings.com which, unlike other sites that just tell you the page rank of your site, will allow you to provide a search term, and it will try to find your site on the google, msn, and yahoo. 

You just need to provide your Google API key:

Of course, finding that your site is number 836 for some search doesn’t really help you in any meaningful way, other than to know that no one is ever going to find your site through that search engine.

I was trying to see who my site is listed number 2 at MSN for “Chris May” but not even in the top 1000 at google or yahoo.