What's the best way to keep track of keyword rankings

[VinceWicks]

Here's the deal. I keep track of my keyword rankings with the help of Rank Tracker from seopowersuite.com for the most part. I ran it on a daily basis and my keyword was not in top 100 for a few months. Moz.com panel shows pretty much the same (not in top 50) for the same months. That said, if I check that keyword ranking in my Google Webmaster Tools (avg. position) it says that its position (ranking?) was on average: 49, 7, 7, 8 (for the last four months). So, I'm not sure how it's even possible? How come Rank Tracker and Moz don't see any rankings and Google gives me sorta decent avg. positions at the same time. I assume that avg. postion means that same as avg. ranking, right? I'm not sure what I'm missing here.

[GPainter]

My dirty little secret is Serpbook, i find it great.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Vince,

Lets remember that Moz and Google are two completely different and independent company's. They have different spiders programed to do different things. One company could not "take" or "scrape" the others data. A good example is the fight that ensued between Google and another well known search engine that was allegedly "scraping" Google's data, and presenting the data formatted differently as their own. You should NOT expect Moz's data to exactly reflect what's going on at Google. Moz is a fabulous tool, to use as reference to the changes you make to your website. They come to your web project on an advertised interval, and provide reference data for the changes you have made.

Have you tried this area of MOZ? http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/account number/rankings

Substitute "account number" above with your pro account number. The results page shows your keyword results. Next to each keyword there are two icons. The Icon that looks like an EKG symbol will take you to a report that does exactly what you want. Shows your page ranking relative to other websites. You get 50 free extra keyword checks per week.

[WhiteboardCreations]

Vince,

We also use Serpbook, which is a great tool. We also leverage the Moz Ranking area in Moz Analytics to track keywords. There are a lot of tools out there and Rank Tracker is something we are looking into. Do you recommend that in your experiences? Would love to know your thoughts on that software overall if you use the whole Suite of their products.

Cheers! - Patrick