Ask HN: What do you use to monitor SEO Keywords?
I was looking for a tool to make it easy to monitor keywords today, but came up nearly empty. What do you guys use?
Having said that, I've seen a number of such tools come and go in the past decade or so. Since I don't use such a tool, I don't know of any currently active ones but if your check with/ask at the WebMasterWorld forums, I'm nearly sure you should be able to dig something out.
If I'm mistaken, please correct me, I and 100,000 other developers would love to use said APIs.
I forget that I sometimes need to be very specific when posting on the internet...
You can also go the market samurai route if you want to, or use many other services out there that track your SERPs
http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/ has the basic setup, but this only tracks which page the keyword ranks on.
To get the actual ranking, you need to track the "cd" parameter from the referrer string rather than the "start" parameter as is given in Yoast's example.
Google doesn't put the cd parameter in all their referrer strings, but it does it often enough to be moderately useful.
This method also shows you how your ranking for a keyword is variable rather than a fixed number.
A word of caution: be very careful using any automated tools to run queries on Google (unless they use the official Google search APIs). For easily understandable reasons, the folks at Google are generally not very happy about such things and this could lead to some harmful consequences for your site if you're found violating their TOS.
HTH