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Everyone would like to see their website rise in the rankings, and reap the rewards that the extra traffic will bring them. This has created the industry of search engine optimization (SEO) which purports to help webmasters and site owners optimize their sites for precisely that reason. How effective it is depends on the skills of the practitioner, as well as the vagaries of the search engines themselves.
The competition for rankings has spurred the development of tools to help in analyzing results, and to guide to user to what they hope will be a higher ranking. There is no doubt that tools can help in this regard. Anyone who has sat down and manually tried to not only discern what their present rankings were, analyze backlinks and get a read for a competitor’s site, can tell you that while it is possible to do it that way, you’d be a fool to do so.
Today there are so many SEO tools on the market, and many of them are free or have free βliteβ versions, designed to whet your appetite for the more spiffy paid versions. That’s okay, we all need to start somewhere, and investing in SEO tools that will help you determine how to lift your pages in the rankings will be a good investment in time and money that can pay off handsomely.
There are various tools that help with this task. You can perform much with simply free Firefox Plugins like SEO Firefox. It returns valuable information through basic web searches you do.
Alexa.com can give you great information about your competition. Some of the commercial tools that are worth a look and not overly expensive are able to keep a history of your work, and will give you a great deal of your time back by automating these functions.
These SEO tools are designed with one purpose, to help you ferret out the criteria by which you can get better rankings. Some of these tools are very expensive, but many are very reasonable. Two of the more well-known and accessible tools for those of us who are NOT total techheads are Market Samurai and Traffic Travis. They both deliver up actionable research in seconds, and enable you to see what used to take weeks and months to discover, and get about the task of either making changes or improvements.
Some of the areas covered in SEO tools like these include keyword research, SEO competition, pay per click analysis, web page optimization, ranking trackers, backlink tracking and analysis, keywords searches monthly, cost per click of specific keywords and more. Thus you are able to properly identify keyword phrases and site optimization opportunities that might have gone unnoticed.
Be careful about SEO firms that want to charge you thousands of dollars to give you what you could have gotten yourself for a great deal less. And chances are they’re using the same tools you could be. Granted, they may know a bit more about it, but remember, I said be wary.
These days it does not pay to come to the rankings fight unarmed. Make sure you’ve got an arsenal of weapons to choose from, both free and paid, and that you’re using them. Knowledge is power in SEO.
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