Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what every webmaster wants. SEO can give your site long term free targeted traffic from the search engines. If your website gets ranked for a high traffic competitive keyword by the search engines, you have hit a goldmine. But SEO is not easy. It may take months of back breaking work for you before you succeed.
If you dont know SEO than it means optimizing your site for search engines so that it gets ranked on search engine pages. You do this by On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. On page Optimization means that you include the title tag, description tag, keyword tag and H1/H2 headers to tell the search engine the keyword that you want to be ranked. Search engines dont like keyword spamming. So keep the keyword density on your page below 4%.
This is known as On Page Optimization. The search engines like it. But they love the number of quality back links that your site and that particular web page gets from other authority sites. This is called Off Page Optimization. The more quality back links your site gets, the higher it will get ranked.
Let me be frank, both On Page and Off Page Optimization requires hard work for a few months. There is no shortcut. Google does not like reciprocal links.
Many people want to take short cut to SEO. They download Black Hat SEO eBooks thinking that these black hat techniques may give them success. Nothing is further from the truth. Search engines dont like black hat techniques.
A number of SEO software are now available online that claim to help you in getting good traffic from the search engine. One such software is SEO Elite. Many people think that this software get help them in getting there website get ranked on Google, Yahoo or MSN.
SEO Elite can only tell you whether your site is being ranked for a particular keyword and how many backlinks you are getting for your site. It cannot help you in On Page Optimization or Link Building. You will have to do this stuff yourself.
In my opinion, you need not waste few hundred dollars on such SEO software. Google gives you the resources that does these things free for you.
Open a Google Account and register your website at Google Webmaster Tools. Submit a sitemap of your site. Within days Google will index your site. When you add new pages, Googlebot will get notified and index that page in a few hours.
In the Google Webmaster tools, you will find the link Search Queries. Click on this link. It will show you the keywords for which your website had been ranked in the past week.
Click on: link:http://www.yourdomain.com on the Google Webmaster Tools page and you will find the backlinks that Google is counting for your site. If Google is not counting a backlink, it has no value.
Now, isnt this method better than purchasing SEO Elite? If you advertise on Google Adwords than you can use Google Analytics as well for your site free!
Google Analytics is even better. It gives you the number of visitors, pageviews; keywords that are giving you search engine traffic, direct traffic and other referral sites that send traffic to your site.