Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the dream of every webmaster. Webmasters know the value of getting good ranking on the search engines that can give their sites free targeted traffic for a long time. SEO is a long process that can take a couple of months before you will see any results. But it is worth it.
If you don’t 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 don’t like keyword spamming. So keep the keyword density on your page below 4%.
On page optimization is only for telling the search engines the keyword that you want to be ranked. But its your site link popularity that is given more importance by the search engines. This is known as Off Page Optimization and requires you to get thousands of quality backlinks from authority sites before the search engines start taking your site seriously.
Let’s be clear; this requires lot of work. It’s not easy especially link building. There are SEO companies that can do this work for you on payment of a few thousand dollars. Why pay this much, when you can do it for free. And it is fun too!
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 don’t like black hat techniques.
Some people will tell you that there is a short cut. They call it Black Hat SEO. Avoid it. It may help you in the short term but in the long term your site will be noticed by the search engines and get banned. Others sell SEO software. One is SEO Elite. It sells for a few hundred dollars.
SEO Elite will tell you the number of backlinks that your site is getting. You will have to get the backlinks yourself. It will also tell you whether your site is getting ranked for a particular keyword or not.
So why pay a few hundred dollars when you can get the same information from Google free. Google wants to help you in building a better website that users like. This is what SEO is all about; a user friendly website with good quality content.
Open a Google Webmaster Tools account free. Get your site indexed by Google by submitting your site and its sitemap at Google Webmaster Tools. Without being indexed, your site cannot get ranking from the search engines.
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.
If you want to know the number of backlinks to your site, just click on link: http://www.yourdomain.com on the Google Webmaster Tools and you will get the backlinks that Google is counting for your site.
Now, this is a free method that does not require you to pay hundreds of dollars. Why you need to buy SEO Elite if Google can do the same thing for you free. And if you are using Google AdWords for advertising your site than you can use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics gives you everything. The number of visitors, their countries, time spent on the site, referral path, bounce rate, pageviews; keywords that give you search engine traffic, direct traffic and referral sites that are giving traffic to your site.