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.

First let me explain in simple terms what SEO is. SEO means that you optimize each page of your website with a title tag, description tag, keywords tag and H1, H2 headers for a particular keyword. The content of the page should not have more than a 4% keyword density.

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.

Lets be clear; this requires lot of work. Its 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 dont like black hat techniques.

Black Hat SEO short cut is not good. It may work for sometime but the search engines will find it and ban your site. Other people buy SEO software. There are many available online. SEO Elite is one such software.

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.

Why you want to pay a few hundred dollars to know these things when Google provides you this information for free. Google is your friend. Learn to do what Google wants you to do and see how Google will start loving 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.

Use: link:http://www.yourdomain.com on the Google Webmaster Tools page to find the backlinks that Google knows your site is getting. If Google is not counting a backlink, it simply means Google does not know about it and that link has no value for Google.

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.

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