A lot of webmasters and small business owners want traffic to their website without having pay hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. Although you won't get the same results as an experienced SEO consultant, with the right tools you can greatly improve your site's rankings in search engines and get more traffic. In this guide, I am going to show you a few of those tools and how to use them. Some are free, others aren't but are well worth the price. I will include the cost of each tool as I introduce it. Enjoy...

Step 1: Free Website SEO Analysis

The first step in optimizing your site for search engines is doing an SEO analysis on your site. This should tell you a few simple, but often overlooked ways to improve your rankings. An SEO analysis will tell you a lot of things, including:

-What your site's ranking is for your keywords on Google, Yahoo and Bing
-If your site's metatags are allowing your site to be indexed by search engines
-How many links you have pointing back to your site
-If your site is listed in major directories, such as Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, WHOIS, etc
-How fast your site loads i.e.: 30 seconds, 45 seconds, etc
-If your keywords are in your site's domain, title and body

There are currently two SEO companies that have a free SEO analysis on their site, DIYSEO and SEOlegion. You just type in your URL and keywords, and the tool tells you what you need to improve on your site.

Step 2: Market Samurai

Market Samurai is an awesome tool for keyword research. I have another program that does this(SEO PowerSuite), but Market Samurai is the best in my opinion. With it you can:

-Find out what keywords your competitors are using
-Discover low-competition niche keywords, such as long-tail keywords
-Manage AdWords campaigns
-Find companies to represent as a paid affiliate
-Find content relevant to your keywords
-Track your domains’ ranking in top search engines
-Manage all your WordPress blogs with streamlined content-publishing tools

In SEO, picking the right keywords is half the battle. Most people who say SEO doesn't work are going after the wrong keywords. For instance, "SEO services" has A LOT of competition and will be very hard to get ranked high for. However, "San Diego Online Marketing" or "San Diego free SEO report" are going to have much less competition. It's often the long-tail keywords that let you get to the top search results for your locality, and then work your way up as needed.

Market Samurai is priced at $149

Step 3: SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is probably the best over-all SEO software in the industry right now. It is made of 4 other programs: Website Auditor, Link Assistant, SEO SpyGlass and Rank Tracker. These programs work together to give you everything you need, with little to no knowledge required. The program walks you through the steps, tracks your progress and generates reports that you use for yourself or email to your clients if you're a freelance SEO noob. Here's what it does:

-Find relevant, frequently-searched keywords with low competition
-Analyze your site's architecture and make appropriate changes for a Google-friendly structure
-Find quality link partners
-Establish links on high PR sites
-Uncover your competitors' linking strategy
-Develops a step-by-step plan to outperform competitors' link-building efforts
-Continuously track your site's rank for all of your keywords on all search engines

You can get it at Link-Assistant for $249.