How SEO Tools Can Both Help and Hurt Your Web Site

One of the most powerful methods of optimizing your company's web site and improving its search engine rank is to use SEO tools, or search engine optimization tools. Using SEO tools correctly can make a vital difference in your site's success. The key word is "correctly." Using SEO tools improperly can also be a night and day difference in your site's ranking... as your ranking drops like a stone and your stream of visitors dries up. Before you use any SEO tools, make sure you know exactly what you are doing.

For instance, keyword tools are perhaps the most important SEO tools available. A well chosen and well programmed set of keyword tools can make it possible for you to list the keywords your web pages target, track their ranking in search engines by keyword, measure your pages' keyword density, and compare your site with your competitors' sites, allowing you to improve your targeting and fix false targeting. You can also develop new pages with keyword tools by using keyword generators to create lists of promising new keywords, evaluate likely traffic by keyword, and generate lists of commonly mistyped variants of your keywords for extra targeting.

However, you can also aim for the wrong keyword density, create combinations of keywords that sound spammy to search engines, or do any of a multitude of stupid SEO tricks that will cause your site to be blacklisted as spam. Because real spam merchants are excellent at showing search engines what they want to see, search engines constantly revise their algorithms, changing their "opinion" of overused SEO tricks. Google is notorious for this; what may have been best practice two years ago according to Google may now be a red flag. If your SEO knowledge is too old or your SEO tool is calibrated for a previous algorithm, whoosh, down goes your page ranking.

Therefore, although online SEO tools may make it appear easy to do your own optimization yourself, you may discover that this is a false economy. A better alternative to doing your optimization yourself, then running an ad campaign to fix the damage you might do, is to invest in a professional Seo services firm. Their SEO knowledge will be fresh, and their SEO tools will be cutting edge. The end result will be a finely targeted, highly competitive web page that will adapt to changing algorithms and serve your business well.