Webmaster Articles > Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business and can become very expense. Find out about some tools that will make do-it-yourself search engine optimization easy.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.
What is search engine optimization?
SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’ techniques.
The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e., from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.
The SEO industry
Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.
If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget, consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.
A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize your site for search engines.
SEO tools compared
While we've listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these comparisons are summaries only.
Internet Business Promoter (IBP)
Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:
1. Page optimization
- Generate, analyze, and edit keywords
- Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings
- Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page
- Validate the HTML
- View the site via a spider simulator
2. Page promotion
- Submit your site to search engines and directories
- Search for sites that might add a link to your site
3. Results tracking
- Verify search engine positions automatically
Price: $179.95 or $349.95.
LinksManager
Links Manager is designed to help users manage
reciprocal linking. It doesn’t require any software
downloads, and current links pages can be imported into
it. Some of its features:
Link organization and formatting
- Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and “most popular links” lists
- Store the links on your own server
- Highlight newly added and featured links
Link management and tracking
- Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker
- Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
- Rotate links automatically
- Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a blacklist
- View the most popular keywords on your links pages
Price: $19.95 a month.
SEO Administrator
SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools
that can do these tasks:
Keywords and site visitors
- Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search engines
- Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of competitors’ sites
- Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page
- Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords used, referrers, and more
Search engines and directories
- Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search engines
- Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories
- Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your pages
Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.
