How SEO Tools Can Both Help and Hurt Your Web Site
Posted 04/06/09
SEO tools, or search engine optimization tools, are invaluable in optimizing your web site and ranking well in search engines. 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.
You can also accidentally oversaturate your keywords by choosing the wrong keyword density, pick keywords that search engines have flagged as undesirable, or make any of a legion of SEO errors that can put your site on spam lists. 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 If you use outdated information or an outdated SEO tool, whoomp, there goes everything you have worked for.
As you can see, online SEO tools might seem to be an easy and economical way to optimize your site yourself, but you could find that you have been penny wise and pound foolish. Rather than optimizing your web site yourself and throwing money at expensive advertising to undo any damage you may have done, consider hiring 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.