SEO Tools: Help or Hindrance?

SEO tools, or search engine optimization tools, are invaluable in optimizing your web site and ranking well in search engines. The proper use of SEO tools can be the difference between night and day in your web site's standing. The key word is "proper." 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. Be certain you know what you are doing and what search engines want to see before you use any SEO tools.

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 If you use outdated information or an outdated SEO tool, whoomp, there goes everything you have worked for.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. In the end, your web page will be highly targeted, fiercely competitive, and well designed to adapt to changing search engine expectations, an excellent tool that will represent your company well.