I  often hear people complaining about how doing search engine optimization is like flying blind. That’s simply not true. If you know you SEO basics (keyword research, tagging, link building, and …), you are not flying blind. Sometimes SEO efforts take time to show up in your results, and often you are outdone by an even more dedicated site.

All hope is not lost though. There are tools out there that can help you gain competitive edge and stay atop of your market. One underrated tool that you can use to help you figure out whether you are on the right track is Google Adwords Keyword tool. I often hear people talk about how they subscribe to WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery to do better keyword research, but you should never ignore the tool that is offered by Google itself. Google Keyword tool is an excellent tool to find out what Google thinks of your website.

Google Adwords allows you to find out two key important items about your SEO campaing. By generating keyword ideas based on description, you can figure out the top keywords that you can target in your market. Not only that, you can also check to see whether you have enough relevant content on your site to keep Google happy as far as LSI is concerned.

The 2nd option is absolutely powerful. So you create a site, and you think it is optimized for the word “SEO.” But how can you be sure? That’s where the second option comes into place. You can check your own site with the keyword tool to see what Google thinks of your site (keyword-wise). It’s amazing that many don’t even notice these options. But I guess we all want to believe that a paid tool is much more powerful than a free tool. Don’t get me wrong. WordTracker is a must have, but when combined with Google keyword tool, you can take your game to a whole other level.

In the search engine optimization market, being productive is the best thing that can happen to you. Sometimes it’s really about who can get things done faster. Now you can’t take a big company’s site from zero to 10 in 5 days, but you can certainly do more for them by using tools that are available online. Here are a few tools that everyone can use to automate SEO tasks:

Keyword Research Tools:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool (Free)
• Google Traffic Estimator (Free)
• WordTracker (paid)
• Keyword Discovery (paid)
• Wordze (paid)
• SEO Digger
• SpyFu

W3C Validation Tools:

• W3C Code Validator
• RSS Validator
• CSS Validator

Robots.txt Generator:

• Robots.txt file generator
• Robots.txt Validator

Htaccess Writers:

• Htaccess generator
• Htaccess writer

Site Analyzer:

• SE-Inspecter
• Website Optimizer

Linking Tools:

• Backlink Check Tool
• Broken Link Checker
• Link Verifier
• Reciprocal Link Checker
• Site Link Analyzer
• Back Link Text Analyzer
• Link Popularity Checker
• Link Quality Assessment Tool

I will have a more comprehensive post on each category later on, but the above tools should be plenty to get anyone started.

If you know anything about SEO, you know that article submission is a major part of link building campaign for any SEO campaign. Of course, we have link buyers who take a shortcut, but if you have an article handy and submit it to the top article directories, there is a good chance that sites pick it up and give you a link back ( I don’t recommend directories that require reciprocal links). Submitting articles is a tough job because:

• You need to know how to write an article
• Have the patience of Noah to submit articles to some of these directories

The first part can’t really be helped. If you know the basics of SEO and can write English and have something valuable to say, then you are set there. You can also hire ghost writers.

But the second part is tough. So I was going through forums the other day and I saw this discussion about Article Submitter vs. Article Announcer. These tools basically save you time by filling out forms (no, they don’t auto submit). I have personally tried both, and I can say that Article Announcer is a little bit better because it provides you with templates that you can use for articles. It may not look much but using the template can help you come up with more articles in a shorter amount of time.

Now, why am I talking about Article Announcer? The reason is DealDotCom has this item for 50% off for about an hour more before it expires. That’s right. An hour! Here is why you should get it if you can afford it:

• Training: John Reese and his colleagues teach you how to write effective articles
• Templates: The article templates with the package are very handy.
• Software: It has a list of directories that you can submit to. In addition, the software helps you draft emails to e-zine owners.

It’s still a little bit pricey but it saves you about 50% on the time that it take to write and submit an article so it could be well worth it, depending on your niche.

I had a chance to play with the MSN Demographics Predition tool, and I got to tell it’s a pretty neat tool. If you are doing any SEO, PPC, or any marketing at all, knowing who you are dealing with is a very good thing. Now, I am not sure how accurate the tool is. Here is why:

I logged in to the MSN Demographics predictor tool (you can find it here). And I searched for my favorite keyword “tech deals.” To my surprise the tool shows that only 43% of people who search for tech deals are males. Now if it was 50-50 I wouldn’t have been surprised. But suggesting that females shop for gadgets more often than men do sounds a little bit inaccurate. The word “gadget” shows 69% searches by men. So my suspicion about men being a little bit more excited about toys seems to be accurate. Even the word “tech bargain” shows 58% male dominance. So the tool seems to be a little bit off.

Here is what I know. If you have a list of keywords that you are planning to target for your SEO or Paid Search campaigns, this tool will give you the ball park demographics on them. For most low-medium level campaigns, the numbers should be good enough. But I doubt big companies will be using this tool for their national/international campaigns anytime soon.

This is the question that many keep asking, and to be honest Google has not really been clear about. If you read their webmaster’s guide to SEO, Google states that you should not use unauthorized programs such as Web Position to check your ranking. That is all fine and dandy until you read the whole story behind Google Web API. In essence, you are allowed to use Google API to check your ranking as long as you are making less than a 1000 queries. I personally believe that abusing Web Position could have some effect on your rankings but her are the mind boggling questions:

1. If you are limiting the No. of times people can access your DB, then why would you ban them for putting load on your servers?
2. If my competitors get Web Position and keep running it every few hours, would it get me banned?

As far as using Web Position goes, I think using it once a week or once every two weeks should be fine. But don’t push your luck by checking your rankings every single hour.

Checking your ranking is one measure that can help you figure out whether you are actually making any progress. It will also help you to understand who is doing better than you are and how you can potentially compete with those guys. There are many professional ranking tools out there (e.g. Webposition). Some of them are good, some others useless. The free tools are usually worthless when it comes to checking rankings. I personally have seen very few accurate ranking tools, so I was excited when I found out that Aaron Wall had released a Rank Checker tool for Firefox. I generally trust Aaron’s tools as he spends a lot of resources to offer useful SEO tools to his readers and beyond. Having said that, the Rank Checker is seriously flawed as the Google rankings that I get from it are not accurate. For instance, for the word business card, my site is ranked in the top 10, but according to Rank Checker, it is not in top 30 on Google. I have tried it for multiple keywords and in almost every case, the ranking I get on Google is different from the one Rank Checker gives me. The tool definitely has a huge potential. It’s easy to use and easy to install. Best of all, it works with Firefox which is a big plus for me (I hate IE, I can’t help it). I would give this tool 4.5 out of 5 if the ranking for Google was accurate, but right now I can’t go over 3.

You can find a million tools to do almost anything SEO on the net. Having said that, only a very low percentage of these tools actually work the way you expect them too. Let’s take a keyword rank checker. You would expect to get the latest SEO rankings with these tools, and that would be indeed the case if these tools actually worked. But you may want to be careful with these tools as some of them provide you with inaccurate and dated reports. That’s why I have researched for a while now to come up with a list of tools that actually do work. Most of them you probably know and use already, but just in case:

1. Google Keyword Tool: This tool which is tied with Google Adwords tells you about volume and competition for your keywords. You can then use these keywords with your adwords campaign. This tool is widely used in the SEO industry due to the fact that it is made by the best.
2. Microsoft Adcenter Labs: This is one of the best tools there is out there. Microsoft is playing catch up in the search industry, but they are trying to gain some momentum by providing tools such as this. This tool not only works for MSN ads, it also provides you with useful information such as Geographical reports and Intention reports.Very awesome tool if you ask me.
3. Digital Point Tools: Digital Point has a selection of very good SEO tools that you can use without any charge. Some of their tools will need you to sign up for an account, but overall their tools are very good. Worth trying out.
4. SEO Book Keyword Research Tool: Aaron Wall is one of the best SEOs there is out there, and he has dedicated a lot of time and money to bring you the best SEO tools available anywhere. In general, I like using Aaron’s tools as they aggregate information from multiple sources such as Google, MSN, and WordTracker. Having said that, the tools have crashed on me a couple of times, but the results have been fairly accurate. But more useful than the tool is his training book, SEOBook. You should definitely read it if you afford it.
5. SubmitExpress Keyword Tool: SubmitExpress is a little handy tool that shows side-by-side comparison between WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery results. Both these tools are great paid SEO tools, but if you don’t afford $400/$500 a year for these tools, then you can use the free results to get an estimate for the keywords that you are trying to target.

There are many other tools out there that may do the same job, but why waste time playing with so many different tools when you can use the above tools to actually do some search engine optimization. One thing about the Internet is that it’s a great tool for innovation and distraction. You can gain a lot from the Internet, but you can potentially lose a lot as well. Just go to remember that time is money!