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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what every webmaster wants. SEO can give your site long term free targeted traffic from the search engines. If your website gets ranked for a high traffic competitive keyword by the search engines, you have hit a goldmine. But SEO is not easy. It may take months of back breaking work for you before you succeed.

First let me explain in simple terms what SEO is. SEO means that you optimize each page of your website with a title tag, description tag, keywords tag and H1, H2 headers for a particular keyword. The content of the page should not have more than a 4% keyword density.

On page optimization is only for telling the search engines the keyword that you want to be ranked. But its your site link popularity that is given more importance by the search engines. This is known as Off Page Optimization and requires you to get thousands of quality backlinks from authority sites before the search engines start taking your site seriously.

Lets be clear; this requires lot of work. Its not easy especially link building. There are SEO companies that can do this work for you on payment of a few thousand dollars. Why pay this much, when you can do it for free. And it is fun too!

Many people want to take short cut to SEO. They download Black Hat SEO eBooks thinking that these black hat techniques may give them success. Nothing is further from the truth. Search engines dont like black hat techniques.

Black Hat SEO short cut is not good. It may work for sometime but the search engines will find it and ban your site. Other people buy SEO software. There are many available online. SEO Elite is one such software.

SEO Elite can only tell you whether your site is being ranked for a particular keyword and how many backlinks you are getting for your site. It cannot help you in On Page Optimization or Link Building. You will have to do this stuff yourself.

So why pay a few hundred dollars when you can get the same information from Google free. Google wants to help you in building a better website that users like. This is what SEO is all about; a user friendly website with good quality content.

Open a Google Webmaster Tools account free. Get your site indexed by Google by submitting your site and its sitemap at Google Webmaster Tools. Without being indexed, your site cannot get ranking from the search engines.

Use the link Search Queries in the Google Webmaster Tools to find whether your site has been ranked by Google. It will give you the list of keywords that your site has a ranking.

Click on: link:http://www.yourdomain.com on the Google Webmaster Tools page and you will find the backlinks that Google is counting for your site. If Google is not counting a backlink, it has no value.

Now, this is a free method that does not require you to pay hundreds of dollars. Why you need to buy SEO Elite if Google can do the same thing for you free. And if you are using Google Adwords for advertising your site than you can use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is even better. It gives you the number of visitors, pageviews; keywords that are giving you search engine traffic, direct traffic and other referral sites that send traffic to your site.