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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.

If you dont know SEO than it means optimizing your site for search engines so that it gets ranked on search engine pages. You do this by On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. On page Optimization means that you include the title tag, description tag, keyword tag and H1/H2 headers to tell the search engine the keyword that you want to be ranked. Search engines dont like keyword spamming. So keep the keyword density on your page below 4%.

On page optimization is good but what actually works on the search engines is Off Page Optimization: getting quality backlinks from other authority sites. Search engines like to see thousands of quality backlinks to your site from authority sites before they start ranking your site for high traffic keywords.

Let me be frank, both On Page and Off Page Optimization requires hard work for a few months. There is no shortcut. Google does not like reciprocal links.

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.

Some people will tell you that there is a short cut. They call it Black Hat SEO. Avoid it. It may help you in the short term but in the long term your site will be noticed by the search engines and get banned. Others sell SEO software. One is SEO Elite. It sells for a few hundred dollars.

SEO Elite will tell you the number of backlinks that your site is getting. You will have to get the backlinks yourself. It will also tell you whether your site is getting ranked for a particular keyword or not.

Why you want to pay a few hundred dollars to know these things when Google provides you this information for free. Google is your friend. Learn to do what Google wants you to do and see how Google will start loving you.

Have you heard of Google Webmaster Tools? If not then open a Google Account, you will get the Google Webmaster Tools free. Submit your site and its sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Within a few days, Google will index your site. Without getting indexed, you cant get ranked.

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.

If you want to know the number of backlinks to your site, just click on link:http://www.yourdomain.com on the Google Webmaster Tools and you will get the backlinks that Google is counting for your site.

Now, isnt this method better than purchasing SEO Elite? If you advertise on Google Adwords than you can use Google Analytics as well for your site free!

Google Analytics is a great free tool provided by Google that tells you everything. How many visitors visited your site on a given day, the countries from where the search was made even the cities, how much time they had time spent on the site, their referral path, the bounce rate that your site had, how many pageviews per visitor; keywords they used to find your site on the search engines, how many direct visitors and how many referring sites are giving you visitors.