Essential SEO Tools
I work very hard but one thing I will not accept is wasting time. Why do more work than you have to? With these tools you can cut down on the manual labour and spend more time driving profits into your pocket.
Web Design
I highly recommend OSWD and Free CSS Templates. Both have some great designs for content sites and best of all they are free. For fancier stuff check out Template Monster, although one of these designs is certainly not required.
For photos I like SXC (also free) and iStock (not free.) Both of them have beautiful images which can really make a site attractive and easy on the eye.
Keywords
By far the most informative is Google’s Keyword Tool. It shows search volume as well as how competitive a keyword is. The more competitive the higher amount of money you can expect to make on a site featuring that topic. Consequently you will also be competing with more websites to get traffic.
There are other good keyword tools by Yahoo and Microsoft but they require you to sign up as an advertiser (which you are free to do) but unless you really really want a second or third perspective the Google tool is your best bet.
Another free (and paid version) KW tool is Wordtracker. Their dataset is a small fraction of Google’s but again it is useful for a second opinion.
Google has another great tool called the Traffic Estimator. This helps you determine how high your payouts will be per click with Adsense (and other text ad providers.)
Content
…is KING. Unique content is essential if you are trying to get the search engines to like you. In some cases that may not matter to you if you are able to tap another traffic source. If it does matter do not copy the below word for word. Instead ensure your site has customer/unique content.
Plenty of sites like ArticleCity, Articlesbase and Amazines offer free articles. Content Exchange is a unique concept where you can exchange content. You write/get content for someone else and they do the same for you. Quite handy if you are working on a site that you personally don’t have a lot of expertise.
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