In a nutshell, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing a website’s ranking on the results pages of Internet search engines. It’s generally understood that the higher the ranking of a site or web page, the more traffic it will receive. Unless your site offers products and services aimed at a very narrow niche, you will have to maintain your SEO efforts to keep up with the competition. You may even have to develop new techniques to give you an edge.

Fortunately, there are a number of SEO tools which you can use to optimize your site. And if that’s not enough to get your hopes up, many of them can be used for free. Google also has a number of free SEO tools the average webmaster can make use of. Because Google always promotes the use of organic SEO techniques, the means to improve your website’s presence and compete with the bigger names in the business are at your disposal. Even if you may not have a big budget, you can still work your way to the top, or at least maintain a decent search engine ranking.

Before you get started, it’s important to first analyse your website yourself. Are there any improvements that can be made to its structure? Are the URL’s friendly enough to users? Are you linking properly? Are the Meta titles, tags and descriptions correct? Once you’ve checked all these, it’s time to look at the free Google SEO tools that are at your disposal.

For starters, you can check out Google Webmaster tools. It provides you with an in-depth look at how Google sees your site and how Google Spiders sniff it out. It also gives you information on what issues the Spider ran into when crawling and indexing the site.

Next stop is Google Analytics. This is more of an internet marketing tool for site owners to know the nature of their site visits, providing information on the number of visitors, the country/state they’re from, how long they stayed on your site and more.

These are just two of the many SEO tools from Google which you can use to improve your site. Take it slow and don’t overwhelm yourself. Take your time to know each tool before putting them into effect.