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Here are some tools that you will find useful
Lots of people are out there competing every day for good listings in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and if you're not one of them then you really are missing out on an important way of getting traffic to your website.

Of course getting traffic to your business or your website from search engines is not the only option. Here in adult we can also bring in traffic by getting listings on the various TGPs and link lists, we can buy it in from traffic brokers such as Choker or, to a limited extent, we can advertise out there in the real world.

If we're working in mainstream, apart from the search engines, we can be bringing in traffic from the various directories - although that's usually quite limited; we can buy in traffic from traffic brokers and big social media sites such as Stumbleupon and we can do a lot more to advertise our sites than we can if they're adult sites.

But you still can't beat a good organic search engine listing for quality traffic whether we're promoting mainstream sites or adult sites. However, getting those good organic listings is not easy ... and let's be frank, a good organic listing is somewhere in the top four on the first page for your chosen term so it really is difficult but very important. If you're not there in the top four then you're not really going to see much traffic at all.

Getting that top four listing in the SERPS depends on a number of different factors. One search engine optimization expert that Steve and I believe has a real clue on achieving good listings continually tells people that there are four factors that affect search engine rankings.

- What you do with your pages
- What other people do with their pages
- What the search engines do with their data
- What people search for

While we might have little or no control over what other people do with their pages it can be very helpful to look under the covers so to speak. Obviously one of the ways to do that is to view source and examine things like their head tags, the coding of their outgoing and internal links and even the mark-up they've used in their text.

But after you've looked at that what do you do to garner more information and what information should you be looking for? Well, believe it or not, sometimes where the site is hosted can be very important when it comes to getting a good listing in the SERPS. For example, in google.com one of our sites ranks at number two for a very important local but is absolutely nowhere to be seen in google.com.au where we really do want to rank well.

So what's the difference between our site and our competitors' sites? It could come down to where each business has their sites hosted, but how do you find out where your competition is hosted?

There are two tools that can help you hear. A reverse IP DNS domain check tool like the one found at seologs.com can give you the IP number of a site along with other interesting information. NeoTrace, available from McAfee, can tell you exactly where a site is hosted whether you have the IP address or not.

Whois.sc is another important tool that can give you some great insight into your competitions' domain names. Webuildpages.com is another site with some very helpful search engine optimization tools (although it wasn't working for me this morning).

Another tool we use is LinkSurvey from antssoft.com. It's been around for a few years now but it's very easy to use and it helps you identify any site's back links. A competitor's backlinks can be very important when it comes to identifying the reason a site may be doing much better in the SERPS that your site is. LinkSurvey is not free but it's very inexpensive when you consider how much information it can give you.

Another place for some very helpful tools is tools.seobook.com. There are two or three there that we use frequently because they really do help when it comes to search engine optimization for the terms we're targeting.

Finally, the last tool I'll recommend is the cheapest of all. It's nothing more complicated or expensive than a pen and paper. You see SEO research isn't something that's over and done in 10 minutes. It will extend over weeks and even months and it will certainly lead you down some less than obvious pathways and you will need to keep notes.

You might think that you will be able to remember it all but you won't and the notes you keep as you dig deeper into search engine optimization will help you remember where you've come from and what you've done to reach the point your at.

So there are some tools that I hope you will find helpful. SEO is not rocket science, if you dig into it you will understand it and once you understand SEO you will be able to improve the rankings for your sites ... and that will help you make more money.