Why Learn SEO? SEO helps you get found by search engines. Optimizing for the top search engines will increase your likelihood of being found by potential customers. You need to learn the basics of optimization so that you can structure your website in a way that will make Google, MSN, Altavista and other popular search engines see your site as relevant to the subject your site is about.

Can you hire an SEO pro instead? Sure you can but this article will help you understand why it might be more advantageous to your business today as well as your business a year from now to learn SEO yourself. You don't have to do it alone either. SEO Tools and knowledge together can have a big impact on your success.

If you've got a great product to sell and great copywriting on your site to convert visitors into buyers the only other problem is going to be getting people to your website. There are many tools out there that are free and available for a fee that can help you become an SEO guru so that you can maximize exposure on your site. What do you need to know? You need to know about page rank, keyword density, The Long Tail, latent semantic indexing, page reputation, social book marking and more. Sound daunting? It doesn't have to be. Should you just do a pay per click campaign and be done with it? Not necessary! Furthermore, pay per click isn't nearly as effective as organic search engine results. Think about the last time you searched for something. Did you click on Google's first or second result or did you click the sponsored ad? Enough said.

Tools like SEOElite and OptiLink and others might be helpful. Tools that help you assess your competition can be very helpful in getting you some more viewers. You can learn and implement SEO on your own without tools to a degree but tools can save time and reduce cycles you'd have to spend finding out information and making changes.

Various tools that exist can help you maximize your linking strategies plus work on content and layout as well to make the best use of information from reports so that you can act accordingly and build on strengths while eliminating weaknesses.

Advanced SEO tools could require a bit of an investment but could be substantially less than the price of hiring an SEO services firm who will do your SEO for you. Many self taught SEO gurus are far better at helping their business grow and evolve because they learn the tricks and tips and grow and change their knowledge as the SEO rules change.

Companies like Google and Yahoo change the rules regularly to stay ahead of the game and keep the search engines honest. Knowing how they work will be an ongoing effort and staying up to date on changes to algorithms is going to be helpful too.