Over the years as a webmaster, I have been many different roles in our organization.  I have been everything from a content writer, a web designer, to the SEO expert.  All throughout this experience, I have relied on software tools to assist me in the job that I was assigned to do and I thought that I would share a couple of my favorites with you.

One of the tools that I have relied on heavily over the years has been ALink, a reciprocal link manager.  This has been instrumental in building backlinks to the sites that I had been promoting as it provided a simple interface to organize my link exchanges with other related sites.

I also have used AMeta, a meta tag editor to help me make sure that I have each page of every site I create optimized properly for the search engines.  I found this software much easier than trying to code by hand and it has saved me a lot of time.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the above tools have been instrumental to my success online.  I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to create a website.  In fact, with all the software packages available on the market, anyone that wants to can create their own site.

But the point that most people get stumped on is what to do after the site is online.  Most people just expect that people will visit the site automatically once it is online.  But they forget the most important thing: website promotion.

Without any type of marketing, no one will be able to find their website.  Even something as simple as listing your site in web directories, blogging about it, or posting a link on your Facebook page will get some traffic and rankings in the search engines.

Once the marketing has started and your site starts to get indexed by the search engines, things will go smoothly - at least that is how I achieved the level of success that I have with my sites.

In my quest to get my blog to rank higher in the search engines, I’ve hooked up with an SEO mentor. He’s brilliant in other online areas, as well, but for now I’m only interested in the search engine part of his psyche. *grin*

It came up in conversation recently that dotnetnuke web hosting might influence a page’s ranking on Live.com. I tried to act as if I understood, but my eyes must have rolled up into my head because my mentor just laughed and changed the subject to a topic I was capable of understanding without straining something.

Little by little I am starting to “get” search engine optimization. In the past I’ve been put off by so much conflicting information. Now that I have a mentor who knows when I’ve lost him, we can go step by step over every point from page rank to keyword research to using alt tags, at a pace I can handle.

If you have ever tried to create your own website, you will know what I mean when I say it is tough.  Now, I guess it is really not that hard, but when you don’t know what you are doing, it can be quite a challenge.

After reading book after book on website optimization, I thought that I had everything figured out.  I mean, all I had to do was make sure that my site would look good to the search engines, right?

Well, that really wasn’t the whole picture.  Sure, I wanted to get good search engine placement, but the goal of the site was to be useful for my visitors as well.  When I finally realized that the search engines weren’t everything, I had to redo my site to cater to both the search engines and my website visitors.

After much trial and error, I finally figured things out and people started to come to my site.  What I learned at that point that my marketing was not complete - in fact, it was just beginning.

After trying for the past six months to get our online business off the ground, I have pretty much given up.  What I thought would be an easy task has turned into a nightmare with little rewards.  I think that the site has made a big two sales, and that is not enough to even break even.  So, I have decided that it is time to call in a professional, and see if they can help out.

I recently contacted an Internet Marketing Consulting Firm to see what they could do for me in terms of my Internet marketing campaign.  We scheduled a meeting and sat down to discuss how they could help me with my business.

At our meeting, they brought up many valid points and even gave me some free suggestions on how I could increase my website traffic.  From talking with them, I could tell that they knew their stuff, so I hired them on the spot to take care of my Internet marketing.

Now, just a week later, I have already doubled my sales, and it is looking like the business will actually end up being profitable this month.  I am very thankful that they were able to help us out - I will be using their services in the future for any other online businesses that I decide to start.

I have seen many websites over the years that have been innovative and stood out from their peers.  Some it was due to their design - they were very beautiful and professional looking.  But, the most memorable sites were the ones that took one good thing, added it to another and created something unique.

I had the opportunity this week to come across one of those sites.  I was actually in the process of submitting my site to a business directory when I noticed something different about the site that I was on - it was a link bid directory too!

Now, I might be a bit naive when it comes to these things, but it was the first niche link bid directory that I had ever seen - and it was a really good idea.  What I love about the link bidding system is that you can choose what position that you come up in the results - depending on your budget of course.

I expect to see many more of these niche bid directories come out of this idea - and to the owner of the site, let me just say good thinking!

I will be the first to admit that I am really good at making websites - but not so good marketing them.  In fact, I would have to say that I really detest the amount of time it can take to market a website properly, so I try to avoid it as much as I can.

But without proper website marketing, your site will not perform as well as it should - and usually not well at all.  So, instead of complaining about getting the word out about my site, I have hired a professional advertising company to do the marketing for me.

They will take care of my search engine advertising and make sure I get the amount of traffic that I need to make the sales targets I have come up with.  I don’t need to know the exact details on how they are going to do it, but I am more interested in the results.

And the best part is I won’t have to do website marketing anymore.  That alone, makes my day.

My husband is in the midst of teaching me all about the article submission service we use to promote our websites. I know that he has been promoting our websites for awhile now, and it is a major source of our family’s income. For this reason, he decided that I should know what to do with them in case anything ever happened to him.

I am not a morbid person and I do not like to think about these kinds of things, but he was right in saying that I needed to be able to support the kids if something did happen. Thus, I am learning the art of article submission. I was very afraid at first, but it is not as bad as I feared.

Today, I am learning all about how a one way link drives traffic to our site. My husband is such a smart man and he is teaching me well. I will hopefully make him proud by being a fast learner. So far, he says that I am doing well. He has succumbed to calling me grasshopper.

For the past while, most people have been obsessed with page rank.  This is especially true for those people who buy and sell text links - the higher the number, the greater the cost for the link.  But are these high value links really necessary?

Some people would argue that the higher the page rank, the greater the traffic - but that is not necessarily true.  I have two websites that are totally different page ranks, and the one with the lower page rank gets more traffic.

But, should you leave high page rank sites out of your link building strategies?

I would have to say no.  You see, those sites that are ranked higher tend to have more authority than one that isn’t.  But by just focusing your link building on those specific sites, you may be missing out on sites that are more relevant to your niche.

Do a little brain storming and come up with some good link building ideas and you will see your traffic and search engine rankings increase.  Be sure that you have different ideas on how to build links and do them all - a little variety never hurt anyone.

I asked my husband, who is a bit of a website promotion guru, what I could do myself to achieve higher search engine rankings. He gave me a variety of options and was proud that I was taking the initiative to learn instead of expecting him to do it for me.

He said that I would need to learn about online media before I started utilizing it for my own monetary gain. I thought that this was a good idea, so I took a fair bit of time to learn the ins and outs of search engines and how they rank websites.

When I completed this task, my husband taught me about article marketing. The more links that I had back to my site, the higher I was going to climb when people searched for my keywords.

I learned a lot about Internet marketing from both my husband, and from looking up the information on my own. I have started to put the knowledge into effect and am now waiting to see if it was worth it.