SEO Tools: Help or Hindrance?

One of the most powerful methods of optimizing your companys web site and improving its search engine rank is to use SEO tools, or search engine optimization tools. Using SEO tools correctly can make a vital difference in your sites success. The key word is "correctly." Using SEO tools incorrectly can also make a difference to your sites success... by flushing it down the toilet. Before you use any SEO tools, make sure you know exactly what you are doing.
For instance, keyword tools are perhaps the most important SEO tools available. With a good set of keyword tools, you can find out what keywords your pages currently target, how high in each major search engine they rank for each keyword, and what keyword density each page has, making it possible for you to refine your existing keyword targeting and even correct mistargeting. You can also develop new pages with keyword tools by using keyword generators to create lists of promising new keywords, evaluate likely traffic by keyword, and generate lists of commonly mistyped variants of your keywords for extra targeting.
However, you can also aim for the wrong keyword density, create combinations of keywords that sound spammy to search engines, or do any of a multitude of stupid SEO tricks that will cause your site to be blacklisted as spam. Because real spam merchants are excellent at showing search engines what they want to see, search engines constantly revise their algorithms, changing their "opinion" of overused SEO tricks. Google is particularly frustrating to target; site features that Google loved three years ago might now be verboten. If your SEO knowledge is too old or your SEO tool is calibrated for a previous algorithm, whoosh, down goes your page ranking.
As you can see, online SEO tools might seem to be an easy and economical way to optimize your site yourself, but you could find that you have been penny wise and pound foolish. Rather than optimizing your web site yourself and throwing money at expensive advertising to undo any damage you may have done, consider hiring a professional SEO services firm. Their SEO knowledge will be fresh, and their SEO tools will be cutting edge. The end result will be a finely targeted, highly competitive web page that will adapt to changing algorithms and serve your business well.