For those of us who run our businesses online - or just run websites in our spare time - we’re all well aware of how important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to getting lots of traffic to our sites and, in turn, growing our bottom lines. 

To that end, we spend countless hours trying to make sure that our sites are in tip-top shape in order to capture massive amounts of traffic from the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I came across an article published in Entrepreneur.com that may help cut down on some of the time that we have to spend working on our site’s SEO.  The article outlines ten free SEO tools that might be able to help you ascend to the front page of Google much faster than your current trial and error method.

I’m not going to go over all ten tools, but there were two tools in particular that I think are worth noting:

• Keyword Density Checker: This tool is great not only for helping you make sure that you’re hitting the right keyword density (which should be give or take 3% of any given article) but it’s also a useful tool to help you fine tune your article for contextual based advertising like Google Adsense.
• What Are People Searching For:  For the most part, niche sites tend to do a lot better with targeted traffic and revenue when compared to very broad topics.  A great way to start narrowing down these broad topics is to use this free tool from Google to see what other search terms come up for your given topic.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you check out the article from Entrepreneur.com and begin to implement many of the listed SEO tools.

I know it’s a pain to do all of the initial grunt work to get your site ranked on the first or second page for any given term, but once you get your site there, you should see a substantial jump in traffic and revenue.