If you start getting into promoting your site, you will begin to discover how complex it is. Besides word-of-mouth and the usual collateral materials like postcards, there are a huge number of on-site and off-site procedures you can use to attract visitors and rank higher in search pages. Fortunately there is also a rapidly expanding universe of helpful tools. One site that is mostly free and provides a kind of all-in-one approach is Submit Express. I like this site, especially for novices because the tools are free and they can quickly get you up to speed. For example, it has a couple of types of keyword suggestion tools, which are critical because keywords should be the place you start when you are looking to fix your site. There are some misleading labels in the navigation bar, but all the tools seem useful. Another tool subtitled “Keyword Popularity Tool” but also labeled “Keyword Traffic Estimator” gives you daily search volume from two surveys presumably based on the big search engines. Why is this important? Because if you are going to use a keyword you have to consider that your competition may also be using it and this may help keep you lower in search rank. It is a delicate business trying to balance the popularity of a keyword against the competition factor. One thing that should help with your keyword choice is your competitive edge. Hopefully you offer something unique and this will give you a platform to start choosing terms. If you find you are offering the same product or service as everybody else, you need to define you own angle and that’s where your keyword search begins. If you want to find out what your competition uses you can use the handy tool offered by Submit Express. It’s called “Page Snooper” and all you have to do is type in your rivals URL and Page Snooper provides the page source of that page. Of course you can also do this from your browser by using the menu bar as follows: View>Page Source. Sometimes this is also accessed by using: View>View Source. Page snooper makes the process a little faster because you don’t have to be on the site to see the code. There are a bunch of other free tools as well, like “Free Submission”, “Meta Tags Generator” and “Reciprocal Link Checker”. So get started with some great free tools. Reprinted from my traffic blog