The success of your online business, no matter what model you use, relies on one thing - traffic. There are essentially two ways to get that traffic: pay for it (PPC, CPM advertising etc.) or get it free (which essentially boils down to SEO). SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of making your website more ‘valuable’ to the search engines and hence likely to rank higher for your keyterms. Here are my top 5 free tools to help in the SEO process:

1. Wordpress

Yes - Wordpress is a blogging platform, but it’s a very powerful one, and one that can create very search engine friendly sites, plus of course it’s free! Search engines LOVE blogs because they are packed full of content which is regularly updated. Wordpress makes the entire process simple and efficient, and is powerful enough that it can even be used as a CMS system for building entire sites. There are also a ton of plugins available and lots of community support.

2. Google Alerts

Another superb and free SEO tool is Google Alerts. You can set alerts for all your major keyterms and Google will keep you up to date on new links that it indexes for those keywords. Great for tracking your competitors as well as your own posts and articles.

3. SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a Firefox plugin which gives you a bunch of SEO information on any site while browsing. You get all the basic metrics like pagerank, inbound links, traffic rank , keyword density etc. and a built in Whois function. Again, great for checking up on your own sites and your competitors.

4. Search Engine Rank Checker

Another Firefox plugin (perhaps Firefox should be in my top 5 SEO tools!?), this one allows you to check rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN search. It will let you check sites which rank in the top 200 positions for your chosen keywords and even has a built in scheduler.

5. Free Keyword Tool

This free keyword tool from SEO Book is powered by WordTracker and tells you how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. You get to view suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, links to the search volumes and loads more.

All in all, 5 very valuable tool to help your sites rank well and give you a heads up on your competitors sites and rankings… and all without spending a penny!