Before you spend a lot of money on SEO tools, we recommend getting the free Google Toolbar available for Windows based Internet Explorer at http://toolbar.google.com or for the Windows or Mac Firefox browser at http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/.

The toolbar will instantly show you key information that will help you in your SEO quest on Google. Key information are the Google PageRank (PR), a cached snapshot of a page so you know what Google thinks it’s looking at, and even the backward links that it recognizes from your site. That’s a lot of great information right from the definitive source - and all for free!

Balanced optimization is an insider term used by some SEO professionals. It means that you should remember that your site is visited not only by search engine robots, but by humans as well. If you plan on converting your visitors to paying customers, you should try to keep a balance between user-friendliness and keyword optimization.