From a newbie to a savvy webmaster, the best and the easiest way to improve rankings in the search engines tremendously is by “reciprocal linking” or “link exchange”. This is whereby websites exchange links to share traffic and some do this to improve their Page Rank.

Though this is a tedious job especially if you were to do it manually that is why a good SEO tool comes in handy. But before you go out to purchase one, you need to know exactly the qualities and the ability of that software.

There are several SEO tools that would assist you do this job efficiently since like I said doing it manually will take you a great deal of time.

Here are some of the basic things that a good SEO Tool should be able to do:

1. It should be able to get links for your website in relation to various factors:-

• Find websites with high page rank using a specific keyword.
• Find websites with high page rank using a competitor
• Find Link directory using a keyword

This is the hardest thing for any webmaster especially if you are a beginner.

2. It should be able to analyze the backlinks and find out whether they are still linking back. – This would reduce your ranking tremendously if not checked. The tool should ensure that the websites that you are linking to are still linking to your website. If they are not, you should remove them immediately. An exceptional SEO tool should be able to do this using a specific search engine e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN among others.

3. Find out where you are ranked using a specific keyword – this is a good way to track down your performance over time and know whether you are improving or not. Remember that you can rank well in almost any keyword you choose with a good SEO Tool.

4. Find out how many pages are indexed – by using a particular domain, it should be able to tell how many pages have been indexed by various search engines; be it Google, AlltheWeb, Yahoo among others.

5. Find out the possible authority website – again the tool should be able to give you possible websites that are viewed by search engines as authority websites. These are website that are ranking well using a keyword that you are also optimizing your website for, website with higher PageRank compared to yours etc.

6. Some may give an option of submitting articles to various article directories – This is just an Add-on where you may be able to submit articles to various article directories and take advantage of “One-Way links” – Links that you do not link back to which are viewed by search engine as more valuable thus giving your website the boost it deserves.

7. Others:-

• Does it support a proxy server? – it would be a huge loss if a software that you just bought does not support a proxy server and you are behind one. Look out for this.

• Export and Importing – Does the tool has the ability to import content from a text file, csv or html and/or export to the same for future analysis.

I found a great tool called SEO Elite and it’s amazing. See what it can do