Website Promotion
Search Engine Tools and Aids
Once you've submitted your site to the search engines that allow you, prepared your pages in regards to your title, meta tags and getting your link on as many sites as possibile, don't just sit back and wait for things to happen.
There's a number of sites and projects around that can help you evaluate your rankings and see what changes you could make to improve them.
Overture
Overture or "overture ranking" is something you'll often hear people mention when talking about the search engine ranking of websites.
A useful url to note is inventory.overture.com This is an extremley useful tool that can display information on the number of times particular terms and keywords were searched for over the last month.
It's ideal for checking which terms are often looked for when people are searching for services related to those that you offer.
For example, if you search the term "computers" you'll see how many people searched that word over the last month, but you'll also see the most popular other searches related to the term "computers" this will give you a great clue as to which keywords you should include in your page meta and title tags to ensure you get the most from search engine traffic.
Market Leap
www.marketleap.com also has a number of useful tools for monitoring the ranking of your website. You can perform checks on your link popularity to see how many pages are linking to your website, check your search engine saturation and see how many of your pages are actually listed in the top search engines, and perform a keyword verification check to lookup the standing of your website in relation to certain search terms.
The great thing about marketleap is that you can compare all your results to the top websites in your particular field or business and see how you compare.
Alexa
Alexa also offers other useful tools, they are not so much related to improving your search engine rating, but the Alexa traffic stats allows you to compare the traffic to your website with others in your line of business, so it can give you a better idea of weither or not what you're doing so far to promote your site is successfull, in comparison to other websites offering similar products or services.
Alexas traffic stats and other webmaster tools can be found at pages.alexa.com