Don't worry, you don't need to get too fancy to get started. In fact, you don't need to get fancy even if you're an SEO professional. 95% of what you need to get done can be done with a small number of fairly inexpensive or free tools.

Web CEO - For me, this is the first SEO tool I would invest in. Sure, it leaves some things to be desired, and there are a lot of things in it I don't desire, but what I use it for it does well. What Web CEO allows you to do is set up profiles for the different websites you manage them and run reports so you can track progress. There are four principle reports I use from Web CEO:

1. Search engine rankings - You enter in your website and your keywords and it goes out and queries the search engines and gives you a nice, easy to read report, showing where your site ranks. You can also run it to rank your competitors as well so you can compare. You could get this information for free, it just wouldn't be as easy and you wouldn't get the nice reports.

As with all Web CEO reports, you can customize this one to show data from certain search engines. I don't care about any search engines except Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, so I only run the reports to show rankings in those search engines. Often I only run the reports to show rankings in Google.

To buy Web CEO click here.

2. Indexed pages - A simple report showing you which pages of your site have been indexed by the various search engines. If your pages aren't indexed by a certain search engine then that search engine doesn't know they exist and therefore can't rank that page, so it's helpful to see which pages have not been indexed so you can do whatever is necessary to get them indexed and ranking. You can also get this information for Google by typing in "site:www.whateveryourdomainis.com".

3. Inbound links - A very simple report showing you how many links Google and Yahoo! recognize as coming to your site. Not extremely helpful, but I like to show it to clients once in a while. But generally I'd rather just use the search engines themselves to look at the data. Again, you can get this data from Google by typing in "link:www.yourwebsite.com".

4. Link text analysis - Tells you the text of the links linking to your site. Helpful in that the text of inbound links matters to your rankings. The report also tells you what sites the links are coming from.

Google Toolbar - A free SEO tool, so you can't complain about the price. Install it in seconds, and then use it to quickly see inbound links for the website you're on. Of course you can also get this data straight from Google without using the toolbar, but I find the toolbar to be more convenient.

Google Analytics - Another free SEO tool. Well, it's not necessarily an SEO tool, per se, seeing as how you could use it for a lot of non-SEO purposes, but for me it's an SEO tool. Did I mention it's free? I used to work for a company that charged $25/month for the same thing. Lucky for them they sold it several years ago and focused on website analytics for enterprise customers and they've done quite well for themselves. Anyhoo...Google Analytics gives you information about your website visitors. How many of them, what they did on your site, how they found your site, and if they found your site through a search engine you can see what keywords they used to find your site. Pretty helpful stuff.

Google Keyword Tool - In case you don't know which keywords to focus on, this tool can help you figure things out. If you just have one keyword it will help you go from there.

To be honest, just these four SEO tools are probably what 99% of you need to get started and do well, so I'm going to leave it at that. There are plenty of other SEO tools, but if you're just getting started you can do without them.

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