Having great content on your site is only half the battle.  You’ve built your blog.  You have your posts. Now you want people to actually be able to find your site.  I’ve shown you how to get your own website, but another important part of building your site is optimizing it for search engines.  Your website is like a needle in a haystack, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing traffic to your page from search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

There are entire companies dedicated to providing SEO, and thousands of guides out there, but I have selected my favorite tools and tips to help increase your traffic from search engines.

1. SeoQuake

SeoQuake is one of the most popular Firefox plugins for measuring SEO.  It allows you to see many important SEO parameters of your website, like Google pagerank and incoming/outgoing links.

2. Hubspot Website Grader

For the more advanced user, Hubspot’s Website Grader does a complete analysis of your website, grades it, and gives you suggestions on how to improve your SEO.

3. All in One SEO Pack

This is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO.  It will automate your keywords, post titles, and include meta tags for all your pages.  For more WordPress plugins, see Mashable’s 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress.

4. WP Auto Tagger

The WP Auto Tagger automatically tags all your posts with recommended keywords based on search engine data from Yahoo.  This is a great way to increase traffic to specific posts on your website or blog.

5. SEOmoz Tools

SEOmoz has an entire collection of SEO tools for your website, from keyword rank tracking to a site explorer that can explore a site’s backlinks and top pages.

6. Social Mention

Social Mention scans various social media platforms for mentions of you or your brand.  This is a good way to check to see whether you are successfully making you and your work visible.

7. Backlink Checker

This tool will show you all backlinks that link to your website.  This is a good way to see what other websites are linking to you.

8. Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to other websites that are similar to yours.

9. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets you see the volume for different keyword searches.  This is a good tool for selecting keywords to use in your post titles and tags to boost your SEO.

10. SEO Browser

This website will show you exactly how a search engine views your page.  This is helpful for artists that use a lot of images in their posts so that they can make sure everything is tagged correctly.

11., 12., 13., Search Engine Land, Problogger.net, SEO Book

These are all good blogs about search engine news, blogging, and basic SEO.

14. YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

15. Google Search-based keyword tool

Another keyword search based on Google queries.

16. Google Analytics

Track the changes you are making with Google Analytics to see what changes have the biggest effect on your traffic, or whether they even have any effect at all.