Ever since I started my website, theIanternet.com; I have found so many useful tools online to help me with: keywords, SEO, forums, reciprocal linking, etc. These tools you can find online for a price as well, they can claim they are better or work more efficiently. Well, starting an internet business require for you to spend some money correct? Not necessarily.

There are products out there that speaks for itself and which I myself would like to get a hand on, but as a starter I wanted to start off searching the net for useful tools. I have joined several forums which helped me in doing so.

I looked to my website and when I first published it I wanted it to seem as it was online for a while, publishing forums (with no users), reciprocal linking (with no links), articles (with no articles), etc. So I said to myself I need some tools to help me here. I found several important tools and programs that helped with my site. I will list them and explain them below.

The first tool I used was a keyword generator called Good Keywords. This tool links to overture and shows you how many times that specific phrase has been searched for the month. I used this to help create my FrontPage and Meta tags, applying most of the keywords to target the niche market I wanted. As you may all know keywords are very important to your site, it helps search engines and users define who and what you are going to provide to the user.

RSS feeds are great to help refresh and give your content a new look and new information all the time. This is great for SEO as search engines see different content all the time. Keep your site fresh with RSS feeds. The script that I used is called Carp. This turns RSS feeds to HTML so it is SEO friendly. Having a SEO friendly site is great as new content is always being added, making the search engine search it more frequently.

Reciprocal linking is the process of exchanging links. Every did a site comparison via Google or Yahoo and you noticed a site has a page rank of 4; you would like them to have a link on their site correct? Emailing them and posting their link on your site and then having to always check their site to assure yourself that your ACTIVE link is on there is very time consuming. There are scripts out there that do this for you, well except the fact of contacting the user themselves. I use Duncan Carvers Link Management Assistance. I can add a link or have a user add their link to my site or directory and the script will automatically check their site every week (or however you have it set) to assure your site is being linked back! WOW we save a lot of time. You can have users add links to your site as well, but you would like to have site that have high page ranks, it will give you more respect to the search engine showing that your content is worth its views. Please visit: http://directory.theianternet.com to post your link.

Other than that you want to have your site be interactive, in this case I created a forum. There are a lot of good scripts out there for online communities. PHPBB is a very popular and very configurable forum, very similar to VB bulletin. I myself I do not need all that configurations, so I went with Simple Machine Forum. This is a very simple and useful forum, not a lot of change this, font size this, color that, etc. You can download themes, mods, avatars, etc and add it to your forum, very simple, as the name states, and useful. Even then I am trying to grow my community but it takes time. Please visist: http://forum.theianternet.com to help grow my community and get assisted help from other young entrepreneurs!

I am always looking for more scripts to help update my site and its value, looking for new software that can do the same job as the paid ones. As this article title states, why purchase when the simple ones are FREE and BETTER! To me this is true, I had no failure with any of my scripts or tools that I am using to help my site. Most of the tools I have has easy to read instructions and installation procedures, the programmer will even install it for you for a price, if you wish.

First I say research, research, research for web tools help and or scripts before actually buying. This saves you money!!