Have you been trying hard to optimize your website for the search engines but you just could not get it to rank well? So what went wrong? Why couldn't you rank your site while thousands of Internet marketers are able to get seemingly an endless stream of website visitors from the search engines? That's because they have valuable tools that help them with SEO.

In every SEO campaign, there are 2 major components. You have to optimize your website internally, and you have to build as many inbound links as you can. These are the two main elements.

For the first component, that is the easy part. You can tweak your existing website as much as you like because you have control over the website. For example, if you are using Wordpress (the popular CMS) to power your website, you can always install an SEO plugin to help make your site more search engine friendly. Alternatively, if you know how to code, you can make changes to the template yourself.

But when it comes to link building, that's where most people get hung up. They don't know where to get high quality inbound links, and they don't know how to build links properly.

To make matters worse, some marketers don't even know which keyword phrase to target.

Well, when you are performing SEO, your primary goal is to rank on the first page of the search engines. You must know your target keyword phrase. Otherwise, it's just like walking blindfolded. So how do you know which keywords to target?

Fortunately, there are SEO software in the market that will help you with your research. Software like SEO Elite can help you find your target keywords quickly and easily.

For instance, you want to target keywords that will bring you traffic. There is no point trying to target some obscure keyword that no one ever uses in the search engines. Those keywords will not serve you. What you must do, is to use the software, to find out if the keywords that you are trying to target will actually bring you some targeted visitors.

Of course, the more common the keyword, the more competition there will be. For some keywords, there will be so much competition that it's going to be hard for a newcomer to compete in. Remember, you don't get any traffic until you rank really well in the search engines. And while you are trying to build links back to your sites, the existing sites are still getting traffic from the search engines, and they are making all that money. With money, they can usually get even more back links. That is the reason why you need software like SEO Elite to tell you which niches to avoid.

Use the software to find keyword phrases with enough searches, and with space for you to compete in. Don't be overly ambitious when starting out. When you gain enough confidence, you can always try to take on the big guys.