Alright, now that you're officially a webmaster, you're going to need some SEO tools. Buying all of the full-featured products that you will eventually need could end up costing you a ton of money, but I'm going to put together a basic toolbox of FREE SEO tools for you that will accomplish roughly the same thing. Why would someone pay money for something that you can get elsewhere for free, you ask? Simple - The expensive stuff works better. The free online tools will more or less get the job done, but somewhere along the line it WILL benefit you to break down and buy something like SEO Elite. But in the meantime we can work around the fact that you're either a beginner or a cheapskate (probably both) and put together a package of free SEO Tools that you can use to help efficiently manage your new blog.
First of all, your website is going to need something to keep track of your traffic - a stat tracker. I like Histats personally, but feel free to use whatever service you want to as they all basically do the same thing. This will allow you to keep track of how many visitors your blog gets everyday, where they came from, and lots of other details that I'm not going to go into as I don't think it's either necessary or interesting. Point is, you need a stat counter as it will be one of your most helpful allies in analyzing how well your site is doing and where improvements could be made.
Next up, we'll need what are apparently referred to as "Webmaster Tools" - the stuff that tells you all about the stuff going on behind the scenes link backlinks, indexed pages, search engine rankings, etc. Webmaster Toolkit's Webmaster Tools is really all you need - I love this site! iwebtool's Webmaster Tools are handy as well. And while signing up with Google's Webmaster Tools might seem like the thing to do, it's more or less a complete waste of time. To be completely honest most of its features are absolutely worthless and you should take its stats with a grain of salt as in most cases they're wildly inaccurate and terribly outdated. Why Google's Webmaster Tools sucks so much I'll never understand, but it does provide a few useful barebones services, and it's slightly better to have them than not have them. Just remember to not rely on them too much and only add it to the sites that you want to proudly declare yourself the owner of - Personally, I try to show Google as little as possible when it comes to what I'm doing online in regards to my websites...
Those two things combined are a good general package and will take care of the majority of your needs, but they can't do everthing. Now that we've got a basic seo tool "starter set", we need a few more things to really get a well rounded internet toolbox:
A backlink checker is invaluable. There are a few out there but I like Backlink Watch's Backlink Checker - This will allow you to see how many backlinks your site has, and scope out your competition as well. (NOTE: The Webmaster Tools package that you decide to use may also provide this, but I'm listing it anyway as it's good content for the search engines...)
Speaking of backlinks, there are free tools out there that can help you get them. I use Fast Directory Submitter everytime I create a new website to get some quick directory links. There's also a free blog commenting program known as Koopa Troopa that will make finding and commenting on relevant blogs much more proficient.
Another helpful little service is Google's own Adwords Keyword Tool. You won't be using this much but it's incredibly helpful when it comes to making money with Adsense - What it does is tell you how much advertisers are willing to pay Google for a click on one of their ads for a certain keyword. Just remember that the numbers don't represent what you as a publisher will actually earn - it's raw data and the amounts disclosed pertain to sponsored search results links only. The Adsense CPC is lower (how much lower is anyone's guess, but I'm going to estimate that it's only about 40% of the Adwords CPC, and that's not counting Google's cut). So don't get all excited if you find a keyword with an $8 CPC as you'll only see a fraction of that. Nevertheless, it's a great tool to have when researching whether targeting a specific keyword will be worth your time or not.
And finally, a PageRank checker will help with the link-building process - PR Checker will do the job fine. There's also the Google Toolbar, which is a semi-helpful tool that I DO NOT recommend that comes with a PageRank checker as well. Again, I highly recommend against installing this. Not because it doesn't work or anything, as it does, but because by installing this you're basically giving Google a front-row seat to all of your online activities. And considering that SEO is technically "gaming the system" in Google's eyes (unless you're a big corporation, of course), not showing them what you're doing is in your best interests. Anyway, I'll get into PageRank in depth later on but until then, I'll just tell you that the only PageRank you should care about is the PageRank of a site that you're using to link to your site. Simply put, PageRank = link juice. The higher the better - Outside of that, it's pretty meaningless...
Well, that's it - there are a lot more free SEO tools available on the internet (and please, feel free to do a search for alternatives if you don't like the ones I've linked to - I'm just trying to put this thing together as simply as possible and these are the services I chose to list. Just because I linked to these doesn't mean that there aren't alternatives that will do the same thing), but these are the only ones that you really need to bother with for now.
For a much more in-depth look at how to make money online with SEO, check out Ben K's awesome How To Make Money Online With SEO blog.
