There are a tremendous number of home business and work at home opportunities offered on Internet. Many of these are all hype and try to convince you that it doesn't take any effort and that you will be making huge amounts of money in very little time (you know, stuff like..."you will be making $5,000 per week, and more, in just a few weeks!"). You should avoid these so called "opportunities" like plague...if they were for real everyone would be doing it.

Study opportunities carefully and select home business opportunity that seems to fit your own particular style or talents. What is a good choice for one person may be a very poor fit for someone else. The common thread that applies to everyone is that you must be "for real" (as indicated above) and business opportunity itself must be "for real".

Discovering Your Site’s Status on MSN http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

As page in help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you date of last caching.

Google Rankings http://www.googlerankings.com

You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and site has direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query site for information on Google.

With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine.

They also have some other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call “Ultimate SEO Tool” that will measure your site’s keyword density.

Google Backlinks Checker http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php

LilEngine.com’s Backlink Checker will measure number of links you have pointing back to your site against competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have versus others, though how much getting more links back will help varies, depending on other factors.

Yahoo Search Rankings http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/

From same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo Search Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings, it’s quite helpful.

You can find more Yahoo tools that use Yahoo Web API at their developer’s site : http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList .

In next part of article, we’ll take a closer look at other tools that give you more specific information about links pointing back to your site, keyword research, and more.