If you are a small business owner, you can do 1 of 2 things to enhance your website. Number 1, you can hire an SEO/SEM professional to make on-page SEO improvements to the site. Number 2, you can do something like that yourself. However, you will need to do some things to give yourself a fighting chance. Do yourself a favor, and add these free tools to your repertoire. You can thank me later.

• Firefox - There are faster browsers (Chrome) and more elegant ones (Safari), but there are none that have the add-on ecosystem of Firefox. Every optimization tool in the book is available as an add-on to Firefox. It doesn’t have to be your browser of choice for your personal browsing, but it’s a must when scouting out your competition.
• SEO Quake - This Firefox add-on gives you the ability you the ability to see where you or your competitors rank in Google, Alexa or a host of other web metrics. However, do yourself a favor. If you are going to use this add-on, use it 1 of 2 ways. Either use it only sparingly, or disable everything but Google PR. Otherwise, you could find yourself unable to search Google for 30 minutes to an hour. They only allow a certain amount of searches of PR via their API.
• NoDoFollow - This Firefox add-on gives you the ability to determine whether backlinks from a website are DoFollow or NoFollow. For the uninitiated, it definitely matters. DoFollow means the links allow the googlebot spider to follow the link to the website that is linked. NoFollow, obviously does not allow this.

None of these are guarantees that your site will rank at the top of the Google search results. There are too many variables in play to promise that. However, if you use these tools as they are intended to be use, you will certainly be a step ahead of your competition.