Tracking Your SEO Efforts

Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to SEO, or if you’ve hired an SEO Specialist, you want to be able to see that your efforts (whether it be time and/or money), is paying off.  You want to see that you are indeed making improvements in the Search Engine Results Pages for your given keywords (as well as hopefully starting to rank for some additional keywords that you weren’t even intentionally targeting).  So how do you go about keeping tabs on such matters?