SEO Software Review

Do-it-all SEO Software reviewed

SEO Elite has to be just about the best competitive analysis-type SEO software I've seen anywhere. Ever. Bear in mind I've seen some and then a few more. To get you going, there's a whole series of instructional videos, closely followed by a series of lessons in basic SEO (which many could use, judging by the nonsense I read on the forums). It's not surprising that author Brad Callan is at no 1 in Google for Alternative to Pay-Per-Click (and I'm only top 20, ptooie!). The SEO industry has taken to this SEO software, and I can personally verify that it's more than worth the asking price. Here's the link again, SEO Elite. My advice? Buy it! I did and I don't regret it - remember, I don't recommend anything I don't use myself and I use this routinely. Day-to-day tasks that used to take me hours now take only minutes, leaving me valuable time to be using the SEO experience I've gained over the past decade and more. It does the grunt work, pure and simple.

WC comes in several flavours, the Freebie, the El Cheapo, the Bizzo, and the Pro. I started off with the free version just to check it out, and graduated to the cheap version. I did this for one reason; the quality of it's logs. If you peek at the code of any of my pages you'll see the WebCEO code in there. It's very cheap and extremely detailed. Yes I know you can sit down and learn Awstats and so forth, and then you have to learn implementation of .htaccess and various servery-type stuff, and while you're learning all this stuff you could have upgraded WebCEO and been getting on with your real business. I use this myself. You can download it at WEB CEO.

Page Rank checker

Very useful. I've used standard settings throughout, and they give me plenty to think about. You get the top ten for your specified search term, presented in a table, I went for SEO UK in Google Yahoo MSN and DMOZ. The results you get back are handy as from left to right you get the url, PR, back links in Google, Yahoo, MSN and whether it's in DMOZ, and the title text. All this is very useful but I have to say the software doesn't pick up each of the title tags, three were left blank and I checked on-site with each and they were present, so a little more work to do there. I think the principal use for this tool is as a quick check for comparison of your back links and PR with your main competitors and that it does very well. As well, results, which can be compared with displays of earlier results, may be exported into Word, Excel, CSV, HTML, XML (!), plain old text or packed off to the printer. I'm a fan of PDF myself but, fortunately, on my home set-up the print option gives me the opportunity to send it to my pdf convertor, a must for everyone who now and then has to sit in front of a boardroom and say "Now if you'd please turn to section 3...."

Ranking Monitor

Much of a muchness, as all these inevitably are. You ask it to check the engines for where you are for certain terms, it goes off and checks then comes back and displays the results. What's different here is that you have the option of showing the results as a graph, exportable as a bitmap, an unusual feature I've not seen before. Useful for those Powerpoint presentations, I imagine. You have the usual comparison tables, this week's results as opposed to last weeks, or whenever, so no surprises there. A useful feature is that the software imports a clickable list of all the competition, also, so you can examine them from inside the program. Very handy.

Google Data Centre Checker

Only really useful during dance time, I would think. This displays your site's position for a chosen keyword or words across a series of Google's Data centres. Would you use this? Good for the obsessives but it isn't something I'd spend a lot of time with.

Site Indexation Tool

Fairly straightforward, it apparently queries the "link:" facility on each engine and displays the results. Very handy for comparison though, particularly when you bear in mind how Slurp's been behaving lately.

Log Analyser

Good as far as it goes but it's simply nowhere near as detailed in this regard as WEB CEO. That said, realistically you'd need to have both WEB CEO and Robot Manager to get better stats. Or spend God knows how long learning to get Awstats up and running.

Link Popularity Checker

Excellent. Just what's needed. Probably worthwhile buying for this alone, so long as Google's algo remains as is. You get the source of the IBL, its PR, and the anchor text. You have the opportunity to compare with older tests to see what's new and who's stopped linking. We all know that the Google back link checker is, shall we say, economical with the truth and it can be illuminating to compare results from Google back to back with the results from Yahoo, as you have the opportunity to do here. This is bang on the money.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

The world will always need alternatives to Wordtracker. This feature attempts to provide this by offering results from Overture, Wordtracker (the freebie version which means MSN), the Yahoo Index and something I never heard of called Rambler. I don't really (as yet - haven't used it much) see a great deal of point in this, why not just get a subscription to Wordtracker? But it's early days yet. The related terms tool looks interesting as it draws from ask Jeeves, which has a different way of looking at things from other engines. This could well be a standout feature. I'll probably come back to this.

Snippets

The little excerpts from your site that get shown in SERPS. A good idea in principle, but you only get results from Google and Yahoo. I'd like to see results from more engines. The principle usage, as it stands, is to compare what's shown for your site compared to what's shown for your competition. There indeed is a very useful feature. If you're no.1 in fifteen search engines and your click-through rate is zero, I'd run a test here to illustrate what people see in the SERPS. Perhaps then you can work out what's so upsetting them. I don't know of another tool like this.

I have to say, for someone starting out, new to the game, or for the seasoned professional who finds that his customary software has undergone an upgrade too far, this is an excellent package. It has a host of features that you want, and it has them to hand in an easy to get cosy with interface. I'll buy it myself, but because I'm already used to using WEB CEO for my logs and IBP for my ranking reports and I'm perfectly happy with them, I'll only really be using the Snippets feature, which so far as I know is unique among the seo software suites.

Fancy giving SEO Administrator a try?
You can buy it now, for a limited time only, at SEO Administrator!

Simply put, of all the "find a blog related to your key phrase and leave a comment on it" software I've come across, this is the best. Help yourself; all that's asked for it is your email details... Real Link Finder :-)

A pair of link checkers. The freebie version is ok if you're broke, but I would recommend you try Xenu, which is fine for sites of up to around 300 pages. More than that and it becomes unreliable. Better to buy the licensed version of WebLV, though, as you can go into much more detail about where the links are connected from and you can make a report for further reference.

The CSE family of html syntax checkers. I use these together with Dave Raggett's HTML TIDY for further code verification.

Software to add a spell check facility to almost any Windows program.

So, why are these mentioned, you wonder?

I'll get to them in time. The reason these three types of software (immediately) are given prominence is because as an SEO these are your three best friends.

An engine needs to be able to navigate your site if it is to index all of it. Check your links! It's important!

All the major engines have at various times asked that sites be validated. I won't go into this in depth as I've covered the subject of validation elsewhere, but I'll just repeat that for a site to rank well then an engine must have confidence in its understanding of your content. It must have faith, for example, that your site is about its intended subject matter and not about really small tables.

If your favourite (favorite?) HTML editor doesn't have spell check built-in already, you'll be needing a program like this or something similar. Why? Because over the web language is our primary means of communication and location. If your site should be about widgets and you've unintentionally built it about wigdets, then your ROI figures aren't going to be quite what you were hoping for.

Here are two

that I like to keep handy for examining new pages. First is the Paessler Site Inspector, which has developed since I've been using it from being a simple add-on to being a browser in its own right. It does all this; "For any given URL, users can access lists of the images, forms, links, frames, meta tags, or the scripts of a web page as well as the HTML source and HTTP headers. Using the Highlight function, users can mark any HTML tag with a coloured border inside the rendered web page (e.g., to show all TD tags in a page). An invaluable tool for web designers. A pixel grid as well as guide lines can be shown in a web page. All image tags and link URLs can be shown right inside a web page. HTML sources and Java script files are shown using syntax highlighting. You can copy the page URL, page title, page source, list of URLs, and even the page as a bitmap to the clipboard. The browser window can be resized to various standard screen sizes (e.g. 800x600) and you can zoom into a web page. A fine selection of tools that are available online (e.g. "CSS/HTML validation", "link checking", "ping the server", "traceroute the server", "show domain owner", "W3C markup validation") is already included and can be customized.
Phew! It's a great tool for getting a handle on the guts of a page. I still use it, but these days since I've become a little more technical, my preference these days is for Iconico's Web Tools Pro. This amazing program does so much I don't know quite where to start - go and see it for yourself by clicking on the link to (eventually) get to the free trial version download link.
Paessler is Free, Web Pro Tools is very cheap for what it is, and I wouldn't be without either of them.

Two products from Micro-sys I use every now and then, the A1 Sitemap Generator and the A1 Website Analyser. Yes of course I use the G-site Crawler for XML sitemap generation - who doesn't? - but it chokes on some sites and I find the A1 an excellent alternative.

The A1 website analyser is one of the tools I use to unearth information about a web site's inner workings when my usual software shows me it's clean - but I still have a bad feeling about it. The value of having any number of programs like this in your arsenal, when like me you are dealing routinely with a number of web sites, is that while they present the same information, they present it in a different manner. Seeing material in this new way can trigger trains of thought that would otherwise never occur. You need a few like this. I'd buy this one for sure. In fact, I already did!

A quick word for any developers thinking of getting into SEO. Buy both those programs. The guys who develop them are techies themselves and the programs have many features that you won't appreciate until you've had them for a while.

By way of contrast and supplement, here are two

neither of which I've had time to review so this column reverts to a kind of "seo-software-mentioned" status because as is increasingly the case these days, I'm just too busy to go into any kind of detail. They both look good though. First up is the Search Status Toolbar and it tells you a whole lot about pages when you tell it to examine them and report back, and second up is Aaron Wall's SEO for Firefox which does the same only more but different. I'm going to give them both a try and I think you should too.

Too many tables? You'll be wanting to redo the site in CSS then - lot of coding though :-(.

I'm fond of Cascade DTP the CSS editor and I recently came across the CSS Stylizer which looks really nice. Let's not forget Topstyle!