What in your opinion is the best SEO software/utlility?

I have used a few in the past yet I have never seen much come out of it. What are your opinions? Do they work effeciently or is the manual way the best and which utlilities do you use?

tezza, could you please elaborate on some of the examples of SEO Utilities and softwares? Because I do not know of any of those. As far as I knew, SEO was more a practice and process than a particular piece of software.

And with respect to the effect of SEO? Well, I think that I recently have seen the effect of proper placement. (I will do another post on that - because I have been thinking of discussing that). So, SEO does work, and it does get relevant traffic to your site or particular page - but I do not know how a particular piece of software can help you acheive it stand alone. I might be wrong, of course, because I do not know of any SEO softwares.

Sorry I didn’t make my post that clear. When I talk about SEO in the case of utilities I mean the software you can purchase or download in order to help submit your website to various directories or search engines.
Some also come with various other features like keyword finder, link popularity, web page ranking, etc.
Like I said I have used a few in the past but not much of them so I am unsure whether they really work and I was just interested to see if anyone else uses them and if so how successful has it been fro them

Well, no. I have not used such softwares. I am not even sure those things would actually help much and make great differnces if our website itself was not Search Engine friendly. I think, that is all it takes to drive traffic to our website.

Basically, we need to make the web pages in our websites as semantically correct as possible. That means, say bye-bye to the old table based layout designs, and switch to CSS designs. Why? Because, even if we use SEO utilities to submit to n-number of Search Engines, it will be of not much use if the Search Engines do not know what our web pages are about. When we go for a table based design - all our content is seen as a tablular data and naturally no words get weighed and no keywords are tagged to our page by the search engine - broadly speaking. On the other hand, in case of CSS based designs, search engines know what the heading/subject of the content is; it knows which of the words are important - because they would be marked by <strong> and <em> - emphasis.

That should also be followed by placing proper words in <h-> tags; and using <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>.

The SEO softwares may help in generating links from high PR site, but it is bound to be found out and marked as Black Hat sEO, there by placing penalty on our webpages.

Even the search engine submitters - I am not sure how that would help. Think about it - how many majorly used search engines exist? Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and a few more - the count could be made using our hands. And the rest of the lot are not that traffic driving. We need to ask ourself a question, as to wheather we want to spend money in submitting our website to those search engines that themselves get low traffic. The highly used ones - we can ourselves go and submit it - because there are so few of them.

Yes, SEO does help, but in my opinion most of these softwares are there just to make money for its creators. If we build our websites logically, and put a bit of human effort (ourselves or we pay someone to do it), that should be sufficient to drive traffic to our site if our website truly offers unique content or good service.

For example - look at AstaHost. The forums are so full with people because AstaHost give great service. Word of mouth itself has made AstaHost to have such a huge member base. Also, AstaHost has rich and unique content in its forum - that is why (I am assuming here), it would be getting large amount of traffic. It does have some SEO tweaks on the forums - for example - if you look at the URL of each thread, you will see that it is rich with keywords from the subject of the thread. It is such things that actually make a difference.

Yes, one cannot though deny on the fact that good back links from highly trafficed sites do serve in increasing our website traffic. That can be only achieved by employing a link exchange or buying links from them. But when we attempt this we need to remember that we should try to get relevant traffic as opposed to just about any traffic. I mean, a traffic full of people who are interested in medical sciences will most probably not have any interest in a site dealing with contemporary paintings. But a traffic containing mostly digital artists have higher likely hood of being interested in contemporary paintings too.

Wow. That was quite a mouthful. I would better stop now. Hope this stream of words is useful to some.

Wow, great perspective on the whole area of SEO. I must admit I totally agree with what you have said and couldnt have put it any clearer. Its just a matter of time spent on how user friendly, etc your site is.
Nice one Vyoma great post.

Thank you tezza. As far as the perspective goes, some part of it I learnt it being here at AstaHost forum. That is the plus point of AstaHost - you get hosting as well as you get knowledge. So, most of that post you can say is what we guys here have to say - well almost. Hang around here, and you will enjoy.

As usual, a great post, Vyoma . I'll just try to talk about another aspect of SEO software...



When people metion SEO Software, I suppose either one of two things come to mind...

1. software that submits pages to the SEs, or...
2. software that actually optimizes Web pages.

The first kind doesn't actually optimize anything. From what I've been reading, it usually does more harm than good, since most isn't sophisticated enough to adequately handle all SEs, each with its own rules and guidelines. And the second kind doesn't really exist, since current technology can't support this type of artificial intelligence on a large scale. BUT there's something close to that...



For example, I use an online system that basically walks me through all the steps of Search Engine Optimization. It works something like this...

• first, I use the Keyowrd Analysis Tool to come up with a good keyword for my new Web page. After all, one of the most important steps in SEO is choosing a good keyword. So this tool researches the demand and supply for a particular keyword (using services like Yahoo Vertical Search, Google AdWords Analysis, Metasearches, etc.) and gives me a number of high-potential keywords related to my page's theme.

• then the system forwards me to the actual "page creation" process, where it provides me with a concise description of the different tags (e.g. title, headings, etc.) and how they affect SE rankings, along with tips on how to optimize those tags for my particular keyword.

• after that, I start writing my content. When I finish, I run the page through the Page Analysis Tool, which checks the page structure against an algorithm based on other high-ranking Web pages, and provides me tips on how to better structure my page, in terms of keyword placement, keyword density, SE guidelines, and things of the sort.

• and lastly, after the system finishes all the in-house steps, it automatically submits my new page to the Search Engine, making sure that it follows the rules and guidelines of each SE.

• and now that the page has already been submitted, the system keeps track of its spidering, indexing, and placement in the different SEs, notifying me whenever the page needs better optimization.

This system is called SBI!, and I have to admit it's pretty good. It's not free, mind you, but since I started using it, I believe it's worth every dime I spent on it. I've mentioned it here as an example of a SEO tool of the second kind. Naturally, it doesn't actually do the optimization for you, but at least it helps making the process as simple and as straightforward as possible. It boils down all the essential SEO information and techniques into a step-by-step process that saves the user a lot of time and effort.



So I guess I can sum up this post in one sentence... "Page-submittance software" up til now is really not worth it. It invariably does more harm than good. And as for "Page-Optimization software," there actually is no such thing so far, but there are things that come as close to it as possible. And, at the end of the day, if you can't spare the money needed to buy such software, then you should make the commitment to spare the time needed to learn and apply solid SEO concepts. It's not really that hard, BUT it does require time, effort, and willingness to learn.



I hope I didn't unnecessarily talk too much. Sometimes I get carried away .





Cheers.

http://www.net-promoter.com Seo Softwares

http://www.iwebtool.com/

Site build it is 300 dollars,,for one that is beginning, is too much..but seems very interesting. If I had the money I definetely would give it a try, but for now would be in my waiting list. Thank you,,I did not know this kind of programs exist..