The Best Search Engine Optimization Software for the Expense

I spent a great deal of my time working on search engine optimization (SEO) for my various websites and blogs.  Basically, an Internet business has only two choices when it comes to improving SEO.  One of those is to handle your optimization efforts in-house, while the other is to hire a consulting firm to assist you in the project.  Such consulting companies cause me some concern for serveral reasons.  Some of them are not nearly as well informed as they ought to be about the details of optimizing for the various major search engines.  Some of them seem to prefer to respond to the latest rumor rather than relying upon solid empirical data; perhaps they just lack the necessary analytical skills.  Some of them are nothing more than linking farms that disguise themselves as SEO consultants.  Such links can sometimes have very short term success, but eventually the linking strategies are made useless by sophisticated search engine algorithms that can uncover such schemes and cause your site to drop back farther in the search results than it was before you hired the self-proclaimed masters.  My third concern about these companies is that they are usually very expensive for the limited value that you actually might achieve.

You should already know what my recommended solution is from reading between the lines of my first paragraph:  Take the time to educate your company team unless you want to hire the few very expensive geniuses in the field, such as Leslie Rhode, Brad Fallon or Dan Thies–if you can get them to work for you at any price.

But to take the do it yourself approach, you need some help in the form of basic search engine optimization education and good, well engineered software to help you gather and analyze the immense amount of data required to indicate potential areas of improvement and to track the results of the strategies that you implement.  I have a review of the most important SEO solutions that is available at one of my sites.

I have long been a long term supporter of SEO Elite (see sales page).  This Callen designed program has been a leader in SEO software for years.  I generally recommend it without any reservations.  I recently learned that they are getting ready to release a new version, SEO Elite 2.0, so I recommend it now only on the basis of two conditions: 1) That you can get assurance that you will be able to get a special upgrade price for the new version when it is released in the future, or 2) that you decide to buy the same company’s highly recommended Keyword Elite, because they extend a substantial discount for buying both simultaneously (it comes as an upsell).  The combined price is a steal!

The other top level SEO software is Leslie Rohde’s Optilink (you’ll land on the sales page).  Rohde is the genius who makes all the rest of us seem like nothing more than silly pretenders to the SEO throne.  Rohde taught me much of what I know about search engine optimization.  Pardon the lack of modesty…I know an immense amount about SEO.

If your business can afford the expense, I urge you to buy both software options–and use them both (as well as the amazing Keyword Elite).  However, if you are new to the online business world and you are going to begin your optimization efforts using just one, I’m going to break with my longstanding position of suggesting SEO Elite and recommend Optilink, instead–temporarily, at least, until I have an opportunity to thoroughly test SEO Elite 2.0.

Optilink and SEO Elite are very modestly priced for such robust software; they cost only around 0 each.  If your cash flow problem is temporarily significant, Rohde’s company offers a much less sophisticated program called Optispider that is only around half the price of the better Optilink.  If you really must scale back to that level, you might also consider the similarly priced (0) Traffic Travis, by Mark Ling.  If you follow the link in the first paragraph of this article, you can get to my comparison of all of these alternatives, and there are direct links there to each of the software products.

I use both SEO Elite and Optilink regularly.  They are tremendous time savers in both gathering the data and in helping make sense of it all.