Glow

I put a lot of my thought into developing strategies for search engine optimization (SEO) for my business’s many traditional websites and blogs.  An online business has two options for tackling the necessary, continuing task of 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.  Many of the consultants are not well informed about legitimate research about how the search engine algorithms determine rankings.  They rely on rumors without the empirical data to confirm these often incorrect assumptions.  Some of the simply disguise themselves as experts, and then go out and purchase links from link farms.  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 comparison of the most important SEO software on one of my websites.

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.  However, I know that the company plans to release a new version of SEO Elite in the near future, so I hesitate giving it my full endorsement right now, unless you can find out if those of us who own the original will be able to upgrade SEO Elite 2.0 at a reduced rate or unless you decide to by another Callen miracle solution, Keyword Elite, because you can buy both at the same time for a substantial discount.  I bought both at the same time and, together, they are still among the best investments I have ever made!

The only other comparable SEO software package is guru Leslie Rohde’s Optilink (you’ll land on the sales page).  Leslie Rohde is the patron saint of optimization, a genuine genius.  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, for the time being I am going to deviate from my usual recommendation and endorse Optilink.

Both SEO Elite and Optilink are comparably priced at just under $200 each, which is a bargain.  Only if you are really pinched for cash, Rohde’s company also offers a less sophisticated aid, Optispider, that is only half as costly as the robust Optilink.  If you really must scale back to that level, you might also consider the similarly priced ($100) 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 am a frequent user of both SEO Elite and Optilink, and I believe that they compliment each other marvelously.  They allow me to save hours upon hours of gather the data, and they make valuable contributions in assisting me in making sense of all the data they collect for me.

Comments are closed.