["Stating the Blogvious"] SEO Elite - the review

[Spencer]

To be honest I like this software. Seoelite from Bryxen Software is extremely niche for Search Engine Optimisation - likely to be used by Search Engine Optimisers only.

It does a variety of things but the primary use is to determine how websites got into the top 10 of google.

If you start scouring the net researching seo then the three things that come up time and again are

Title tag (onpage control)
Keyword density (onpage control)
Page Rank and Linking (Pagerank is determined by offpage links)

For any given key phrase that you put into google you can determine the factors that affect how it got there. If you can emulate or create the same situation then you can be on that all important first page.

So for example, lets say you want to be on top for fishing rods. You sell rods, bait packs, hooks etc.. but your main seller is a range of fishing rods.

So you pop over to google and type in fishing rods to find out who the competitors are.

Take the 1st 5th and 10th position sites and analyse them to find out what onpage and offpage.

It can actually take quite a while to look this stuff up. Especially the backlink information. It's important to know what the keyword text that is used to link back is as this provides the googlebot with a way of working out the importance of the link. Apparently it's better to have some (not every one) of the links back to your fishing rod site using a text link.

It can be quite a trawl to look at the 1st site's linking partners (using link:www.partnername.com) find the link back on their page and see if they are using the text fishing rod...

Seoelite does this for you automatically. So in just a few clicks you can see how many links back your competitor has, what their Page rank is and a whole slew of extra information.

For example one of my other sites, well the link back for a targeted search term from the 10th in the list only has 58 links back - of which about 30 of them are internal links - and they are a Page Rank 4. So if I wanted to get into the top 10 for the site, then I'd need more than 58 links (with 30 internal - not difficult if I create a blog or directory). If I manage to get some of those links on Page Rank 4 or more then eventually the site would creep into the top 10.

The number 1 on the page was obviously using an seo firm to find links for them. They'd paid to get links on the front page of high PR websites - I counted up at least $400 a month's worth before I stopped investigating.

Now to find all that information out with using a tool like this would take hours instead of minutes. I guess that's why I liked it. In the uk we have a long running advertising campaign about a specific type of woodstain where the punch line is "it does exactly what it says on the tin" - well this software is the same. It doesn't pretend to fully optimise your page, or get you a high ranking page position. It does however open the information stream quickly to help you make the decision as to what to optimise on and how difficult it is.

Competitors include optilink which Brad Fallon recommends, but this was cheaper and seemed to do the same.

If you want to understand more about seo instead of spending money on PPC then this software could be a good investment as a timesaver and to understand how google is ranking things for a particular keyword.

Now if only I could find that magic niche....


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Posted by Spencer to "Stating the Blogvious" at 11/29/2004 06:31:57 PM