SEO software

SEO software is something you will want to use with caution. Don't be fooled by any promises of an easy path to SEO glory; there are no shortcuts in Internet marketing. However, there are a few essential tools that give you insight into the inner workings of search, and just make life easier in general.

Handy SEO tools

SEO tools are what you should be using, not SEO software that claims it can get your site ranked with ease. Here is a good list of Internet marketing tools that you should use for optimizing your website. If you need advice or plan to optimize your website online call us and we will guide you through the process

• Google Keywords Suggestions
  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  Absolutely critical tool; you quite simply can't do SEO without it. There are other keywords tools, but this is the best. It's intended for use by search engine advertisers, but it's open to anyone. It shows you how many people searched for a given keyword last month.
   
• Google Toolbar
  http://toolbar.google.com
  This tool by google has a few killer features for SEO. For one, the PageRank indicator gives you a rough idea of the quality of the page and site you are dealing with; green is good, grey is bad and white is ambiguous. The page cache and highlight function are also useful.
   
• Webmaster tools
  http://www.bing.com/webmaster or http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
  Google and bing both offer site analysis tools that can help you identify problems with your site that are interfering with your site placement. Even if you believe there is nothing wrong with your site, install the code anyway, you might find some unpleasant surprises.
   
• Yahoo site explorer
  http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
  It is sometimes useful to study the competition's back-links in order to gage your competitiveness, or simply try to match a few back-links tit for tat.
   
• DoNoFollow
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687
  When you have to opportunity to acquire a back-link, you will want to check and see if it is actually recognized by search engines. If it's marked "nofollow", then it's of no value. Thanks to this tool you don't have to examine the source code as often. It's not 100% reliable, it falsely marks JavaScript links as "dofollow", but it's still a huge time saver.
   
• Linkscape
  http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape/help/metrics
  Trust and authority are important SEO signals. Unfortunately, it is far more ambiguous to measure than factors like backlink count and PageRank score. SEOMoz runs a very insightful emulated analysis that can help you determine the importance of a site.

Harmful search engine optimization software

Search engine optimization software is like most other software of any kind, it was created in order to automate some type of manual task. The problem is not that they don't perform these mundane tasks well, but that they violate the search engine's terms of service agreement in doing so. And as a result, your IP (and possibly site) can get banned from accessing the search engine site completely.

This is why search optimization software is often dangerous. For that reason we recommend staying away entirely from any software or browser extension with the word "SEO" in it. Google's stance on Automated queries is very clear: it is forbidden. They are so concerned with automated results that skew statistics and forgo advertising impressions, that even a flurry of manual searches in quick succession can trigger their "we're sorry [but you can't access Google for a while]" screen.