I'm wondering if people think there are any genuinely helpful SEO tools out there (beside these boards!). Do people think that WebPosition by Webtrends is worth it? What about the WordTracker service? Part of what I'm trying to achieve is targeting the proper keywords, and my research to this point has been inconclusive, with the keyword tools from Overture and the volume projections in Google AdWords being enormously different from each other (and highly inaccurate so far in my experience). I'm interested in accurate information about search volume and search-term competitiveness, as well as any other SEO tools that people more expert than me on this subject find helpful.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Lobo

:) I've found several very useful SEO Tools (and even written a paper on some of them which you can download at the World Resource Center Website.

What I found is that you need to use several tools together, no single tool does it all. Excel is the vechile to merge the output of various tools, I'll mention now, into custom views.

Here's the tools:
1. SeoElite - this is the best overall SEO tool you can buy today - does backlink analysis, inclusion checking, ranking checker.
2. Site Content Analyzer - Good tool for certain situations such as extracting the content of a site in a series of phrases and ranking them by strengh.
3. FirstStop WebSearch 4.1 - A simple tool that scrapes search results accurately. Most people don't know about it because FirstStop WebSearch is mainly a metasearch tool.
4. OptiSpider - the sister of OptiLink (that no longer works properly), OptiSpider can catagorize site links by topic and reputation and give each page a numerical score (1-5) depending on how well the topic of a page matches the reputation of it's backlinks.
5. Excel - this is the tool that makes combining all the tools possible.
5-b. You'll need some Add-Ins to Excel, like Duplicate Finder, to eliminate alot of duplicate data.
6. WebCeo - Overpowered collection of tools (you'll probably never use them all) but the Optimization Module is a jewel, esp if you know how to use it. I've also played with the Auditor module and it has a nice metadata checker that is almost unique outside of custom enterprise applications in large corporations.
7.Ranking Manager - The best ranking tool out there- superior reports and charting.
8. LinkSurvey - Very useful tool that finds all the backlinks from a series of sites and puts them into a matrix in an Excel Spreadsheet.
9) Linkviewer - Nice tool for visualizing links to a site.

A couple of other tools I have used are Competition Equalizer and Extract URL. L

Good Luck!

There are a lot of good and useful tools out there, but nothing can replace knowledge and experience. In fact, without those, most of the tools are pretty much a waste anyway.

Hmmm. Of course knowledge and experience trumps all. But what of the tools out there do you find most helpful?

There are a lot of good and useful tools out there, but nothing can replace knowledge and experience. In fact, without those, most of the tools are pretty much a waste anyway.

I don't like Webpostion, they have fake blogger sites (http://searchenginemarketingoptimization.blogspot.com/) with rss feeds from sitepoint and others, filled with links to other fake blogger sites, and sites that point to Webposition's sites. Puts a dent in their credibility, I think.

Most SEO software offer stuff that is available for free. They also provide often the service to add your url to many search engines, which is not nesecary with good SEO, I believe.

The other thing is that Webposition uses wordtracker itself too, like many SEO programmes which just send you to Overture and Wordtracker for keyword analysis.

Digitalpoint has a nicefree keywordtool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/) that combines the answers from wordtracker and overture.

I'm interested in accurate information about search volume and search-term competitiveness

Well, no such tool really exists (that I'm aware of). The closest you'll come to search volume is by looking at PPC impressions for your keywords (exact match) on Google and Yahoo. WordTracker is an excellent tool, but again without numbers from Google, MSN and Yahoo, its not extremely accurate, though does provide a good comparison reference.

As for search-term competitvness, if you ask 4 seos what that is you'll get 5 different answers. There are lots of different ways to measure, and all have some merit. Again, I don't know of any automated tool that does that for you (accurately)

Now im wondering, will using those SEO tools categorizes you as a blackhat SEOer?

How do you draw the line between whitehat and blackhat in terms of strategies being employed to put our respective sites on top of SERPs?

Probably the most helpful SEO tools are the ones inside the cavity between our ears and the two right under our eyebrows. It's not only a matter of numbers in most cases, it's also seeing *who* is being competed against, figuring out at least somewhat how they're doing it, and being realistic about whether or not we ourselves really can hope to beat out the ones on top.

Or in some cases, do we really want to do what it takes to compete in some markets? How aggressive are we comfortable with being, and how much risk are we willing to take?

>>A keyword density analyzer can be good to sound the alarm over excessive repetition - if only because that isn't user-friendly copywriting and it's the user who has the credit card.

>>Whether or not we're sticklers for validation, runninig pages through a validator can point out serious errors that can prevent proper crawling.

>>A spider simulator can show problems, particularly what links on the page the bots are seeing - or not seeing. I've actually see the homepage of someone offering SEO services that had all JS links; their own site wasn't crawlable.

Personally I would *never* download any tools, especially from unknown sources. Most all the tools we need are right online to use. They're all just tools, but nothing automated can replace judgment and whatever we learn through experience (ours and others), and by trial and error and study.

Logfiles and stats are the best tools on an on-going basis, those little one-shot wonder keyword phrases can be very targeted and it's simple enough to incorporate them into page copy as we see fit.

I occasionally use wordtracker. I use DP for keeping track of rankings on certain key words. As far as I can tell both of those are in compliance with the TOS of the SEs. The only reason I even use DP is to save some time. I could get the information directly from the SEs.

More important than traffic is what is the conversion rate?

Personally I would not use any tool that I knew violated the TOS of the SEs.

Unless I completely misunderstood them I think I pretty much agree with what St0n3y and Marcia said.

If I misunderstood them then this is MHO. There is no tool that is going to replace your logs.

Another helpful tool. A good log analyzer.

A website that I use is http://www.creatingonline.com its very very handy indeed.

There are links to some great resources there and use it as a back up for my seo stuff.

The site readiness checker is wonderful as it tells me if I have metas on each page. Also it tells me of keywords that I have and how many tmes the keyword was used on each page. There are also keyword density tools there etc. Let me know what you think.

:)

I occasionally use wordtracker. I use DP for keeping track of rankings on certain key words.

What's the "DP"?

DP = digital point

they have a cool keyword suggestion tool (Wordtracker + Overture combo) and a cool rank checker

both are free.


other tools I like are keyword permutation tools like thepermutator or googedit and link analysis tools, such as link harvester (which my friend made for me), hub finder (which another friend made for me), and optilink or seo elite.

Digitalpoint.com has a wide variety of great tools, all free of charge.

GoodKeywords is a tool I use simply because Danny Sullivan endorsed it. It allows quick query of inventory.overture.com - good for KW research. It's a time saver, but does not offer Wordtracker stats that DP provides.

SEO Inc. toolbar is a pain to install, but saves time b/c I no longer have to do manual backlink checks. Makes the pursuit of link partners more efficient.