SEO Tools, is it worth it ?

[divesouthafrica]

Hello all,

Are SEO tools such as WebPosition Gold worth buying these days...
I have heard people say that it is a waste of time and money as they have achieved top rankings by optimizing their sites manually and creating enough backlinks for their websites

any opinions ?

[scolling]

I've never used those tools for assistance with optimising my pages so couldn't comment - nor have I read posts on any forums from anyone who has.

I have and do use WPG for rank checking (although not on Google or others where these tools contravene their TOS) but there are plenty of on0line ranking checkers now that I use WPG less and less for this now too (e.g. seireports.com).

[seobook]

automated stuff is limited in its ability to do well. you usually do not want to trust a machine to automate messages to people.

as far as exact analysis I find that page copy could get rather chopy if you tried using some automated tool to find the "perfect" kw density.

IMHO link analysis software is useful but I do not use too many other tools.

[I, Brian]

Google is so much more heabily weighted towards links these days, so expecting good targeted rankings on Google for commercial keywords, simply according to the text on your commerce site pages, is not really a sound strategy. Google always was a links based search engine - now it's even more the case.

Basic on-page SEO you could learn to do quickly enough - Aaron's SEO Book can give you all that information and a lot more cheaply.

[Terry Plank]

I've used the Ranking function in the past, but now use another program I find more helpful. As for the other functions, I haven't found them helpful and led more to being lulled into thinking I had "done my job". Deeper evaluation revealed I was not being helped that much and I was spending a lot of time I could have used more profitably.

Bottom line for me is spending the time keeping abreast of changes with the Search Engines and doing the work manually.