There are a number of companies that sell SEO software designed to help you get your site ranking well in the search engines. The cost for this software varies dramatically from low cost affordable programs for one site, to large expensive programs designed to help you track the progress of several site.
Most of the software has similar goals in mind.
- Help you workout good keywords to use on your pages
- Make sure your pages are using these keywords in all the appropriate locations
- Compare your site to other sites that are ranking well for those keywords
- Help you locate sites that might link to your site and that are based on the same topic
- Track your progress in the search engines with the various keywords
Of course all of these things can be done manually by someone who knows what they are doing, but even someone who knows what they are doing can use reminders and it helps to have a program that tracks your progress over time. This tracking helps you to see if the methods you are using are really producing results.
This tracking process can cause you some problems though. One such software “WebPosition Gold” has been directly singled out by Google (Automated Queries) where it is stated that using the software to send automatic queries against the Google database violates Google’s Terms of service. While this doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use the software against other search engines, or use other parts of the software, you might want to consider limiting the use of any programs ability to send these automated queries.
That doesn’t necessarily make these products useless though. They can be very instrumental in helping you ensure that your site is reaching its potential through on page SEO and Link Building. This is particularly true for new webmasters and smaller SEO companies that need help tracking multiple clients.
There are a large number of search engine optimization software companies out there, some offering multiple individual tools, others marketing one tool that covers the majority of the SEO tools that you will likely need. Which one to choose will likely be decided by your current skill set, your budget, and reviews that you read on how well the software works for the specific jobs you need to accomplish.