SEO Consultant Ireland

What is the best SEO Software?

That is a question I get asked from almost every client. Jet I never really know how to answer that question. Why is that?

There are number of the SEO tools I have used and still use a number of them, depending on the site I am optimising. I wrote about a number of the SEO Tools on this site, and Hubspot is the one I use for a long time. They keep coming out with a new tools, relevant to the new things that happen on the web. Hubspot Twitter Grader is just another fine example!

I Wrote about the Stompernet Site Seer, a whole list of Google SEO tools like Google Webmaster Tools, KeywordSpy and many others.

But to answer the question – What is the best SEO Software, I simply cannot. I just realized I never even wrote a blog post about a single SEO Sofware package. Is WebCEO, SEOElite, Internet Business Promoter (IBP), SEO Suite, SEO Studio, and a long list of other SEO Software packages really not worth an article?

Well in all fairness they surely are! But each of them will cover a few task SEO specialist does, and try to automate the process in completing those tasks. Most of the SEO Software does a great job.

The unfortunate fact is that there is no SEO Software that does it all even for one type of the web site. I actually use Excel and Notepad more than any purpose built SEO Software.

Search Engine Optimization is all about Google really. I never got a client that rings me and says – I want to be the first in Yahoo! Or MSN, or Live, or whatever it is called today. Google rankings is what web site owners are concerned about – Google SEO!

Most of the web site owners think that SEO is some magic or a trick. And SEO consultants are not really the most popular people. Trust me!

A client told me last week that he SEO Consultants are like the hairdressers. Whenever you go to a new one, he looks at your haircut and asks: Who on earth have done this?! You just sit and answer: Well the last one,… that I as well paid to do it…

SEO is not a secret, magic or a trick. In fact, our dear old Google will teach you all you need to know about SEO. We might as well call it Google SEO School.

Google gives SEO experts a long list of free SEO tools. And the list of those free SEO Tools is getting longer and longer almost every month now. As wall as publishing new SEO Tools, Google almost constantly updates and improves the existing Google SEO tolls.

Where to start with Google SEO tools?
Google SEO tool No. 1 – Google Analytics
Google SEO Tool No. 2 – Google Webmaster Tools
Google SEO Tool No. 3 – Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions
Google SEO Tool No. 4 – Google Website Optimizer
Google SEO Tool No. 5 – Google Insights for Search

Not really a Google SEO Tool, but if your business has a local aspect, you will find the Google Local Business Center very beneficial.

All your Google SEO related questions can get answered by the combination of the data from various Google SEO tools listed above. You can get your keyword list (AdWords), check the search volume (Trends & Insights), check your ranking historically (Webmaster Tools).

Then use your imagination to calculate if it has the value for your business to increase the ranking for each of your keywords. It is not Voodoo really! Google SEO Tools give you all the ingredients!

Analysing a large an numerical data is much easier if displayed in graphs that highlight the important data. The use of images and colors enables us to see much more than just looking into the raw tables with just numbers.

An Image tells a thousand words.

Imagine is you could look into your Google Webmaster Tools data in some Visual Ranking Reporting Tool as opposed to the boring and hard to grasp numerical tables?

Every SEO professional is asking himself the same questions:

Where is my site ranked in Google for a keyword?
Is my ranking going up or down?
What keywords do I show up for in Google, and is my ranking increasing or decreasing trough time?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have our data presented in such way in Google Webmaster Tools?

Some three months ago I wrote the post about the speed of Google – defining a test on how long does Google really take to place a new web site high (first page) for the relevant search phrases. We all know that Google will fairly quickly display a web site high in the search engine results pages (SERP) after it initially finds the page – for the search phrase that is exactly the same as the domain name of the web page. But getting listed for the other keywords is something that Google really does not rush to do quickly. Exceptions are of course pages PING’ed directly to Google, or submitted via the XML Sitemaps. But both of those tend to have a short ‘life span’ high in the SERP.

So three months after the publishing of this site SeoConsultant.ie – the Google Webmaster Console is showing its rankings in the SERP:

Note that all those results are still obtained with the ‘Pages from Ireland’ option selected for those search phrases.

Google Webmaster Tools is a tool that a serious web marketer cannot replace with anything else really since it gives some figures that no other tool can give you. The example is the answer to where in search engine ranking does your web site display for certain phrase? Google Webmaster Tools also has a nice overview of the historical data, so you can see if you are on the ‘up’ or ‘down’.

As with every Google service the Google Webmaster Tools is changing a lot, and changing constantly. The latest addition is the Google Webmaster Tools Gadgets. It really is a nice tool that can generate 8 different gadgets you can display on your iGoogle homepage. Here is the list below.

You can choose the gadgets before adding to your homepage:
Crawl errors
Content analysis
Top search queries
Subscriber stats
What Googlebot sees
External links
Internal links
Sitelinks

The integration with the iGoogle is still pretty ‘raw’. Not only that you cannot customize the ‘Look and Feel’ of those gadgets, and anything relating to their presentation (and they are really presented very bad, taking up far too much space each, with about 120% ‘white space’ each!) but there are also some serious bugs.

Perhaps the most serious integration bug is that if you have multiple web sites and you decide to create a Google Webmaster Tools Gadget of any web site you have in your list of web sites – Google will always create a Gadget presenting the data of the first (alphabetically) web site you have listed in you Google Webmaster Tools listing. The way Google is one cannot really let them know about it, because of the complete absence of any contact details on their pages.

A few times the new page I would be optimising for Google, I would se the new page all of the sudden, completely unexpected, on the first page in Google during the weekend. I would be happy and start the celebrations only to find out that on Monday the web site is nowhere in the SERP as it was last week.

When you are fine tuning the SEO of the web site you end up checking the ranking for the site every day. You check the ranking; you check what version of the page is in the Google cashe. You check when the latest Google XML Sitemap was submitted. You check it all against to your own log of changes of each page. And a zillion other little details in Google WebMaster Tools Console, an a whole list of third party software or services a search engine optimization professional uses.

When you check the rankings ever day you also get the feeling what will Google do and when. The more experience the more precise your predictions get. Until Google does the updates of the way it works, and it sets the quality of your prediction back somewhat.

One thing that I keep on noticing in the last two if not more years is the difference in the Google results that happen during the weekend. How does it manifest? Usually a new site pops out (out of nowhere really) somewhere in the middle of the first page of of the Google search results page. It stays there over the weekend, and on Monday morning, it is nowhere to be seen again. Sometimes it happens for a number of weekends in the row. Usually not more than 4 consecutive weekends. And what happens then? One of the Mondays Google simply does not remove the page from the first page listing. The new page that firstly appeared only during weekends, simply gets its ranking, and usually stays there where it was during the previous weekends fro months before moving up or down in the search engine results page.

You can actually use this strange feature of Google displaying different search results during weekend to check what sites are likely to get to the first page son, of who is catching up with your search engine optimization efforts.