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.

Yes there is a cheap SEO. Actually there is plenty of cheap SEO around. The question is what are your exact needs and expectations – will the cheap SEO do for you?

Let’s start from the beginning. Most of the smaller companies try to do SEO themselves. Somewhere between the marketing and the IT, there is this SEO task, bounced frequently in between. Like a hot potato. No one is really sure what to do, and has absolutely no time for it. So after the initial internal effort that did not result in the desired changes in your ranking here are two avenues:

a) Keep SEO in house
b) Hire a SEO company

We all want cheap SEO so the obvious choice is to keep your SEO tasks in house. You will need:
SEO Training – do not expect to have a SEO knowledge in the company that never did any SEO.
SEO Tools – As you would buy tools for any other tasks, you will need a budget for a list of tools. IBP, WebCEO, iSnare, and similar will each help you do a task.
Links Purchase – Yahoo at $299 is where you start and Best of the web and similar is where you continue spending.

That was a cheap SEO option. Now add the time you or your staff will spend on it, and get the real cost, of our all of the sudden not so cheap SEO!

Outsource your SEO – bring in the professionals

It might seem expensive at first, but anyone who have tried to do SEO internally will understand that outsourced SEO is actually a truly cheap SEO.

Most of the SEO provides fall into the following three groups:

Marketing Agencies (€10,000 per month)
Their marketing experience is usually the biggest, but might not really be related to online marketing at all. Double check their online experience and if they actually have SEO staff internally or are just outsourcing the SEO tasks to external freelancers. Their price range cuts off start-ups and small companies.

SEO Companies (€1,000 to €10,000 per month)
Those are usually companies who had an extremely good SEO guru, who trained a team around him. They will in general do more for you than the big companies, since the founder / owner is still doing SEO or at least training SEO internal staff. There is a pride involved, and those companies will show off with the high rankings of your (clients) site (free PR!).

SEO Professionals (€500 to €1,500 per month)
Mostly students and ex web developers in that price range of cheap SEO. Do not rule them out since some of them will generate good results. The general rule is that the smaller your SEO provider is the more will you have to ask about the relevant experience and RESULTS in similar or same geographical markets and industries.

Ask for results, ask for references and ask for their plan of action.

When you compare the cost of in house SEO and outsourced SEO – what one would you call The Cheap SEO?

If you have decided that SEO Costs are too much for you, here is another free SEO tool for you: Stompernet Site Seer. A web site contains a lengthy movies that describing the ‘Get Rich Quick’ scenarios of tons of the site’s users. You will learn how Lucy increased the revenue 5 times in a few months, how Mark had to hire the assistant to cope with the increase of the business. And all that thanks to the Stompernet Site Seer!

How does Free SEO Tool: Stompernet Site Seer work?

Well you put your URL and you email in the box on their web site, and an hour later you get an email with a report of your site. The report tells you what Meta and Tile you have on the home page, and how many back links different search engines show to your site. It shows your Alexa ranking, your Google PR, the numbers from Digg, Delicious, and similar social bookmarking sites.

And all that is packaged in tons of text, that explains what all those figures mean. The report will again show you a video about some of the Stompernet Site Seer staff (presuming by the T-shirt logos), who will tell you how will you benefit greatly from their excellent and free tools, or service,.. or something anyway!

Compared to the Website Grader we looked into earlier this week, Stompernet Site Seer, is perhaps good for someone who is not 100% sure what does SEO really stand for!

PS. In most cases, ‘the decision maker’ or ‘the buyer’ of the SEO service is someone who is not too sure what the SEO really means. So the Stompernet Site Seer web site is a good thing to spend 15 minutes on if you are a SEO consultant – and what to learn the language of the ‘ordinary people’. The people that go out, mingle with other people in real world as opposed to Second Life, do outdoor sports outdoors, and not on Wii,… those strange people, you know!?

It would be very nice, and the whole SEO ‘science’ would be much better perceived and accepted by the marketing people if the SEO work could be measured somehow. Imagine the tool or a process that will tell you on the scale 1 to 100 – exactly where your web site is?

Web Site Grader is trying to do that exactly! It is the free online website grading service. You just put your URL in it, and it checks all different aspects of your site (including online and offline web site optimisation!) and gives your site the score. It even gives you the brief description of all various elements and checks the web site was scored against.

So is Website Grader good? Is it bad?

Well it is far more good than bad. The advantages are:
1. It is quick
2. It does an fairly rounded check-up of various elements
3. In almost all cases it is correct in what it states
4. It can be used as a ‘Reminder Checklist’.
5. It is nice!!!

What is bad? Well nothing much is bad with Website Grader. If it is used with a grain of salt. If your site gets 100% it does not mean you should stop working on SEO. If you get 95% it does not mean that there are not obvious SEO mistakes on your site!

How to use Website Grader?

The reports that Website Grader should be used in conjunction with all the other SEO reports you have. Trusting anyone in the SEO industry is a bit ‘unreliable’. Who you do trust is your own gut feeling, helped by the number of other sources who tell you the same!

Website Grader is nice. It is really easy to trust it!

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.