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SEO Elite Ratings |
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Functionality |
9 |
/ |
10 |
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Intuitive, Easy to use |
9.5 |
/ |
10 |
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Value for the Price |
9.5 |
/ |
10 |
|
Current & Real-World |
9 |
/ |
10 |
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Help & Support |
9 |
/ |
10 |
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Overall Rating |
92% |
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Visit the SEO Elite Website
Review
SEO Elite is a desktop software application for Windows designed to perform eight major
SEO functions intended to increase traffic to your website. There has been some
controversy with SEO Elite. Some say that it’s a powerful tool that delivers all that it
promises, while others feel that there are other tools, some for free, that perform
similar functions. So, how does SEO Elite stand up when put to the test? The version being
reviewed here is version 4.0, which appears to be the most current version as of August
2007.
Similar to its counterpart,
Keyword Elite,
SEO Elite is divided into what they call
“projects”.
Currently the program offers 8 project types:
Project 1, Analyze backlinks using a specified search engine, is designed to find out what
websites are doing well for a given keyword, and, more importantly, why they are doing
well. The idea is that if you know why a website is ranking well for certain keywords, you
can duplicate their success.
It is commonly recognized that search engine optimization consists not only of making a
website’s pages search engine friendly, but also increasing the number of quality
backlinks coming into the website. By determining which sites are ranked highly and
analyzing the links coming into those sites, you can get a pretty good idea of why that
site is ranking highly. Project 1 is designed to analyze a high-ranking website’s linking
strategy to see why they are coming out on top.
- The Google PageRank of each web page linking to your competition
- The exact web pages that are linking to your competition
- The page title of the web pages linking to your competition
- The IP Addresses of all web pages linking to you or a competitor
- The total number of times a specified keyword appears within each of your competition's links
- The Alexa Rank of your competition, as well as all web pages linking to them
- The total number of outbound links on the web pages linking to your competition
- The anchor text (clickable text) used in all pages linking to your competition
- A Whois search on each of the websites linking to your competition, so you can easily contact them
- The percentage of websites that a specified anchor text exists within each of your competition's links
- The total number of PageRank 0 - 10 web pages linking to your competition
- The total number of inbound and outbound links on the web pages linking to your competition
- The total number of web pages linking to your competition from specific IP Addresses
- The average PageRank of all the web pages linking to your competition
- The total number of websites linking to your competition that contain each type. (.edu .gov .org .com .net etc.)
- The age of all websites linking to your competition
- Whether your competition's website is in Wikipedia
- Whether your competition's website is in the Yahoo Directory
- Whether your competition's website is in DMOZ.org
For an excellent video on what Project 1 is and how it works click the following, and then scroll down to
about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 1 SEO Elite Video
Project 2, Get links to your website, is designed to help you obtain one-way and
reciprocal links from other highly ranked websites, as well as discovering potential joint
venture partners, super-affiliates, and marketing partners. It works as a logical
progression from Project 1. This part of SEO Elite provides the following options:
- Find high PageRank websites using a keyword
- Find high PageRank websites using a competitor URL
- Find link directories using a keyword
- Copy the links on an existing links page
- Manually enter links
- Add links from another SEO Elite project
One of the nice features of Project 2 is that you can set Filtering Options, such as the
minimum PageRank or Alexa Rank, to return only websites that meet your desired quality
criterion. After SEO Elite has found your potential link partners, there is a great
feature included that allows you to view the websites SEO Elite pulls up with just a
single click. Then, when you’ve viewed the website and decided that you would like to
contact them in regard to getting a link, you can pull up a form that automatically
populates the website’s main contact name and email address. You can then enter a subject
and message to send to the site owner. Clicking another button will send the email to the
site owner. This functionality is well designed and can save a pile of time. There is
another feature that allows you to find link directories by typing in a keyword. Clicking
on one of the relevant directories that SEO Elite brings up will cause the directory to be
displayed in the program interface, and most of your relevant info will be pre-populated
in the website’s submission form. After completing the submission form, you’re ready to
submit your website. Although you have to be careful about submitting websites to link
directories in order to avoid issues like link spamming and associating your site with
directories that search engines consider being disreputable, this feature can be a handy
time-saver as well. What I really like about it is that it can help to find sites to
partner with that you might not have found so quickly or in any other way.
For an excellent video on what Project 2 is and how it works click the following, and
then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 2 SEO Elite Video
Project 3, Analyze AllInAnchor, AllInTitle, or AllInText, is designed to go further into a
given website’s optimization strategies.
Basically it lets you know if the site in
question is ranking highly because of the quality versus quantity of links coming into it.
In case you are not familiar with the terms, here’s a rundown on what they are about:
- AllInAnchor: a Google syntax to search only the anchor text of webpages. Results are
listed based on the text used in the backlinks or outside links pointing to the page. The
command allinanchor can be used in search engine optimization projects to analyze the
keywords and the context of backlinks to a certain site.
- Allintitle: If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to
those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search]
will return only documents that have both "google" and "search" in the title.
- Allintext: If your search query includes the allintext: query term, Google will only check
the body text of documents for the words in your search query, ignoring links in those
documents, document titles and document URLs.
Although not everyone will find it necessary to analyze their competition to this level of
detail, it is interesting nonetheless to see how Google’s algorithms rank sites based on
incoming links.
Project 4, Verify that link partners are still linking back, is designed to help you save
time when managing a larger link campaign.
The idea is to make sure that your link
partners are still linking back to your site. After inputting a URL, the program will scan
the partner’s website and show you where they are linking to you. If they are, then great;
but if they aren’t, you can decide what you want to do about it.
For a brief video on what Project 4 is and how it works click the following, and
then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 4 SEO Elite Video
Project 5, Find where your website is ranked for a given keyword(s), does a great job of
monitoring your site’s position in several major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN,
AllTheWeb, and AltaVista) for your desired keywords.
The interface consists of an upper
frame, displaying each keyword and its corresponding rank; and a lower frame, which
displays the ranking data in an intuitive graphical format. The graph can be set to
display various ranges of ranking positions and time periods. One of the features I like
about this project is that it not only reports your site’s ranking, but it also displays
trend data over time. This is very important to make sure that you are keeping your
rankings from sliding, and for determining if your SEO efforts are in fact improving your
rankings.
For a brief video on what Project 5 is and how it works click the following, and
then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 5 SEO Elite Video
Project 6, Find out how many pages are indexed, allows you to find out how many of your
specific site pages have been indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. For
pages that have been indexed by Google, the PageRank is also displayed. This is a handy
tool to use shortly after putting up a new webpage, as seeing how long it takes before the
search engines index it tells you something about how the search engines regard your site.
However, the main value is if you see that some pages are not being indexed at all. This
can alert you to the possibility that there is something wrong with your site structure,
your page linking, your robots.txt file, or the web page itself. Thus, you can take
corrective action accordingly.
For a brief video on what Project 6 is and how it works click the following, and
then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 6 SEO Elite Video
Project 7, Find possible authority websites, is a logical extension of Project 2, and is
designed to integrate with that project. Project 7 focuses on obtaining potential partner
websites that Google, Yahoo, and MSN considers being authority websites. While knowing
what sites are relevant to your niche, and are also authority sites, does not guarantee
that they will want to link with your site, it does give you a good place to focus your
link-building efforts on. To find these authority sites, you select the search engine that
you want to focus on, and enter the keyword phrase that best describes your niche. You
then set the criterion to define how authoritative you want the resulting sites to be.
When SEO Elite brings up the resulting authority sites, it displays useful info such as
the site’s PageRank, and how many of the top ranking websites the authority site is
linking to. It’s a little difficult to explain; probably the best way to explain how it
works is to point you to the Project 7 SEO Elite Video.
Click the following, and then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 7 SEO Elite Video
I was impressed at the methodology SEO Elite uses to find authority sites. This kind of
information is difficult to obtain without considerable research, but SEO Elite’s
algorithm makes the process quick, and will always remain current and accurate despite
changes in web trends.
Project 8, Submit your articles to article directories, is designed to expedite the
process of submitting articles to article directories. Article creation and submission is
one of the essential methods of increasing a site’s search engine rankings. It isn’t
difficult to write a good article or to hire a ghostwriter to write one for you. It also
is relatively inexpensive to hire someone to rewrite the article into multiple variations
of the same article in order to prevent duplicate content penalization issues. However,
the most time-consuming part of the process is when it comes to actually submitting the
articles to quality directories. This is the problem Project 8 is designed to take care
of.
You start by inputting, among other things, your article title, category, author, email,
URL, and bio info. Then you enter resource and description info (extra info which is
permitted by some article directories) in both text and HTML; along with the keywords you
consider to be relevant for your article. You then input both a text version of the
article and an HTML version.
Once the article data is in place, you can start submitting. This part of SEO Elite is
very well designed. The directory selection interface consists of the article directory
URL, a description, your last submission date, whether the directory in question accepts
HTML articles or text articles only, and whether a user account is required. When you
click on one of the directories you want to submit to, the website of the directory is
displayed in the lower panel of the user interface. If you need to log in, your login info
can be typed in manually, or it can be pre-populated if you wish to save time. Once you
have logged in, you are taken immediately to the article submission webpage. Here you will
find that nearly the entire form has been pre-populated with the article data that you
have already entered in SEO Elite. If the directory accepts HTML, then the HTML version of
your article will be entered; otherwise, the plain text version will be entered; and
likewise for the bio, resource box, and description. This is a fantastic time-saver.
However, you can still fine-tune the information before actually submitting it. For
example, you may need to select a different category, depending on the categories the
directory offers. This automation, coupled with the ability to manually intervene, is an
outstanding feature of SEO Elite.
There are several programs out there that do bulk submission, but most experience a high
acceptance failure rate due to improper submission methods. Some will submit only to
lower-quality directories that don’t require user log-in before submission. The article
submission tool in SEO Elite allows the user to save time by automating as much of the
process as can be safely done, while still allowing the finer details of the submission to
be done by an actual person. This ensures that the acceptance rate can be as high as
possible in as many directories as possible, while still keeping the time down to a
manageable level. There are some subscription services that do a more thorough job of
partly automating article submission, but unless you are intensely involved in article
submission, SEO Elite does a very good job for a much better price.
For a decent video on what Project 8 is and how it works click the following, and
then scroll down to about the middle of the new page that opens up:
Project 8 SEO Elite Video
Summary
SEO Elite is a serious program for serious marketers and webmasters. Its name is a little
misleading. It really does nothing directly to optimize your site’s content or structure
for search engine friendliness. Its main focus is to intelligently build and monitor an
effective linking strategy, and to analyze how your website is doing in the search
engines.
There are free tools that will do some of the things that SEO Elite does. For example, I
use two free SEO toolbars that perform the same functions as Project 3. Projects 1 and 4
can be done manually, as can some of SEO Elite’s other functions. However, the beauty of
SEO Elite is that is provides a full range of diverse functionality in a single
time-saving and user-friendly interface. Since I started using SEO Elite I no longer need
to keep bouncing back and forth between various tools, programs, and websites to get the
information I need to perform off-site search engine optimization. SEO Elite is designed
to be a time-saver, and time, of course, is money. Finally, I am impressed that the
developer has continued to improve the software since it was first released. When I first
started using it, there were only six projects instead of eight. Considering that the
software comes with free lifetime upgrades, SEO Elite becomes an even more attractive
purchase.
Intended Audience:
SEO specialists, Web Designers, Web Masters, Affiliate Marketers, Internet Marketers
Pros:
- Simple and intuitive
- Extensive core functionality
- An enormous time-saver over using web-based tools
- Some decent bonuses are included, including lifetime free software upgrades, a Success
Blueprint, 90 minute coaching calls with Internet Marketing authorities (downloadable in
mp3 format), and access to a members forum
Cons:
- I would like to see a few more tools, for example, a banned site checker, a rel=nofollow checker
- You need to manually select the “Report View” tab, even when the processes displayed under “Threads View” are finished
- A bit slow at times
|
|
SEO Elite Ratings |
|
Functionality |
9 |
/ |
10 |
|
Intuitive, Easy to use |
9.5 |
/ |
10 |
|
Value for the Price |
9.5 |
/ |
10 |
|
Current & Real-World |
9 |
/ |
10 |
|
Help & Support |
9 |
/ |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Overall Rating |
92% |
Visit the Product Website
Product is ExtraProfit!Bonus Qualified
Visit the Product Website
Product is ExtraProfit!Bonus Qualified
|