How useful is SEO software with Google?

[clansullivan]

How valuable is some of the SEO software like <edited>? I bought this product, have made the recommended changes (i.e., keyword in title, keywords in Meta and Heading tags, keyword prominence, weight, etc.) but still am not doing very well on Google.

It seems like Google mostly cares about "off the page" factors.

If so, is software of this sort very useful?

thanks
Scott

[edited by: tedster at 5:06 pm (utc) on June 13, 2007]

[tedster]

Hello clansullivan, and welcome to the forums.

While we won't discuss specific software by name, as a general topic this could be fruitful. I've used several software packages and continue to use different SEO "tools" -- some are from the open market and some are custom. Seems to me that they are mostly good, but as with any tool, the way they are used is an important ingredient. Knowledge and experience cannot be replaced by a tool.

You are correct that off-page factors are very important with Google. Many SEO packages will help you research those off-page factors, both for your own site and for your competition -- backlinks, anchor text in backlinks, PR of the linking page and so on. You can also get that data without dedicated software, but the software makes it a friendlier task.

Getting a solid analysis of your competition as well as your own pages is important, especially for highly competitive keywords. Once you have a solid idea of how the high ranking sites are succeeding, then you have a better sense of the job in front of you.

[Silvery]

tedster's advice is all good. I'll just add a few comments.

For less-hotly-contested keyword terms, on-page factors are very, very worthwhile. So, if your desired keyword terms were something unique that not many people are striving very hard for, just fixing/improving those on-page factors are very advantageous.

If you're up against other, well-established, well-optimized players who've been around a lot longer and established more inbound links from quality sources, you'll have to go to more effort to achieve similar rankings.

I don't know if your software also analyzed the page's URL or site link structure? It's still valuable to include a keyword or two in the URLs, and have the URLs not have the query-stringed treatment, particularly if the querystring is longer, with more parameters or if it has session IDs appended to it.

Also, the link structure and anchor text throughout a site can help influence keyword relevancy of particular pages.