SEO software

is it worth it

[Friar99]

Hi all,

New to this fabulous resource supported by great people.

I'm on a tight budget where I don't think I can afford an SEO firm.

Do software programs like WebPosition/AddWeb etc. work?

Does Google penalize them? Is it a risk?

Which one is best?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Friar

[Shak]

Welcome to Webmasterworld.

SEO software, who needs that when you have Webmasterworld, with 10000s of postings from SEOs, SEMs and a few what I refer to as "next breed" :)

On a serious note, keep well away, just read, read and read, and the answers will hit you like a ton of bricks.

Golden rule about SEO is Common Sense.

Software "may" help, but its way outta your control, and could do a LOT of harm, especially if you are starting out.

Shak

[Editor]

Well.... to be irreligeous...

Yes, packets could be traced back to an offending IP...

Still...

We will very (in)ocassionally use WP Gold 2, which can emulate manual search function. Also, show courteousness by only tracking a few phrases that really are important... Don't overload servers.

Then again, if it truly is WICKED important, track manually anyways...

Cheers!

[dwilson]

I worked for a company that used WebPosition Gold for some of its clients. Until they realized WebPosition Gold could barely be found in the SERPs itself.

Afraid I'm not a fan of that kind of software.

[makemetop]

>WebPosition Gold.. not found in SERPs..

I can see over 48,000 listings :)

Seriously though - tools are tools. If you don't know how to use them they could cause you harm.

Think about it. If tools could get everyone top rankings, why would people pay top SEOs thousands of dollars!

Google dislikes any rank checking software intensely which works aginst their terms and conditions.

[Jack_King]

I'm particularly interested in using a software package to see ranking reports.

I found an seo company that provides ranking reports from WebPosition Gold as testimonials for their services. What I don't understand is how they have been able to get rankings for phrases they did not even use or barely used in their meta data and the body of the pages. Also how are they getting rankings for so many keywords per web page. I thought we are supposed to be optimizing pages for two key phrases. Did they purposely optimize for all the keywords? If not, how did they know which keyword combinations to input into the WebPosition Gold reporting tool?

Thanks,
Jack

[edited by: pageoneresults at 6:33 am (utc) on May 21, 2003]
[edit reason] Hello Jack, no urls please, thanks! [/edit]