Search engine optimization and e-marketing, when done well, can take a long time to carry out and make the most of. Mom’s expecting to dramatically increase the traffic to their site should be spending a good portion of time generating more links to their e-business site, mailing their regular customers and list subscribers, as well as keeping tabs on their competitors, ensuring a favorable ranking above all others.
There are many tools on the market, which claim to remove a lot of the leg-work from e-marketing, but generally ask for some of your hard-earned cash in return. So are they any good and, more importantly, are they worth the money?
Here, we review some of the more popular and well-known e-marketing applications and tools for you. We hope to give you a better insight into what’s “in the box” and save you the trouble of reading those book-long sales pages to make your decision!
Analyzes back links in Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, MSN, Altavista
This feature really helps you to keep tabs on, and keep up with, your competitors. By providing the domain names of your closest rivals, SEO Elite will furnish you with the details of all their link partners. The information includes:
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•The URL for the link partner
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•Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank
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•Page title and anchor text
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•The number of outbound and total overall links on their page
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•The Whois information and contact email for the page owner
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•The link popularity for the link partner
This is a really useful tool in itself, and allows you to identify and target the link partners you should be working with, all at the touch of a button. All the information is generated in real-time, so you know it’s accurate and up-to-date.
Find high Page Rank sites that can make great link partners for you
One major concern when optimizing your site for the search engines is ensuring that your link partners rank well for the same keywords that you are targeting. This feature helps you do just that, without the need to search the engines and page ranks yourself.
Enter one of your favorite keywords or search terms and SEO Elite will find high Page Rank sites related to your keyword. You can also specify a minimum page rank, in order to filter out the lower-ranking sites, and find your perfect, high-ranking potential partners. As well as returning the site details and page rank, SEO Elite will tell you how many existing links there are on their page. If you’ve used Page Rank Prowler, you’ll be familiar with this type of functionality.
We found this feature to be a great supplement to the Back links tool. Once you’ve identified your competitor’s partners, this tool adds further credibility by showing just how well-liked they are by the search engines. So far, so good.
Analyze allinanchor, allintitle or allintext
Allinanchor will rank the websites in order of importance by the websites with the most back links containing the specified keyword.
Allintitle will rank the websites in order of importance by the websites with the most optimized page title for the specified keyword.
Allintext will rank the websites in order of importance by the websites with the most optimized on page text for the specified keyword.
There is one concern with this feature. SEO Elite makes automated queries to Google, and the big problem is that Google hates automated queries. However, SEO Elite adheres to Google's own guidelines and allows you to enter your own Google API key for these Google searches. Google will give you one of these keys for free, which allows you to query Google without fear of penalty. Problem solved.
Verify that your link partners still link back to you
Once you’ve chosen your link partners, and have swapped your precious links with them, you want to make sure that those links are maintained, and that you’re receiving full benefit from your linking strategy. This feature allows you to “spy” on your link partners, and see valuable information like whether they still link to you and from where on their site.
SEO Elite will even tell you what anchor text they are using (very important for link reputation), what Page Rank the page has (important in avoiding penalized sites), what the Alexa rank of the site linking to you is, the page title of the linking page, the number of links on the linking page and much, much more.
In reducing the amount of time you have to spend maintaining your ongoing SEO strategy, this feature gets a big “thumbs up”. Just imagine the amount of time it would take to review each of your link partner sites, and ensure your links are still active, of good quality, and the partner’s reputation is still intact. Time is money, and this tool saves you bags of both.
Find where your site is ranked for your keywords
This feature is fairly self-explanatory. Simply enter the keywords you want to rank for (you can use your Google API key here for safety), enter the URL you are interested in, select which engines you want to check and click a button. Your rankings will be displayed.
Find which pages of your site are indexed in the main engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, AlltheWeb and Altavista).
Want to see whether your site pages have been indexed? SEO Elite makes it as simple as typing in a URL, selecting which engines you want to check, and just clicking a button.
Momventure has found this feature to be freely available on the web, with sites like Marketleap, though having all your tools to hand, as part of the overall SEO Elite package, makes this task a little easier to manage.
SEO Elite Summary
We believe SEO Elite to be the best at what it does. The many features available within a single package allows for many of your up-front and ongoing SEO tasks to be carried out in a fraction of time they would take if done manually. For the single task of creating inbound links to your e-business site (and we know that inbound links are king), the product is well-worth the money. Ranking well and ranking early should result from using SEO Elite, providing you put the effort in. Once you’re up there on page 1 of the search results, the additional tools and features of SEO Elite should keep you there!