SEO Compare

WEB CEO

Well, this is the first SEO Software I review here, so I’d really appreciate your comments on things that needs to be reviews and I’ve missed or perhaps things I’m paying too much attention to.

Let’s start with the download & installation:

Download of the free version was pretty quick, only 26.5MB . During install you need to fill in name & email, do some updates from the database of WEB CEO and you’re done.

On-Site-Optimization

Very friendly, I was really impressed, I added my 1st site then in order to optimize you need to add pages, but don’t worry, you can just click on the “Add Pages from site” and even choose how deep to crawl – 1st level, 2nd level or entire site.

Once you have your pages organized in the page list you can just click on the page you want to analyze, choose keywords or let the software choose the keywords by itself.

A click on “Analyze” will generate you the report which will include:

1. Keywords in URL – yes / no
2. Keyword in Title – yes / no and how close are the keywords to the beginning of the title.
3. Meta description & keywords analysis.
4. Body text – if your keyword does not appear enough or doesn’t appear in bold, or doesn’t appear in recommended locations.
5. Alt text-Checks if exists and the density and gives recommendations.

OFF-Site-Optimization

On the same report from the On-Site-Optimization you will see in the lower part an off-site-optimization section which includes:

1. Link Popularity – general report
2. Anchor text in Inbound links
3. Dmoz listing check
4. Yahoo Directory check
5. Alexa Directory check

On same report there’s a detailed Keyword density report and General page properties with details about used tags and anchors.

SE View Report

This script gives you a thorough look at your website as a search engine crawler would see it:

• Head Tags
• Visible Text
• Links that crawlers can follow
• Alt tags on images

Find Link Partners

Well, finding link partners could be the most difficult task SEO folks have to deal with.

WEB SEO find link partners feature is found under the “Features” Menu.

This feature allows you to select how you want to search for partners:

1. By search phrase
2. By links to your competitors
3. Both

After you choose the Search Engines you want to use, you can choose the keywords manually or import them from the websites you’ve defined already and then choose Competitors if you’ve chosen that option and last and important option is sites you’d like to exclude from search results.

Once you’ve done with the configure, a simple click on the “Find Partners” Button would make the search for you.

The results are presented in a very friendly table where you can notice the following options:

1. URL of the link
2. Search Method (by keyword or by competitor link)
3. SE Score
4. Number of links to the competition
5. Site Title
6. Site Description (by meta)
7. Site keywords (by meta)

Afterwards you can define the email template, settings & other rules to set the way you’re going to correspond with your link partners and manage your entire corresponding through the WEB CEO system so once you make a link exchange you can add it quickly to the system and monitor that link on a regular basis to see it is never removed – what else can you ask from a link exchange management software?!

Check Ranking

Another feature the WEB SEO offers is to check ranking for defined keywords for defined websites. Since everything is already defined from previous tasks, this task is really simple.

When going to the Ranking screen you will have to configure your search, which is really easy & nice use.

You can select which search engines from a list of virtually all search engines.

Next step is to choose the keywords from either the website meta or enter them manually.

Based on the number of results you’ve defined to search for and the number of keywords to search for, the duration of the ranking search will take.

PPC Management

What WEB CEO actually does here is download the database from your PPC account and help you manage it in the software based on the sites defined and on the keywords in your site and keywords related. If you know how to manage your PPC account and already using the Adwords software or any other method you already gotten used to, I don’t know how helpful this part of the tool is.

Conculsion

If you have no program to help you manage your links and you would like to also get an idea about possible mistakes in your on-site-optimization this program is definitely a great solution and the PRO version also gives you the benefit of getting more information about your competitors and finding more link partners.

I sure do recommend this software, but you can wait for more reviews on other SEO Softwares, as WEB CEO are not alone in the market.

Google searches your mail

While my Ban Gmail post was mainly based on theory, I’ve found a prove by mistake that Google do search Gmail for link exchange emails – you can read about it at Matt Cutts post from May 1st 2007 and let me quote:

“A quick Google search finds similar emails that were sent to mailing lists. Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.”

So he mentions in his post that they get reports from users forwarding the link exchange requests and they find them by themselves by simply searching mails for “link exchange”.

Now, do you really want to keep using Gmail for SEO purposes?

SEO Hosting

Many companies offer these days SEO Hosting packages.

What is SEO Hosting? Where to get it? These questions and more I hope to solve with your help.

First time I saw a SEO Hosting package was in Host Gator front page.

It offered a very expensive package of $35 / month and promised to host your sites on 16 different C-Class IPs.

After the first pioneers many decided to offer similar packages, but since most hosting companies are small and do not offer so many servers and cannot give so many different C-Class IPs these packages are very expensive.

What is the benefit of purchasing seo hosting packages over spreading your sites across many different hosting companies is pretty obvious, but let’s mention a few:

1. Managing all domains from one control panel is much easier.
2. Accessing only 1 FTP
3. support with companies offering SEO Hosting is usually much better.
4. Dealing with many hosting companies is hard as you have to keep track of all passwords, user names, which websites are hosting on which hosting companies and try to keep them on seperated c-class IPs.

Since started with the SEO hosting packages, Host Gator decided that Google might frown on that service, so they’ve completely removed it from their site and now it offered as a service from a company affiliated with Host Gator under the unique, brand name url www.seohosting.com – yes, indeed very unique.

Pay attention that many companies are trying to use the “hunt” for SEO hosting services and are offering different dedicated IPs with their services, but in most cases all those IPs are from the same C-Class IP which conflicts with the entire idea behind the SEO Hosting.

Minor Update  (February 5th, 2008)

Got a coupon code from hostgator to use for their seo hosting service – the coupon code is: seo-compare and it would give you a discount of 50% on first month.

2007 SEO Summary – Top 10 events

Events worth mentioning in the SEO world during 2007:

1. Google declares war on paid links – 1 2 3 4 – caused many high PR sites to lose their PR and many websites to completely lose ranking (see: Aviva Directory, Text Link Ads and many more).
2. 3 Google pagerank updates – Jan 25, Apr 30, Oct 26 – the long delay between the 2nd and 3rd PR updates in 2007 cause many to believe that PR is dead and SEO Moz Page Strength tool became more popular for a short period of time.
3. The creation of www.SEO-Compare.com
4. MSN Live brings back to life webmasters favorite search operators +link: +linkfromdomain: +linkdomain: +site: – but yet, lost most of its webmasters traffic to Yahoo which proved stability.
5. Google PR Prediction tools – dead.
6. Digital Point Year  – Doubles the amount of users to 125,000.
7. Gambling laws in USA caused ban of gambling ads on adwords and other ppc systems which cause more SEO efforts and blackhat techniques.
8. Spread of Google’s sitelinks (those 8 small links that appear under the 1st search result).
9. Bidding Directories scripts gets popular and pop up like mushrooms after the rain.
10. Outsourcing becomes more and more popular and due to high usage of SEO Forums had became a thing that every SEO guy must use for content writing, directory submission, link building and even programming, graphics and website building.

The list is open for changed for the next month – please post your ideas & thoughts below and help me choose the best 10 SEO events of 2007.

SEO Quake

This great SEO extension saves you so much time and enables you to view the following within the need to click anything and it works in both FireFox Mozilla & INTERNET EXPLORER (Which don’t have too many useful extensions so far):

1. Google PR – click to go to Google Toolbar Queries Page.
2. Google Indexed Pages – To google Site:current domain
3. Yahoo Link Domain – ToYahoo Site Explorer with linkdomain:current domain minus the results from the same domain – so you actually get only the links from out side of the current domain.
4. MSN Indexed Pages – Click to go to Live.com +domain: currentsite
5. Alexa Rank- Alexa Traffic Details Page
6. Age – Web Archive for the site
7. Delicious – History in del.icio.us
8. Internal Links – Internal SEO Quake Report
9. External Links – Internet SEO Quake Report

And gives you a 1 click option to view the following:

1. Whois – goes to Domain Tools
2. Page Source – Default View Source of FireFox / Internet Explorer
3. Keyword Density Report – which is very detailed and very clear.

All these and more, SEO Quake gives you a full customize ability in which you can choose the exact details you’re interested to view and where you want to view them.

Another main feature SEO Quake offers is the additional details it shows on your search results, on either Google, Google Blog search, Yahoo, Yahoo Site Explorer or MSN (Live.com) – in all you can add the same details you can add to your toolbar.

A small yet very useful tool inside the SEO Quake is the “Check Links” Option which appears in when you right click the SEO Quake.

When selecting that option a small empty window will open.

In this window fill in a list of urls – 1 per line and when you’re done hit the enter key be directed to a new page in that page you just click “request parameters” to fill in the table with all the details you’ve chosen in the preferences screen . This page filled with all details – you can save as html or add to an existing file.

What else can you ask from a SEO Toolbar?!

Edited

After a long wait SEO Quake is not fully compatible to FireFox3, so go ahead update and enjoy.

Live Link Check

After almost a year MSN had returned their link check operator back to live (double meaning… nice, right?)

But as MSN knows they decided to make things complicated so they changed the way we were used to use.

From now on you need to add “+” before the operator

For example, to check the back links of seo-compare.com you need to write:

+link:www.seo-compare.com

and if you want to check all of your domain backlinks just use:

+linkdomain:seo-compare.com

I am pretty sure they’ve done so in order to prevent old robots from using their tools automatically, so if you have a bot or a script that is attempting to receive data from MSN Live.com simply add the “+” before the original code and you’re set to go.

Link Harvester

from the maker of the SEO Book, Aaron Wall, comes this great seo tool that shows link information for a certain website according to yahoo (the last standing link source for webmasters).

Link Harvester checks up to 1000 results and divides them according to c-class ip address.

It also displays a set of links next to every link your site has giving you the following options:

1. W – Whois
2. A – Archive
3. G – Google Cache
4. T – Google Cache – Text Version
5. D – Dmoz
6. Y – Yahoo Directory
7. S – search Yahoo for page from that link that are linking to your website

Using this tool you can check your site value or your competitors. It also separates completely from the list links that comes from authority sites such as .EDU, .GOV & .MIL

You can find the link harvester here – http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php

BAN GMAIL

Hi all,

 This is not a tip, this is not a recommendation, if you’re dealing with SEO, Link Exchanges, Link Purchases and anything related do yourself and your partners a favor and avoid using Gmail.

 Using Gmail is like shouting in Googles Face: “WE’RE LINK EXCHANGING… WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT??!!” Well, they can do alot Google had already proved in the last several months that they’re not going to allow the link exchange and link brokerage markets continue.

Keep in mind that when you choose to use Gmail you choose to share your emails information with the most important factor in the SEO world – Google.

Use your Cpanels and create yourself a personal email account or even use Hotmail and Yahoo Mail as their Search Engines are less important than Google.

Email all of your friends & partners and ask them to make the change NOW.

DigPageRank – Pagerank Check

Digpagerank.com, the makers of backlink watch, have created not too long ago the most popular tool in the pagerank checking seo tools niche.

This great tool allows you to choose from a several options of bulk Google datacenters from around the world.

 The simplicity of this tool is what makes it so popular, as it does exactly 1 thing and it does it good.

So if you want to check for pagerank updates, like we have running right now and started about a week ago, you can just use digpagerank and see if all datacenters shows the same IP or there are difference between datacenters – which indicates on a Google PageRank Update in process (TBPR – Tool Bar Page Rank)

Visit this great tool: http://www.digpagerank.com

Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Overture, once a Giant in the PPC insdustry had lost some of its adventage once Google and their PPC, Google Adwords, stormed in.

Back in those days Overture were the PPC management system for both MSN and Yahoo, until purchased by Yahoo and forcing MSN to issue their own version called MSN Ad-Center, which is still considered as the less popular system of the three.

Overture are now basing the data on Yahoo searches and Traffic to determine the keyword popularity.

The keyword selector tool that can be found in Overture PPC or as a standalone at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

The keyword selector tool is not the most accurate and does not work completely well with foreign languages, but it is still a good source to get an idea from as for specific search terms popularity. It also suggests more popular similar terms to the keyword you’ve entered.