What Does Sphinn Think About SEO Tools & Software?

Yesterday I wrote a post about what SEO software means for the SEO community and it was received with mixed feelings, especially from the folks over at Sphinn. In my opinion, good (and I emphasize good here) SEO software (like Ranksense) helps to automate repetitive tasks and is beneficial for the community in spreading SEO awareness and teaching best practices.

Here’s what some of the top SEO’s and members of Sphinn have to say about SEO tools and software…

Michael Gray of Atlas Web Service

The problem with SEO software is that once it gets in the wild and goes mainstream, Google gets pissed and starts to footprint it and block it or feed it screwy data. So public tools are good to a point, but after a certain level private tools are really the way to go. I use public stuff for quick scans, but for serious stuff it’s all private stuff – although it’s not polished and not very forgiving if you make mistakes.

Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea

I don’t use much in the way of automated tools for SEO. I do look at a lot of the technical aspects of websites, but with the exception of a few in-house proprietary tools, I like to dig around in the code of pages, to explore the nuances of search results for specific keyword phrases, to do some of the dirty grunt work myself because that’s often where some of the biggest inspirations come from. I do agree with you that a focus on creative marketing is necessary, and that tools like Ranksense can be helpful.

I do find Xenu useful. I’ve seen an early version of Ranksense, and I think that it was thoughtfully put together, and should be helpful to people who use it.

Donna D. Fontenot of SEO Scoop

Way back in February, I wrote a post about RankSense
and mentioned that I really liked it. I’m a fan of tools, as long as
they are used correctly to help us gather and process information. If
we use tools to make decisions for us, rather than simply supply us with
information, then we cross a line that shouldn’t be crossed. We have to
use our brains, but allow tools to feed us information that would take
too long to do manually. RankSense does a great job of that.

Being a lone SEO, I heavily depend upon tools to supply me with info. I
could never manually accumulate, sort, and process all the information I
would need to compete successfully in any market, much less a
competitive one. Tools are a necessity. It’s up to us, however, to
supply the brainpower to use them wisely.

My favorite tool:
Search Status Firefox Extension

Although I use numerous other tools as well, and blog about tools as I
discover them, I tend to keep the specific tools I use a little more
close to the vest, to avoid having their effectiveness stripped by too
much exposure. For example, I do use a rank checker, and actually have
legitimate reasons for needing to do so (despite the current fad that no
one needs to check rankings, that isn’t always true). But I won’t name
the one I use, because some things just need to be kept under the radar
to maintain their effectiveness.

To summarize:
Tools are just that: tools. One cannot efficiently build a house
without tools, but the home will not be planned, designed, and built by
the tools. The home will be planned, designed and built by a human -
with the help of tools. In the same way, an optimized site will be
planned, designed and built by a human – with the aid of good tools.

Jordan Kasteler of Utah SEO

I talked to Hamlet quite a bit about RankSense at SMX Advanced but have yet to really play with it. I guess the reason is because I don’t know automating SEO. Certain tasks, yes, but not important things. Working on a enterperise level site, like Overstock.com, there’s a lot you have to rely on logic to automate though.
I made a post here about which tools, plugins, and addons I like the most (see the end of the post)

Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and The Link Spiel

I’m sure Hamlet’s done a great job on the Ranksense software but I don’t feel a tool selling for $25 will revolutionize the way we do business. Nor do I think partnering with hosting firms will validate our business. I do use some commercial and free tools, all for research. I shun all the automated email options and such.

• Hub Finder and Link Harvester from Link Hounds
• Relationship plotting tool from Touch Graph
• Search Engine comparison tool from langreiter.com
• Utility linking tool from Solo SEO
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Search Status tool (to show NF links)
• SeoQuake
• Track Engine
• Bot A Blog

Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm and Branded3

To be honest we don’t use tools, aside from analytics and rank checkers.

Marcus Tandler of Mediadonis

I actually just use my own tools. Tools that anyone can use are just never as good as handscripted stuff. Ok, everybody uses XENU and Syntryx, but besides that my own stuff always works better

David Wallace of SearchRank

I and most SEOs already use a variety of tools to automate certain processes of SEO so having a suite of tools such as Ranksense is really nothing new. Also, even if Ranksense is a good piece of software, it will never replace human ingenuity but can only help make a human’s job easier.

As far as what tools we use – I wrote a post recently that outlines some of the tools we use here. You can check it our at blog: What You Will Find In Our SEO Toolbox

Michael Buonomo of Geeks.com

The tools I could not live without:

• SEO for FF
• WebPosition
• YSE – Yahoo Site Explorer
• Coremetrics for Analytics as well as Google Analytics
• Google Keyword Tool
• Seo Digger – on occasion

Peter Newsome of SiteMost SEO

I personally believe that there is a place for automated SEO tools for the 3 reasons you mentioned, but there are some aspects of SEO that I don’t believe should not be automated such as link building and social media marketing. While it may be possible to gain a few links from spamming automated link request emails and use bulk submitting tools to promote articles on various social media sites, I think both processes are far more effective when done manually. A link is really a personal recommendation for a website, so to make such a recommendation a relationship needs to exist and you need to feel comfortable with the site you’re recommending. And social media is all about being social – you need to engage with other users, vote, comment and interacting with the network as a whole to really achieve the best results.

SEO software is great to help make non-SEOs aware of what aspects to focus on and having all the reporting and tracking features in the one place can be a huge benefit, but I don’t think SEO software should automate the whole process or do all the work for you. I think it’s important for users to understand that for the best results it takes time and hard work, none of which can be achieved through a purely automated system.

In terms of SEO tools that I regularly use:

• SEO for Firefox
• Link Diagnosis
• Social Media for Firefox
• A bunch of the SEOmoz PRO tools
• Google’s Traffic Estimator and Keyword tools for Adwords
• SEObook’s Rank Checker
• Xenu
• Started playing a bit more with Google Insights for Search and Google Trends

Depending on what I’m researching will determine what tools I use as many rank checkers and keyword tools will focus on US data which isn’t particularly useful when working with smaller Australian sites or niche region-specific keywords.

Jim Hedger of Metamend

I prefer to do most of my SEO work by hand. I am one of those guys who still prefers to code in Notepad too. I think that is a sign of advanced age but that also might be the fellow in my mirror sassing back at me.

For what it’s worth, here is my list:

• Enquisite
• SEOmoz ToolSet
• Numerous proprietary tools owned by Metamend
• Trellian / Word Tracker
• Click Tracks

Zak Nicola

I have not tried the tools mentioned here, but I do think some aspects of SEO can be automated. Anyone that uses SEO for FireFox is already automating part of their daily tasks as an SEO, as it will run back link checks, tell you PR, and several other things that a SEO’er would need to otherwise do them self.

Automation does have its limits though, and any program that automates content or links is something I would not want anything to do with.

• Zacharia Archuleta-Nicola
• Tube Mogul – video analytics
• http://zi.ma/ – URL shortening
• Copyscape – plagiarism tool
• SEO Digger – keyword ranking research
• Xenu – link crawler
• Google Datacenters tool
• Supplemental results detector
• Document readability tool

Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide

I like using automation but it only works up to a point. At some point you need a human being to look at the data and make some judgment calls.

Software I tend to use:

• Analytics: Blvd Status, Mint, GA
  Keyword Research: Google (I think most of the other tools are lacking because they don’t have access to as much data)
• Site Crawls: Xenu LinkSleuth, SEOMoz’ crawl test (very buggy but can pull up some useful info), my own proprietary crawl tool
• SEO-Browser: Always good for quick looks at pages
• FF Extensions: Web Developer Toolbar, SearchStatus, Live HTTP headers, SEOBook’s Toolbar

Michael Tighe

SEM Insights is working on an article featuring Raven SEO Tools, which actually just went public today.

I’ve been working with that and really like it. Also Datapresser is showing some promise, but I don’t like how it is more associated around black-hat (and the community on it as well).
Beyond that the SEOmoz tool set is really handy when I am creating audit documents or reporting.

Derek Edmond of Cape Cod SEO

Here’s a list of tools I use regularly

Free tools:

• Search Status for Firefox
• Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer
• I also use Fiddler on occasion
• Xenu Link Sleuth
• SEO Book Firefox Extension
• SEO Link Analysis
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Web Developer Suite
• Lynx Text Browser
• Here is an addon for Firefox as well
• Bloglines for all of the RSS feeds I need

A couple paid tools:

• SEO Spyglass
• Competitor-Intelligence from Trellian

Alex Delibas of Alex Tips

I would rather do everything manually. I have this mentality “if you want something done right, do it yourself!”. Anyway, I don’t say that automated SEO software is not good, not at all! But, I just don’t trust them 100%. Nothing beats the human brain in my opinion.

These are the SEO tools I use and that have helped me so far doing numerous SEO campaigns:

• Google Adwords Keywords tool
• Keyword Density Analyzer Tool from SEO Book
• Most of the SEOmoz tools
• Google Search for Multiple Datacenter from SEO Chat – really good tool, these datacenters might be tricky sometimes
• Backlinks pagerank checker

Ann Smarty of Search Engine Journal

Unlike many other SEOs out there, I am not going to pretend I don’t use (semi-) automation.
I use tools to speed up the process, organize things effectively and for SEI inspiration.

I did try Ranksense and find it awesome (especially for organizing keyword targeting).
However, to be honest, I currently don’t use it as I guess I understand more about site issues when doing everything manually.

My favorite tools are:
SEOquake (FF addon)
Linkdiagnosis tool
SEO browser

David Harry of Huomah

I have played with many tools over the years including RankSense and often find them lacking in truly useful features. Now, I haven’t really dug into RS as it was buggy on my Vista install… haven’t tried the update. But I am familiar with a few over the years including WPG, WebCEO and many others…

Common problems:
On-page advice is simplistic and often based on suppositional characteristics (that aren’t mine). And I’d like to see a deeper set of parameters for measuring page strength (especially for competitive analysis)

Keyword research, like all tools, needs secondary data as few seem to have comprehensive enough source data. This is common among many KW Research tools including near dangerous metric such as KEI.

Link building – most of the all-in-wonder tools do ok for researching, but I’d like to see some Google Dorks and other advanced search operator implementations. I often find the data lacking as well as far as semantic groupings and deeper analysis.

Rank Checking – this in itself has become a suspect activity and at least, a more tempered metric. We’re currently conducting some research into SERP flux and there is mounting evidence that rankings are generally in flux dependant on geo-graphic and behavioural re-ranking processes (and potentially OS and Browser). So, while it is a handy tool, likely to be losing value as a performance indicator over the next while.

I think one of the most essential tools these days are analytics tools as that’s where the key performance indicators reside. That isn’t to say I don’t use tools for preliminary research on man levels, just not as much automation requirements around here. For example SEO Quake and other FF goodies are good for prelim research.

I do like playing with tools as new data can often bring out perspectives that you haven’t noticed previously. Also tools such as Link Sleuth are great for looking at internal and outbound links as can bad neighbourhood checkers. I have a fairly good list of tools that I have tried and found some value with over the years…see my search marketing tools.

I don’t think a software can ‘do it for you’ as much as the SEO must learn their craft and then seek out tools that will work for the methods they employ. As one evolves in the art, so do the methods and ultimately tools. It’s a cart before the horse deal… necessity is the mother of all inventions.

Obviously I am also a fan of tools created to my own specs…I own a web development firm and have a small army of programmers at my disposal ;0)

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