I spent a great deal of my time working on search engine optimization (SEO) for my various websites and blogs.  An online business has two options for tackling the necessary, continuing task of improving SEO.  One is for your business to handle optimization on your own; the other of those is to outsource the necessary research to companies who specialize in those services.  Such consulting companies cause me some concern for serveral reasons.  Some of them are not nearly as well informed as they ought to be about the details of optimizing for the various major search engines.  They rely on rumors without the empirical data to confirm these often incorrect assumptions.  Some of them are nothing more than linking farms that disguise themselves as SEO consultants.  Such links can sometimes have very short term success, but eventually the linking strategies are made useless by sophisticated search engine algorithms that can uncover such schemes and cause your site to drop back farther in the search results than it was before you hired the self-proclaimed masters.  My third concern about these companies is that they are usually very expensive for the limited value that you actually might achieve.

You should already know what my recommended solution is from reading between the lines of my first paragraph:  Take the time to educate your company team unless you want to hire the few very expensive geniuses in the field, such as Leslie Rhode, Brad Fallon or Dan Thies–if you can get them to work for you at any price.

But to take the do it yourself approach, you will need to take the time to educate your in-house staff on the fundamentals of search engines and optimization for them, and you must also be willing to spend some money for well designed software to assist in the gathering and analysis of the immense amount of data that will be required.  I have a comparison of the most important SEO solutions that is available at one of my sites.

I have long been a long term supporter of SEO Elite (see sales page).  This Callen designed program has been a leader in SEO software for years.  Until now, I have always endorsed it without any reservations.  I recently learned that they are getting ready to release a new version, SEO Elite 2.0, so I recommend it now only on the basis of two conditions: 1) That you can get assurance that you will be able to get a special upgrade price for the new version when it is released in the future, or 2) that you decide to buy the same company’s highly recommended Keyword Elite, because they extend a substantial discount for buying both simultaneously (it comes as an upsell).  I bought both at the same time and, together, they are still among the best investments I have ever made!

The only other comparable SEO software package is guru Leslie Rohde’s Optilink (you’ll land on the sales page).  Rohde is the genius who makes all the rest of us seem like nothing more than silly pretenders to the SEO throne.  Much of what I have learned about search engine optimization I learned from Rohde.  Pardon the intrusion of my ego, but I know a heck of a lot about the subject.

To those companies that can afford the expense, I strongly recommend buying both products (along with Keyword Elite).  However, if you are new to the online business world and you are going to begin your optimization efforts using just one, I’m going to break with my longstanding position of suggesting SEO Elite and recommend Optilink, instead–temporarily, at least, until I have an opportunity to thoroughly test SEO Elite 2.0.

Both SEO Elite and Optilink are comparably priced at just under $200 each, which is a bargain.  If your cash flow problem is temporarily significant, Rohde’s company offers a much less sophisticated program called Optispider that is only around half the price of the better Optilink.  If you really must scale back to that level, you might also consider the similarly priced ($100) Traffic Travis, by Mark Ling.  If you follow the link in the first paragraph of this article, you can get to my comparison of all of these alternatives, and there are direct links there to each of the software products.

I am a frequent user of both SEO Elite and Optilink, and I believe that they compliment each other marvelously.  They are tremendous time savers in both gathering the data and in helping make sense of it all.