Welcome to the first part of our “Tool Review” series. Today, we will be reviewing one of the most important tools in our arsenal, called SEO Elite by Bryxen Software.
One of the reasons we recommend this program so strongly is how easy it is to get into. We’ve found programs that were cheaper and in a few cases more advanced, but once you start using that software, you quickly realize you’re spending more time consulting the manual or online forums than you are actually finding ways to earn more money! With SEO Elite you get literally all the features you need in a user-friendly package, so you can start working within a few minutes of installation.
The program comes with 8 major functions known as projects:
1. Analyze Backlinks
This project is extremely useful for determining exactly how well-entrenched your competition is, by doing a “link scan” of any domain and giving you: the exact details of every indexed link on all 5 of the major search engines, what anchor text is used, the domain extension (.com, .edu etc), domain age, page title … the list just goes on and on, and thankfully SEO Elite also allows you to filter the information so you can really customize what it reports back with, instead of having to sort through it all manually.
We use this software primarily to determine how difficult the competition is; as well, we can often determine how the website acquired the link to begin with by looking at the page the link is on.
The only thing I wish this project could do was scheduled link scans; it would be really helpful being able to set the software to automatically scan your competition say, every week or two, and report back any new links which have been indexed.
Overall, I would give Project 1 a score of 7 out of 10. However useful it may be, there are free programs that can do a lot of what this project can accomplish, though they may be somewhat less stable.
If your wondering why this project may be useful, feel free to take a look at our article on back link scans.
2. Get Links!
Pretty much every webmaster will love this project; it’s somewhat similar to Project 1, but instead of looking at your competition with the intent to see what his linking strategy is, this time around you’re looking to find link partners for your own site.
This project is extremely flexible, and allows you to search for potential link partners that are already ranked for your target terms, linking to a competitor - or if you’d rather look for directories, you can.
Best of all, once SEO Elite has compiled a list of sites for you, it also collects email addresses from the sites and allows you to send off template emails to as many sites as you want. While we don’t recommend spamming websites, you can easily use this software to send off customized emails to sites, offering articles, or guest blog posts, or anything really. Finally, SEO Elite tracks who you’ve already sent an email to, so you don’t have embarrassing incidents of emailing the same person twice!
Overall, I would give Project 2 a score of 9 out of 10, as I don’t know of any other tool which does everything you get in Project 2. Even if you aren’t into reciprocal linking, it does compile a list of sites in your industry that are already judged by the search engines to be Authority sites - which you can then either contact in an attempt to build a relationship, or offer free content, or whatever you need to do to get that link - and it keeps track of all of it!
3. Allintitle, AllinAnchor or Allintext
If you’ve already tried building a business online, chances are you’ve at some point wished for an easy way to discover how competitive a term is; to put it simply, Allintitle searches will tell you how many sites have your keyphrase in the page title, just as Allinanchor searches will show you the number of sites linked to with your phrase as anchor text. In turn, this gives you an idea of how many, out of the millions of documents the search engine shows, you are actually trying in some way to rank for that term.
With SEO Elite, you can perform either of the 3 above searches and compare the results from each of the top 5 search engines side by side. It also allows you to save the information, so what would normally require an hour or two of hard work can now be accomplished in less than 10 minutes.
It’s hard to give this project a scored rating since it’s obviously just thrown in for added value, however it does the job intended, and I can’t honestly think of anything that would make it better - so I’ll give it a 10 out of 10.
4. Verify that link partners are still linking back.
Personally, we don’t use this project very much, however if you do a lot of reciprocal linking, this project is a real time saver. Generally, you input your links page, then tell SEO Elite to scan every site this page links to and how deeply it should go to find your link. It also allows you to filter results by url so that you can search for links to your home page or subpage, if you want to get specific.
However, this project also has some slight problems: namely, it on occasion misses detecting the link and reports it as missing, meaning you have to inspect it manually. Since the project has been included with SEO Elite for many years now, I unfortunately have to give it a 5 out of 10.
5. Track your rankings
This project is probably the most used project on SEO Elite. I am a ranking junkie and like to check on them every few days, and when I forget then I can easily schedule the software to check for me.
As an added bonus, the program also shows you the history of your site’s rankings. The date is sometimes a day or 2 off; in the past I had some complaints about the speed of the ranking check, but in the newly released version 4 it has become MUCH quicker.
Before the big 4.0 update, it used to take forever to run this project, but it’s much faster now; while it does on occasion report the wrong ranking, it’s usually not off more than 2 spots, so I give it a 9 out of 10.
6. Find out how many pages are indexed.
As a webmaster, you generally want to keep an eye on how well your site is being indexed. Now I won’t lie to you, it is very easy to check how many pages you have indexed by simple search modifiers in both Google and Yahoo, however as a time saver, SEO Elite will scan all the major search engines and report back with exact numbers.
Once again, since it’s more extra value than core functionality - and it does the job described flawlessly - I give it a 10 out of 10.
7. Find possible Authority Sites.
This project has caused some backlash between Aaron Wall and Brad Callen (the creator of SEO Elite). Aaron recently posted a negative review of SEO Elite, complaining that it provided some of the same features of his free program called Hub Finder, however having used both programs, I can say that Aaron Wall’s Hub Finder has a tendency to freeze or crash on my system.
That being said, Project 7 performs its intended job very well: you tell it which keyword to research and how many results to look at (I recommend at least 20), and it then returns the top 20 (or whatever number you picked) for that search term and proceeds to find which links each site has in common. You can also adjust how many sites in the list a site has to link to before coming to your attention.
What can you do with Project 7? Well, with today’s Search Engines getting smarter when it comes to evaluating links, this project allows you to find possible Authority sites who pass along the most link juice, simply by seeing what each site’s link profile has in common.
This is a pretty neat feature that does its job perfectly; Aaron Wall’s hub finder does do a pretty similar job, however I generally experience a crash with hub finder - whereas it’s quite rare that SEO Elite actually crashes - so I will give this project a 7 out of 10.
8. Submitting Articles
I can’t honestly say we use this project very often, however I can say that it performs the task of automatically submitting articles to over 60 directories flawlessly: you simply enter the article and setup your login information for the directories and let the program go to work. It’s really very similar to every other article submitter program on the market.
Mostly what I like about this project is that it saves you money; it’s not really something that everyone will use, however if you need it, it’s there, and you don’t have to hire someone to do the work for you. I did some looking around and found article submission programs that cost between $29 and $167, and from our own experiences in hiring freelancers, you can expect to pay $12.99- 19.99 to have someone do it for you.
If I had to pick a flaw in Project 8, it would be that I can’t find any way to add additional directories to the list, which is disappointing and really keeps me from being able to give this project a high rating.
I give it a 5 out of 10 for missing such a valuable feature.
Overall:
I use SEO Elite almost daily, and our business currently owns 3 licenses so that we can have a copy registered to every computer we own. The back link checker is a great tool for determining whether a key phrase is too difficult to rank for or not, and the link gathering project does a great job of making any link building job go faster than it would manually. This is all for a reasonable price of $167.00; also, a lot of programs and ebooks claim to offer free updates as a big selling feature but rarely do they deliver anything, SEO Elite on the other hand has gone through 2 major revisions since I bought my first license back in 2004, and has undergone countless feature updates (13 in the past 6 months alone) - so whenever the search engines change something that affects the program, it is usually fixed within a day or two.
The article submission project is the one project that still needs some work, however it was just recently added at the end of 2006, so I’m sure its just a matter of time before that is fixed. Even with only 60 directories in the list, that’s still more than enough to get you started in article marketing.
Also, each license you buy is usable on two computers, so if you have a friend or partner you can split the cost and still get all the benefits. If you’d like to pick up a copy of SEO Elite, you can visit their site here.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Very good review. I was thinking about trying out seo programs like this but I don’t really know much at all, just the reading I’ve done on the internet about it. After your review I’m really thinking about buying this program. Did you see an increase in traffic after starting to use it?
April 11th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Hi Glen,
SEO Elite is just a tool, so you get out of it what you put into it. We don’t want to sent the idea that if you buy SEO Elite, your sites will magically get all the top ten rankings you’ve been dreaming of because it doesn’t ever work that way! :)
Basically, it has a lot of features that make it much easier for you to build links and traffic to your site. If you buy it AND put it to use, then you will see improvements in traffic. It does make your job easier, but you still need to do the work!
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
[…] As you can see, the unfiltered results come back as 641. Clearly there is a pretty big difference in the numbers, but for the most part if you put some effort into to it, you should come up with the same thing. I went through the first 70 results Google generated and found about 15 sites to mail to; I will find the rest using Seo Elite. […]
April 30th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I have bee going back and forth with trying to decide if I want to continue using free tools on the internet and having to jump all over the place to do it or just bite the bullet and get this software. I haven’t been able to find a good download to the trial version that works. I tried all of the other softwares life Web CEO (lousy navigation, clunky GUI. ) IBP9 (easy navigation and great suggestions but is expensive and needs to have Arialis to build effective links) I was hoping that this software would be worth it for a t least a few of the tools. Thanks for the review. It is nice to see one that isn’t just a rehash of the marketing page.
May 1st, 2007 at 5:27 am
Yeah, there are affiliate links in this post, we won’t hide that fact.
However, from the start of this post, Jay and I decided we didn’t want to write an ad piece that portrayed SEO Elite as the perfect piece of software, because it’s not. Our goal was to provide an honest review of the software.
It has it’s flaws, but it has things that are very useful. We do own several copies of it, and we use it on a daily basis.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Thanks for the honest reply Dave. Have you used Keyword Elite as well? I have been doing decent with my SEO efforts for about the past 18 months using Overture for the most part and was considering purchasing Keyword Elite but it seems to me that some of the keywords it pulls up aren’t actually search terms. Have you seen this at all?
Thanks in advance~
PS. Where are your affiliate links? How can I purchase SEO Elite and give you guys the credit for it if I cannot find the links? Just my way of thanking you for an honest review.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
OK so I bough this via your afilliate link and I have not received my software so now what?
May 10th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Thank you for making the purchase via our affiliate link, to be honest we don’t really control the software however from my own personal experience purchasing the software you should receive an email with a download link.
If they’ve changed this process since I know you can setup an account with there help service here:
http://www.bryxensoftware.com/cgi-bin/pdesk.cgi
Once you’ve created an account you can submit a help request just label it as urgent and make sure you select seo elite as the program your having a problem with.. Just explain the problem and if possible provide a receipt number that should have been shown during the ordering process, if not name and email address should suffice.
Usually they are pretty good and get back to you in a few hours, it’s late so they may not respond till tomorrow morning.
If nothing happens just post here again and I will contact them to see whats the hold up.
May 11th, 2007 at 4:38 am
Jay can probably answer your questions about Keyword Elite better than I can because we own a copy of it, but he’s the one that uses it :)
May 11th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Hey guys. thanks for getting back to me. I got it all squared away last night and everything is cool.
The software is working pretty good and I am already seeing the benefits in time savings by not having to go to 25 different websites to use the free tools they offer. I have done pretty well with the SEO stuff organically but I think that this software (while not by any means perfect) will be a great tool to make all of my efforts much more efficient. If you guys can give me any real review of Keyword Elite I would really appreciate it. I have been using overture and the free version of Word Tracker for a while. Is Keyword Elite better than that for finding commonly searched for phrases or is it like some of the other tools out there that just auto build keyword phrases without giving actual monthly search queries per phrase?
May 11th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
It gives you traffic numbers however it still needs to pull the data from a source..
Your source is still overture, the difference is if you have wordtracker (the paid version) it can pull the numbers from there as well.
Much like seo elite it’s more of a time saver tool as opposed to a revolutionary product.
If you want a review of it, I’ll start putting one together :p
May 14th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Thanks Jay. Yeah I think that would be cool to have a decent review. Every time I search for reviews on this type of thing all I ever really get is the affiliates regurgitating the sales letters and it gets really annoying. I have gone thru all of the sales videos for Keyword Elite. It looks like they are pulling the data from Overture from what I can tell. I currently have a free keyword tool for Overture that works OK but it doesn’t show the plurals or stems of the search phrases.
So what you are saying is that Keyword Elite pulls data from Wordtracker if you have the paid version? Does it not work for pulling data from the free version of Word Tracker?
Also I sent an email to Brad Callen wondering what happened to the on page optimization stuff for SEO Elite. I would think that the on page stuff is still pretty important as far as SEO is concerned. Am I missing something in the new version of SEO Elite that does the on page stuff?
May 14th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
On page is still pretty important however things are moving more to latent symantic indexing ie instead of repeating the word pasta 10 times in your content the search engines are starting to look for related terms so mixing in related terms like pasta > spaghetti >noodles > sauce > fork etc in a manner which makes sense (not keyword stuffing) is becoming the new on page optimization.
It sort of makes sense, I mean if your computer can’t read and understand english then you have to cheat a little.
If someone writes an a article about pasta, chances are pretty good if its a good article it will contain related phrases so even if Google can’t understand what your page is about yet they can validate that its quality and focus by taking a look at what other terms are included.
If an article about pasta has different types of pasta noodles listed then chances are its about different types of pasta noodles as opposed to being an article about a specific noodle or type of pasta dish.
Hope that clears it up a little.. heh
Anyways I’ve started planning out the keyword elite review however it generally takes me awhile to finish those and I’m moving from May 18th - May 22nd so I’m not sure when it will get done, I will try for end of next week however :)
May 15th, 2007 at 8:44 am
The latent symantic indexing has been the trend more so for about the past year for sure. This was a big thing that Aaron Wall was talking about a long time ago and he was correct on this.
On page factors are still important such as KW density to a certain extent as it pertains to KW stuffing. Site internal linking structure and the placement of your keywords in relation to other elements on your page as well as the use of the H tags still matters. It seems a bit odd to me that Brad Callen eliminated these things from the new SEO Elite software since it is still part of any SEO. I had read somewhere that KeyWord Elite does some of this stuff. Is that true?
I understand the moving thing. Glad I won’t have to be doing that again for a long time.
Thanks again Jay
May 16th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
[…] If you have a product that you own and use already, you can save yourself some hassle and money. In our case, we reviews SEO Elite, a program that we’ve used for quite some time and we’ll soon have a review of Keyword Elite. Don’t be afraid to contact vendors and ask for a free trial or review of their product. You are offering them free advertising, and the worst they can do is say no, you loose nothing! […]
May 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am
[…] How is this useful? It’s a good indicator of competition. If the results come back for one key phrase and there are tons of results, then you’re probably looking at a difficult time getting ranked for that particular term. However, if there are only a few, then it’s more likely you’ll have an easier battle. These numbers can be compiled manually, but why spend hours doing it when SEO Elite can compile them in ten minutes? […]
May 21st, 2007 at 7:46 am
[…] You will almost certainly need a secondary tool to make your life easier on this step. I believe there are free programs that will let you do back link scans, but we use SEO Elite for this process as it also includes all in title, anchor and text scans, as well as some other useful tools. Click on the link to read our full review of that product. Hopefully this little guide will give you a leg up, next time you are thinking about launching a new website. Always remember, making money online is only easy to get into, not easy to do. The details matter! […]
June 1st, 2007 at 9:03 am
[…] you will ever do online… but sadly, few ever accomplish it. As part of our recent review of SEO Elite we thought it would be a good idea to give out some of our ideas and tactics on how to use this […]
June 24th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Interesting read, Dave, and a great indepth review.
Cheers.
November 10th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I am reading this honest review by you Dave & Jay. I would like to buy SEO elite but I cannot find any completed review.
Regards,
Tss