SEO Elite 4 Software Review + Free SEO Tools

I’ve been an SEO consultant for about 8 years (with 2 years before that running a ecommerce store that I cut my SEO teeth on) and for several of those years I’ve been using SEO Elite (bought it within 6 weeks of it’s release) and as a professional SEO consultant I recommend this SEO software to other SEO consultants who spend a LOT of their time doing SEO analysis.

I would not generally recommend SEO Elite to the average webmaster since a lot of what SEO Elite does can be achieved for free: there’s a LOT of very good free SEO tools and free SEO software these days.

Basically it’s about time management, my time is VERY valuable, I’ve been known to charge $150+ an hour for SEO consulting work, so if I can shave even 5% of the time it takes to perform SEO analysis by using the best SEO software on the market today, (and SEO Elite is one of the best) that’s good for me and my SEO clients.

So if your a serious SEO consultant buy SEO Elite, it will save you a lot of time.

Update: Have had several emails about my SEO Elite review above asking what if a webmaster (so not another SEO consultant) has several websites to SEO or spends a LOT of time performing SEO analysis: at what point is it worth buying SEO Elite?

To be honest I didn’t consider the SEO obsessed webmaster I should have really as there’s a heck of a lot of you around and that’s how I started!

I’d estimate using SEO Elite when compared to using free SEO tools saves about 25-50% of my SEO analysis time, exact amount of time saved depends on the SEO task.

I can’t give exact numbers like “if you spend more than 5 hours a week performing SEO analysis type tasks SEO Elite is worth buying”. Since to give a figure like the above I’d have to know what your time is worth to you, have you got plenty of spare time or do you never have enough. Then there’s money available to spend on SEO tools like SEO Elite, can you afford it.

If you find yourself with time to spare and limited funds I’d not advise buying SEO Elite. Like I said , SEO Elite basically does what a bunch of free SEO tools do (better in some areas) and so you buy it to save time/make your SEO analysis life easier.

You could consider it similar to using a calculator to perform relatively easy maths instead of pen and paper. Or a spreadsheet for tracking your income tax (that’s how I keep track of tax due anyway) rather than again just on pen and paper. It’s easier, but the end result is practically the same as long as you know how to use the pen and paper tool in the examples above.

If on the other hand you never get a minute spare, can afford the SEO software and believe potentially halving the time you spend on SEO analysis is well worth the fee for SEO elite, go buy SEO Elite 4 now

Hope that covers the questions in the emails I received (for future reference you could have asked the questions via the comments below).

For everyone else check out the following free tools to achieve similar results as SEO Elite (just takes more time/hassle).

Free SEO Tools and Free SEO Software

WordPress CMS : Not SEO software per se, but as a SEO consultant that has tried just about every conceivable way to create content/article based sites (not ecommerce/product based), WordPress with the right SEO theme (which I happen to sell** :)) is as good (in fact better in some respects) as getting me to SEO optimize your sites template files (I charge thousands for that SEO service).

If you own content based sites seriously consider converting them to WordPress. By simply removing the dated aspect of WordPress (remove the monthly archives and the calendar, very easy to do) you turn WordPress the blogging software into WordPress the SEO CMS (content management system). One day I’ll write an article on how exactly to use WordPress as a SEO CMS: it’s not hard, but then rocket science isn’t hard to a rocket scientist!

** I also offer a free version of some of my SEO/AdSense themes on this site under the WordPress themes category, however all but one of the free SEO/AdSense themes is out of date (I stopped updating them when I started selling the SEO themes). Blix with SEO/AdSense version 02 is the only free SEO theme I’ve updated (the rest will probably have issues in the latest version of WordPress). Also in Blix with SEO/AdSense version 03 the SEO is better, if version 02 is 90% SEO’d, version 03 is 99% SEO’d. Version 2 it’s hard to turn AdSense off, in version 03 it’s easy.

Anyway, SEO theme selling mode OFF

Google Webmaster Tools : Multiple webmaster tools, if you haven’t checked it out you must be nuts

Keyword Discovery Free Keyword Research : The free version is quite good for basic keyword research since it gives 100 results per search.

Will add more later (time for some shut eye :))

David Law

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