SEO Tools: Use ‘em or Lose ‘em?
October 17th, 2005 Intuitive Websites
It seems that every week some company comes out with a new software tool to magically make your site climb the search engine listings. Of course they all say they’re the best, and only THEY have "what it takes" to get the job done. None of actually believe all of the claims – it’s marketing after all – but are they even worth your time?
I own TrendMX and I’ve been happy with it in general. However, it’s now officially pointless to submit to Google, and you do have to be very careful or you’ll get banned. A tool like TrendMX is helpful and useful for analysis and checking rankings (with anyone but Google, since, as they state, it’s against their rules to do ANY automated queries) – but the key is to NOT do it more than once a month – and to be safe, once every other month. It doesn’t change often enough to warrant checking that often anyway. Yahoo has fewer restrictions, but the results are different – I once had a site at #15 on Google and #3 on Yahoo.
Overall – if you get TrendMX or any tool (don’t bother with Web Position Gold, it’s really not worth the money in any way) just don’t OVERuse it, or your site is toast.
By the way – submitting still does help on the lesser search engines, but one could argue that it’s a waste of time to submit to those as well, since nobody uses them and they require an email to submit a site (which they put on every SPAM list in the universe – that’s where 95% of my spam comes from).
And – I hate to say this – the more Google gets "better" (thereby placing more restrictions on a site and it’s rankings), the less SEO is even worth your time or your money. Google is fast making being an actual GOOD website the ONLY way to get ranked – no more shortcuts.
Spend time on increasing inbound links from reputable sites (no link buying or sharing), writing good interesting content, and increasing usability so people will want to come back. Basically, just build a better site.
No more shortcuts.
Entry Filed under: Web Strategy
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