Search engine optimization is a multi-layered and complex task. While there are many ways to do all the necessary research and backlinking for free, a decent tool can go a long way towards making an SEO’s job easier. SEO Elite v4.0 is such a tool designed by Bryxensoft. It offers the user a whole slew of features designed to make ranking well in search engine results an easier and more transparent job. Read this extensive review to find out what the strengths and weaknesses of this tool are.
Overview
| Name: | SEO Elite v4.0 |
| Author: | Bryxensoft (Brad Callen) |
| Medium: | Software (Windows) |
| Price: | $47 |
SEO Elite used to be a lot more expensive than it is now, at the time of writing this. The price has come down over time since the tool is no longer the newest hype. But it’s age doesn’t mean it’s less useful than it ever was.
Video Overview
Watch the video below to get a good idea of what the software is like and what it does:
What Does it Do?
The program consist of eight different “projects”, each of which is a separate tool.
Here is a run-down of all the features:
- Project 1: Backlink Analysis
The backlink analysis tool in SEO Elite will try to find all the backlinks pointing to any site you specify and gathers very detailed information about these links. On the one hand, this can be useful for analysing your own websites and seeing if the links you are building are being registered. More interestingly, you can use this tool to analyze your competitor’s websites. The analysis tool shows you exactly how many links they have, what PR the linking sites have, from how many different IP addresses they are coming and whether they have “nofollow” attributes. - Project 2: Finding Potential Link Partners
Based on a keyword or a competitors website, project number two in SEO Elite seeks out websites in your niche that might be potential link-partners. Not only that, it also seeks out the contact-info for each site and you can submit e-mails requesting a link exchange to all of the addresses found, directly in SEO Elite. Obviously, this could be abused as a spam tool to a certain extent, but if it’s used wisely then this module can certainly be useful.
You can also use project 2 to search for link directories. Since directories (apart from DMOZ and the Yahoo directory) are usually unable to provide valuable backlinks, I did not pay much attention to this feature. - Project 3: “Allintitle”, “Allinanchor” and “Allintext” Search
This is quite a simple little feature: You can do “allintitle”, “allinanchor” and “allintext” searches for any amount of keywords you like. SEO Elite then lists the natural (broad search) results vs. the “allin-“ search specified. This is just another way of analyzing competition strength in detail. For example, you might find several backlink-strong websites listed for a keyword you have your eye on. If an “allintitle” search shows that most of those sites aren’t optimized for your exact keyword, you can get an idea of how to compete against them.
This is really the most rudimentary of SEO Elite’s features, since the “allin-“ searches can be very easily performed within Google as well. However, it’s not a bad option to have. - Project 4: Check Backlinks from Linking Partners
This feature is useful if you are exchanging links with many different partners, assuming that you are using link-pages. The backlink checker in SEO Elite follows every link on a specified link-page and then checks if the sites you are linking to are still linking back. You can also set it up for three-way links (i.e. checking if the partners are linking back to a third site).
Since I don’t use link-pages and I believe they are practically valueless nowadays, this is a bit of a non-feature for me. - Project 5: Track Your Rankings
This is my favourite feature in SEO Elite: Project number five is a great rank-tracking tool. Enter as many domains as you want to monitor and all the keywords you are trying to rank for. The program will then go to the major search engines and search for your pages in the listings. It searches 1000 results deep and reports where each of your web-pages is ranking for the keywords you are targeting. It also displays the results in a graph so that you can easily see your rankings change over time.
This feature is excellent and in my opinion, anyone serious about SEO needs to use some sort of rank tracking tool. - Project 6: Check Indexation
Project 6 is another quite simple feature: Specify one or several websites and this tool goes to the search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) and checks how many pages of your site are indexed on each one. Just like project 3, this is something that can easily be done manually. However, it’s quicker to do it in SEO Elite for several sites in one go and it’s a nice feature to have. - Project 7: Find Authority Sites
As far as I can tell, the original idea behind this feature was to find high-value link-partners. Here’s how it works: You specify a keyword and the program looks up the top ten listed sites for that keyword (in the search engine of your choice). Then it looks for sites linking to several of those top sites. You could then try to get links from those sites (the ones linking to the top-ranked sites).
In practice, for money-making sites, I find that most of the sites found are sites where you build your own links – article directories, DMOZ and Yahoo directory, web 2.0 sites etc. This doesn’t render the project useless. It’s simply another way to estimate competition strength for your keyword (e.g. lots of Yahoo and DMOZ-listings = bad). - Project 8: Article Submission
Article submissions are a great way to build some backlinks and get some traffic (if done properly). SEO Elite’s article submitter is practically identical to the one I’ve already written a review on. It is a semi-automatic submitter and as such, requires your presence to do the submissions. Not so great. It also doesn’t let you do any article spinning, which is too bad.
In short, there are too many superior alternatives for project 8 to really be worth a closer look.
Is it Useful?
Out of the eight available tools, I doubt anyone will really use each one on a regular basis. In fact, to me personally, projects 2, 4 and 8 are pretty much useless.
Projects 3 and 6 are nice to have, but I wouldn’t buy anything just to do some stuff that I can do almost as easily by typing a simple command in Google.
That leaves us with projects 1, 5 and 7 to make or break a recommendation for SEO Elite.
Projects 1 and 7 make for the most automatic, quick and in-depth competition analysis I have ever done. It’s one thing to know traffic volume and an estimate of competing pages (which is the info you can get for free from Google) but it’s a completely different story to know all the backlinks, IP diversity, anchor-texts, and PR passed to your competitor’s sites. You can also dig deeper for each site, to find out things like domain age, keyword density, Alexa rankings and much more.
In just a few minutes, SEO Elite can give you an incredibly detailed overview of what your competition is doing to achieve those top listings. Even as a learning tool, this is invaluable. Check out the results for any competitive niche, go take a look at the top ranking sites and run them through projects 1 and 7. You can learn so much about SEO and website ranking, just from doing this a few times that it alone almost justifies buying the product.
Project number 5 is a solid rank-tracking tool. I like that it goes very deep into the results to find your sites, so even if you are just starting out with a website and still listed on rank 900 or thereabouts, the position will be picked up and you can watch the progression of your pages through the ranks. Rank-tracking is very important for good SEO. Apart from the obvious benefit, it can also be a great motivator since it gives you a more direct feedback on whether or not your backlinking and website promotion efforts are paying off, compared to just watching your traffic stats.
Ratings
Spam-Factor
The spam-factor is almost non-existent, here. I do get the occasional mail from Brad Callen and most of the mails are sales-pitches. BUT, the mails are infrequent, non-pushy and every now and then there is a genuinely great offer to be found among the mails (like heavy rebates on Bryxensoft products). I rate this a two out of five Spams since you do get salesy mails but they are very non-annoying.
Scam-Scale
No scamminess to speak of. You will be shown an upsell-page once you order SEO Elite, but it’s not terribly pushy and it’s not of the annoying kind (“what you just bought is actually crap, buy this instead!”). I rate this a one out of five on the scam-scale.
Overall Rating
SEO Elite has some non-essential features (at least, for my use), but the ones it gets right are absolutely brilliant. As described above, I simply love what the backlink analysis can do and rank tracking is absolutely essential. There is another factor that makes me recommend SEO Elite: The price. A one-time payment of under $50 is really not that much to ask for such a piece of software. I know I’ve spent that kind of money on less valuable things…
If you are already making money with affiliate programs, you know you can earn this kind of money back very quickly. If you are a complete newbie, you might want to wait until you’ve made your first few sales and then use some program like SEO Elite to ramp up your efforts.
Overall, SEO Elite gets a four out of five from me.
This is for you if:
- You are looking for a good and easy way to do in-depth analysis of market-competition
- You want to keep track of your and your competitors rankings automatically
- You want to keep tabs on your indexation and backlink building efforts
This is not for you if:
- You already have a good rank-tracking tool
- …and have competition analysis covered
- The price is not something you can get back quickly with your marketing efforts/existing sites
Click the banner below to get your own copy of SEO Elite.
Given its relationship to Keyword Elite, it sounds like some of the info SEO Elite gives overlaps with KE.
Would you say it’s useful to own both, or if you already have KE, is it best to keep it?
I happen to use both KE2 and SEO Elite, though I do find KE2 more useful/more important.
While there is a little bit of overlap between the two programs, I would say the differences are greater than the similarities. SEO Elite has not keyword research component, but goes into much more detail for competition analysis. That’s useful to have, but certainly not absolutely necessary.
Since there are many features in SEO Elite that I don’t ever use, I can’t really recommend it outright. I wish they did a real good polish-up on it and released SEO Elite 5. :)
So, in my estimation SEO Elite is certainly not on top of my must-have list and it’s not the first thing I would invest in. Nice to have, but not absolutely essential.
Having said that, I do believe that you must have some kind of rank-tracking tool. I couldn’t do without one.
Cheers,
Shane