I’m a little perplexed at the speed in which the SEO industry is adopting new technologies, especially for a constantly evolving industry that’s based on being as nimble as Google.

Having worked in SEO for many years, I’ve used almost every tool under the sun for various elements of research, including site analysis, link analysis, and keyword tracking. The problem with most of these solutions is that they’re still developed with an old-school mentality, where you’re effectively anchoring the software to a single computer. Today I’ll highlight some of the problems this can cause and present some alternative web applications. I’ll be taking up the challenge to make the lives of fellow SEO professionals a little easier, as well as providing clients with greater transparency. I’ll also review several SEO web applications, looking at the positive effect they can have on your campaigns and workflow management.

Here’s how the old process, based on desktop apps, used to work:

purchase the software outright and download it
install the software on the computers where it will be used
perform the SEO-related task
export reports and share via email

Any time you wanted to run a ranking report, the software has to complete this task locally.

To be fair, most of these desktop applications automate the process of running and emailing reports; however, they still rely on the computer being switched on to connect to the Internet.

The Best Desktop Applications and Why They Still Fail to Stack Up

There are some well-designed desktop applications that make the life of an SEO professional easier. Before these came about, I can’t begin to describe the pain or guesswork that was involved in starting and managing an SEO campaign; so, kudos to the likes of SEO Elite, LinkAssistant, and other heavy-hitting pieces of software—you really have changed the industry.

A couple of the desktop applications I currently use on a daily basis are:

Keyword Elite 2.0—A reliable keyword research and competitive data collection program. Version 1 was great but this went to the next level. Yet, here are some reasons why I think it’s falling short of its potential:

It’s locked to a predefined computer after being downloaded and installed.
Sharing reports or any data is quite cumbersome, and generally requires third-party manipulation in Excel for proper presentation.
There’s no direct client access to the data via a web interface, so they’re unable to log in at their leisure.

LinkAssistant PowerSuite—A powerful set of tools that allow you to manage and track SEO campaigns. It comprises four separate applications, with each focusing on a specific element of your SEO campaign and having a robust reporting tool that produces client-friendly data. Here are some of the reasons why it doesn’t quite satisfy my needs:

Single computer installation, which means I always have to carry my laptop around or pay to install the program on separate machines.
Large and complex reports can take weeks to produce when running locally, due to processor speed and internet connection restrictions.
There’s no ability to give clients direct access to run their own reports, so transparency is a real issue.

Is there a better way?

What most of these solutions lack is a proper web application, so that wherever you are or whichever computer you’re using, you always have access to the latest statistical information to make educated decisions involving optimization. For example, if I want to show a client a report, I want to avoid having to export it to an Excel file, editing the data, and then sending it through as an excel graph; I simply want the ability to log in (and give clients access to log in) and show the latest results in an easy-to-understand manner.

It’s Time the SEO Community Boarded the Web Apps Bandwagon

Think about how frustrating email was before services like Gmail and Hotmail appeared on the scene. How about the time before Google docs existed or before online services such as box.net were around? Did you share files via email, or upload by FTP? Annoying! The world is increasingly moving towards web apps and for good reason: it makes accessing and sharing your data much easier. It also takes the reliance on a single internet connection or point of failure away from the desktop application.

What SEO web applications are worth trying?

SheerSEO—One of the best examples I’ve come across of a service that fills a specific niche well is SheerSEO. It does a great job performing on a relatively simple yet niggling set of tasks. Such tasks are essential to your initial SEO analysis and ongoing optimization, including:

keeping customers and stakeholders up to date with site rankings automatically and storing this data online
suggesting keywords and URLs to track during the setup process
defining the regularity of polling and the frequency of emailed reports
giving access to stakeholders and clients so that they can always check the latest data or compare it to historical trends
tracking inbound and social links that point to every part of your website and establishing their effect on rankings
the ability to pull data captured through SheerSEO’s web application into your own dashboards and reports via their XML output stream

Because SheerSEO automates basic but essential tasks for you, it’s much easier to just set and forget, unlike other SEO software that runs as a desktop application; you can then use that time to focus on improving rankings, rather than the hassle of tracking them! SheerSEO accounts have a 90-day free trial; however, if you wish to upgrade it starts from as little as $9.95 per month.

Basecamp—This is one of the original and most reliable web applications. It’s always stuck to its principles and kept it simple. Built with a highly flexible API system, it can be integrated in numerous ways into your own applications, which I personally find very handy. Although this is not an SEO-specific web application, it lends itself extremely well to the SEO workflow. Some benefits of using Basecamp to manage SEO projects are:

it’s an extremely reliable provider that has a very long history of uptime, so no clients will be hassling you about a server going down
it’s flexible enough to allow you to define specific sets of actions, load them for each new client, and then assign tasks to the right departments—all with a few clicks, allowing you to track the entire lifecycle of each SEO client
it offers complete transparency for clients, allowing them to log in to the system and see milestones, to-do lists, reports, and messages relating to their project, centralizing communication and delivery
the ability to integrate directly with services such as SheerSEO or your own web applications via API calls and automated reporting, giving your clients a single dashboard

Basecamp is a great base from which to build your SEO business, allowing you the freedom to integrate your own applications while delivering a stable platform and intuitive interface. This comes with a free 30-day trial on all levels of accounts.

Conclusion: Where SEO Software is Heading

There is still no single killer application around to simplify the life of an SEO professional; however, pieces of the puzzle seem to be coming together and there are promising signs that the bigger issues are being tackled. In the short term, it appears users will be stuck utilizing various, individually powerful desktop applications which when used together, give amazing insights and a competitive advantage. The downside is the data-sharing and portability nightmare it produces. Let’s hope that one day soon some of these players move to web-based applications, like those featured in this post, and make all of our lives that little bit easier. Until then, happy multi-tasking, and make sure that your Excel skills are up to date!

Full disclosure:

Eyal from SheerSEO.com has been good enough to provide the SitePoint team with a free SheerSEO account. However, I’ve been a paid customer of this tool for many years, and have no hesitation recommending it based on my experience over this time.

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The real estate bubble popped. Will the link bubble be next?

The real estate bubble was the product of greed, low interest rates, loose lending policies and derivatives. Nearly anyone could get a house and people bought into the idea that real estate would always be a good investment. The result of this irrational exuberance? Homes were valued far more then they were worth.

The Link Bubble

Are links that different than real estate?

Links have traditionally been a reliable sign of trust and authority because they were given out judiciously, a lot like mortgages. For a long time link policies were tight. You needed references and documentation before you earned that link.

In addition, links weren’t looked upon as an investment tool. The concept that links influenced SEO hadn’t taken hold. The motivation behind links was relatively pure and that meant Google and others could rely on them as an accurate signal of quality.

Links or Content?

Many have recently bemoaned the death of hand crafted content and the rise of content farms as a threat to search quality. But is content really the problem?

Content has little innate value from a search perspective. Yes, search engines glean the content topic based on the text. It’s like knowing the street address of a house. You know where it is and, probably, a bit about the neighborhood. But it doesn’t tell you about the size, style or quality of the home.

Long tail searches are akin to searching for a house by street address. So, content without links may sometimes produce results. But the vast majority of searches will require more information. That’s where links come in.

McDonald’s Content

Lets switch analogies for a moment. Some have called Demand Media the McDonald’s of content. There’s a bit of brilliance in that comparison, but not in the way most think.

Both McDonald’s and Demand Media crank out product that many would argue is mediocre. Offline, McDonald’s buys the best real estate and uses low prices, brand equity and marketing to ensure diners select them over competitors.

Online, Google holds the prime real estate. But that real estate can’t be outright purchased. And in the absence of price, we’re left with brand equity and marketing. Online, brand equity translates into trust and authority. And links are the marketing that help build and maintain that brand equity.

Demand Media has brands (their words) that give it automatic trust and authority. Publish something on eHow and it automatically inherits the domain’s trust and authority, built on over 11 million backlinks.

Writers for Demand Media are provided revenue share opportunities on their articles. Here’s one of the tips they give to writers to boost traffic to their articles.

2) Link to your article from other websites.

Link from your own website or blog, from a message board or forum, from your social networking profile on MySpace or Facebook and more. The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it.

Demand Media combines the installed brand equity of multiple sites (which happen to be cross-linked) with an incentive to contributors to generate additional links. The content doesn’t have to be great when links secure premium online real estate.

There might be something better down the road, but McDonald’s is always right there at the corner.

Link Inflation

The last few years have produced major changes surrounding links. Linkbuilding is now a common term and strategy. A number of notable SEO firms tout links as the way to achieve success.

Linkbuilding firms sprung up. Linkbulding software of various shades of gray were launched. Paid links of various flavors flourished. Social bookmarking and networking accelerated link inflation. And new business models like Demand Media sprung up to take advantage of the link economy, creating a collection of sites and implementing incentives that result in something that resembles derivatives.

Link policies went from tight to loose and people got greedy. Anyone can get links these days. So what’s the natural result of this link activity?

Link Recession

The value of links is inflated and at some point the system will correct. The algorithm will change to address the abuse of links. Unlike The Federal Reserve, Google probably isn’t looking for a soft landing, nor are they going to extend a bailout.

Some links will continue to matter. Links that are in the right neighborhood. The ones with tree lined streets, good schools and low crime. But will links from cookie cutter planned communities still be valuable? Strong links will mean more because they’ll hold their value, while many more links will be neutralized.

I’m no Nouriel Roubini, but I do believe that a major link correction is coming in 2010. Google must address the link bubble to make search results better.

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