Does anyone use paid seo tools

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, i see a lot of people claiming that paid seo tools work, i would like to know if anyone uses them. I have a new site that i am building and i am wondering if there are any good paid tools out there that could help me gain exposure quicker.

I get a lot of emails from well known companies promoting their paid tools but have never bought any as i believe you should hear from people who have tried them first.

If you feel there are any good paid seo tools out there for help with rankings and link building then i would love to hear about them

[ske11]

Hi Diane

There are paid tools that will help with things such as keyword research, visitor numbers, organizing paid traffic and checking rankings, all of these can be used to boost the value of your website business.

However there are also tools that will help you automate the link building process and I think these are the tools you are asking about, as a general rule of thumb I would steer clear of these as the quality of the links they build will probably be low and against the guidelines laid out by Google.

They may work for a time but as I am sure you have read hear and on other forums many people who used short cuts in the past to get higher rankings are now seeing their businesses devastated by the changes in the search engine algorithms. The question to ask yourself is are you looking for some quick wins or a sustained long term business?

One short cut that does work and that should work for ever is to find out what your audience wants and then work out a way to give it to them.

I hope this helps

Sean

[danatanseo]

Hi Diane,

I agree with 100% and his was a great answer. In terms of managing your link-building efforts, i.e. keeping track of who you've contacted where and when and whether or not you earned a link from them or not, I think Raven Tools has one of the best tools to help you organize and keep track of those things.

I love SEOPro Tools and have found them to be indespensible in tracking keyword position, particularly historically. The Forum here of course is one of the best SEO resources anywhere.

Sean actually turned me onto a new tool I'm going to be trying this year: http://www.webposition.com/

As he mentioned, there are a lot of "Get Links Fast" services still out there. To some extent they are still working (one example is Linkvana.com). I would take Sean's advice and steer clear of these. We used Linkvana for a few months and fotunately didn't do it for long so we didn't hurt our business. It was an enormous waster of time for temporary, short-term ranking gains that disappeared quickly. I wrote 84 unique blog posts that were then published to a number of blogs in Linkvana's network. Within 4-6 weeks, all but twelve of those blog posts had disappeared because the blogs where they were posted were removed from Google's index. That's a lot of work for a measly 12 links from poorly ranked (PR 3 and below) blogs. Since we are already a PR3 site, a bunch of inbound links from sites of PR3 and below aren't of any help to us at all really.

I get those same emails every day. They appeal to one's sense of greed. Just don't fall victim to the temptation of finding any easy way. Real SEO is hard work and takes time and patience.

Good luck Diane! I hope this helps

Dana

[DorotheaKettler]

Hi Diane,

This is a very legitimate question, especially since most SEO tool developers place pretty high price tags on their apps. Most tools require a monthly few between 100 and 800 USD, is it worth spending all this money on a tool? To answer your question you first need to look at  what you are currently working on. Do you have the budget to finance 3-4 paid tool subscriptions/month? SEO tools are meant to extract data and simplify reports that can mostly be generated manually too. Do you have time to generate these reports on your own?

In my opinion the most valuable tools are backlink checkers and SERP analyzers, that can be used for link prospecting. Such tools as Opensiteexplorer.org use their own crawler and provide data that isn't available anywhere else. The monthly fee gives you access to that data, which can prove to be very valuable, if used correctly.

[askshopper]

When you say exposure combined with paid seo tools & exposure quicker, you are almost certainly talking link building tools, rather than tools provided by seomoz which mainly give you access to data & site improvement recommendations, I will tell you this regardless of what a lot of users on seomoz may tell you there are only 2 link building tools i know of that work 100% & do will not affect a sites Google status when used correctly, I say correctly as if they are not used correctly then they also will most likely sandbox a site, these tools are expensive as they combine not only the main software but many other paid software tools combined which makes the main software  even more expensive to use, but here lies the key to your question about exposure quicker, NO USING LINK BUILDING TOOLS AND PRODUCING LINKS FOR YOUR SITE QUICKLY WILL DAMAGE IT.

[ClaireH-184886]

Not really looking for short cuts, i am looking for tools that will help, like a mechanic will look for new tools to use to fix cars. I receive so many emails each day from companies about new tools that are out there and you never know which are good ones and which are bad ones.

I have never bought a seo tool as i only buy things that are recommended

[inventandomedia]

I've read this paragraph three times already and I still don't get it. Which tools are those two you are talking about? Are you referring  to something like s*box?

Also, what do you mean by "NO USING LINK BUILDING TOOLS AND PRODUCING LINKS FOR YOUR SITE QUICKLY WILL DAMAGE IT. "?