Mon 18 Feb 2008
95% Of SEO Tools Are Just Crap Linkbait Toys That Waste Time
Posted by Shaun AndersonDo you spend hours looking at your site, your client sites, searching the internet for new resources and tools to give you that ‘missing insight’, reading the latest blogs to see if you’re *finally* going to get a bit of useful information to give you a lead on the competition?
Get on with your work!
There is absolutely no substitute for adding good content to your site, refining your titles, obsessing and messing about with your internal link structures & anchor text. These SEO Tools you hear about (and I have played with a lot!) are usually either broken or return pointless data, which is a pity, because there used to be some good ones.
I honestly don’t have any public seo tools I really care about these days that offer really useful information…. perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.
Edit; Obviously I didn’t take too much time working on the % calculation 
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I agree, I only use two tools for SEO, one’s a firefox plugin and the others, well, a search engine.
Comment by Colin Boyd — February 18, 2008 @ 3:32 pm
It is easy to get bogged down in “SEO tools” that really don’t help produce a result. I do use tools but over time have found a set that really do produce and I only use them to support.
I agree that 95% are useless. You have to find that 5% that are actually useful and doing so waste a lot of time.
Comment by Chris Estes — February 18, 2008 @ 6:32 pm
Cheers to that!!! Sorting through the mess of tools out there is almost painful. I’ve also found that some of the truly valuable ones that do become successful then change to being a paid tool. Then the painful hunt for a new free one begins…
Comment by Todd Daniel — February 18, 2008 @ 6:32 pm
Good point well made! Bring back Overture keyword assistant updates. Has anyone found a decent alternative since they stopped updating the freebie tool in 07?
Its not free, but the Webposition software works quite nicely as an all round SEO toolkit.
Comment by Ben Whitnell — February 19, 2008 @ 10:40 am
I was wondering: if you come up with original content in the form of a blog post (say, number 1), and that content is then re-published in another blog / on another site (call that ‘number 2′) - presumebly number 1 has more weight / important in the search engines than number 2?
And then you go an change the content, in some way, in the original post (number 1), would number 2 then overtake number 1 in terms of weight / importance on search engines?
If not, how much content do you have to change so that it loses its status as the original post / original source for the original content, and instead becomes duplicate content?
Eamon
http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk
Comment by Eamon — February 19, 2008 @ 7:50 pm
I use two tools regularly - Wordtracker for volume and Shoemoney’s SERPs tool to track results. I’m sure there’s a better free SERP-tracking script than Shoemoney’s, but I continue to use that one out of habit. It’s faster than entering everything into Google separately.
Comment by Stefanie — February 19, 2008 @ 7:59 pm
Hi Shaun,
I am sure you say that because you haven’t had the time to play with RankSense. I am going to officially launch it next week at SMX West. Check it out and let me know if we are part of the non-crap 5%.
Cheers
Comment by Hamlet Batista — February 21, 2008 @ 5:04 am
I’ve recently stumbled across this tool:-
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
It seems like it’s in the upper 5 percentile to me… why not ‘gis it a whirl
Comment by John - The Ink Man — February 21, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Hey John tried yes it’s of limited use - I played about with it but got a bit bored. I’d much rather play about with Hamlet’s
If any body else has any neat tools feel free to let me know.
Comment by Shaun Anderson — February 21, 2008 @ 7:49 pm
hi shaun
we’ve been using the linkdiagnosis tool john mentioned and think its pretty good. surprised to hear you say that, what was it about it youre not impressed with?
Comment by SEO ibiza — March 3, 2008 @ 1:45 am