Dear website owner, also webmaster, also SEO!

If you seriously want to make some good cash from a website, you must be thinking of the most effective ways. Don't you fancy your site at the top in search engines, with huge traffic and six-digit sales? Sure you do, and the sooner you can explode your bottom line, the better.

Each day more and more internet marketers become SEO software fans, and you bet they're going the right way! SEO tools save us SEOs huge efforts and endless time.

Almost 100% sure, you must have heard of SEO Elite software — there's so much buzz about this tool on the Web. And if you ever happened to give your email address to SEO Elite's owner Brad Callen, SEO Elite must be following you everywhere. It fills in your inbox and junk mailbox with almost everyday letters, offering you a subscription or a course or a new tool or a video. And if you didn't buy it yet, Brad Callen will be offering, asking, begging, tempting and simply compelling you to pay $47 monthly and $564 for SEO Elite.

While other SEOs and webmasters keep arguing the value of SEO Elite software, and SEO forums are full of discussion of different SEO tools, an SEO newbie is still left alone to make a choice: Which software to use?

Paying someone without a try is risky. As Brad Callen doesn't give you a trial on his site, someone else had to review SEO Elite for you, so read on. You'll know some interesting facts about this SEO tool, and you'll find some free SEO tools that are a good alternative to SEO Elite.

Here are tasks that you can try doing with SEO Elite. Let's see who's good at them.

SEO Elite for analyzing competitors' links

The biggest part of high rankings comes from outstanding links. A good link strategy is your #1 weapon against your online competition, and the sure-fire way to get more traffic.

And if you're dead serious about growing your site's sales, you must take a chance to analyze the links of your competition and to create a linking strategy that's better than theirs.

Let's compare SEO Elite to its free alternative SEO SpyGlass Free Edition (a tool from the SEO PowerSuite set). Any of these tools helps you to control your own links and to analyze your competitor's link-building.

When taking a test drive of the tools, we tried to keep the initial settings in both software products similar, as much as we could. SEO Elite was asked to collect a maximum of 1,000 results from Google and Yahoo! for the site www.cnn.com.

And we kept the same settings in SEO SpyGlass: 1,000 backlinks per search engine, in Google and Yahoo! for www.cnn.com

Because in SEO Elite you can't turn off collecting IP Address, Backlink Verification, Page Title, Anchor Text, Outbound Links and Total Links, we had to include these data for collection in SEO SpyGlass. We also turned on Alexa Rank, Google PR, Website Age and Whois Info in both tools.

Ready, steady, go!

Both tools worked quite fast. After 1 hour 46 minutes, SEO Elite stopped and displayed results: it collected only 772 links. And SEO SpyGlass worked for 37 minutes to collect 1857 links. At first sight, what we see is that SEO SpyGlass works at a faster speed and gathers more links.

Sure this looks strange — such a huge difference in the number of results.

SEO Elite only showed 772 links that your competitor has, and that's almost 3 times fewer than SEO SpyGlass found. Think of it: when analyzing your potential links, you only see one third of them, and the huge rest of 1,085 is missing. Which means, anyone using SEO Elite constantly overlooks and has no chance to control the majority of links.

To outrank a competitor, you need to get links from their best sources. And if you don't see some of them, you have fewer chances to find winning links. Let's check if that's really that serious — missing those hundreds of links.

Let's check if that's really that serious — missing those hundreds of links.

For example, if you are a user of SEO Elite and your site competes with www.cnn.com, SEO Elite collected only 772 links for you, and SEO SpyGlass has 1,085 links more. What are these missing links?

We'll take a look at just a couple of links that SEO SpyGlass found and SEO Elite didn't. Two of them come from http://digg.com. That's the well-known social network with millions of visitors and high rankings. It's over 8 years old — almost as old as search engine optimization, and many site owners make their fortunes thanks to links from digg.com. With SEO Elite, you'd be missing this link. And thanks to SEO SpyGlass, you now know what social networks your competitor is using.

Look at the screenshot to see links from digg.com in SEO SpyGlass:

What do you think of the quality of these links? SEO SpyGlass shows all important factors that prove these links are outstanding. Domain PR 8, Page's PR 8, very good traffic rank, quite good link value, Yahoo and DMOZ listings and other things. A link like this from digg.com would profit you a lot — because it would bring you very good traffic.

For some reason SEO Elite didn't find these links. You see: digg.com isn't in its list:

Now how about another link: http://cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet/radsat.html

Here's how it's shown in SEO SpyGlass:

In SEO Elite, it's nowhere to be found:

Though SEO Elite missed it, this link could also earn you good cash: look at the domain's and page's PageRank — it's five and seven — very high. This site has very good traffic (Alexa Rank is 2,036), and the estimated link value is outstanding. Again, if you know nothing about the possibility to get this link, you might be losing visitors and money.

So think if you're ready to pay $564 annually for a competition research tool, if there's a risk that you miss very profitable links? Remember, Google is crazy about links: just one link can bring you from nowhere to be found to Google's top results, and bring you several thousand visitors in one day.

We're not saying that SEO Elite doesn't do its work well, but if someone wants to be sure they're not missing some profitable links, it's better to rely on SEO SpyGlass.

But let's get back to www.cnn.com's links.

SEO SpyGlass shows you all Wikipedia links: there are 336 of them, while SEO Elite didn't find even one.

Links from Wikipedia are very special. Look at the "Links Back" column in the screenshot of SEO SpyGlass below:

All links from Wikipedia have a nofollow attribute. It means that search engines see these links, but they do not add you rankings thanks to them. You can get a thousand links from Wikipedia, but the site won't move higher in Google or Yahoo!. Seems like there's no use in this kind of links? Yes, that's probably what SEO Elite's developers thought. But that's not the right approach.

Look at the Alexa rank column now. It shows you the domain's traffic rank. For Wikipedia, it's 8! Wikipedia has the 8th biggest traffic in the world! Such traffic rank is outstanding, and it means billions of visitors every day. No need to explain, a link from a site with such huge traffic can send you more visitors than you could imagine. And three hundred thirty six links will bring you three hundred thirty six times more!

So if you wish to discover your competitor's hidden traffic sources that you might also use, SEO Elite will hardly help you. Don't pay a penny for this tool, download SEO SpyGlass for free and see how you can make your paychecks grow like mushrooms after the summer rains.

Besides the links we just talked about, there are still several hundred more links that SEO Elite missed. Just think how much traffic and money an owner of such software can miss! Good news is that you don't even have to pay for a tool that ensures you get all the money you deserve.

With Free SEO SpyGlass, you can be absolutely sure you're controlling ALL links that search engines allow to find. Start finding the most profitable links for your site. Download SEO SpyGlass for free!

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	SEO SpyGlass Free Edition
Finds a small portion of backlinks	Finds all possible backlinks
Allows SEO level: Basic	Allows SEO level: Professional
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: Free   Download instantly >>

And here's a video that shows you how SEO SpyGlass really works:

Click here to download SEO SpyGlass Free Edition

Building your linking strategy with SEO Elite

The more you know about all possible links, the better. Each detail about a potential link lets you estimate, how much good it will bring you, and if it's worth getting. With that in mind, SEO Elite gives you extra opportunities to analyze competitors' links. Check them right now.

SEO Elite will analyze all backlinks that it found and show you how often (in per cents) each keyword is used in the body, title and anchor texts on all linking pages.

Now compare these data with SEO PowerSuite and see how much smarter you'll be with its SEO SpyGlass tool!

This is the analysis tab of SEO SpyGlass:

Along with the same facts as SEO Elite, SEO SpyGlass will give an insight into each smaller detail of a prospective link. Compared to SEO SpyGlass, whatever you knew about links before was just basic baby-talk.

While SEO Elite always analyzes all links, in SEO SpyGlass you can choose only some of the links to analyze and concentrate on the ones that are most important to you. For example, you can select links with Google PageRank 8, then just click the "Analyze" button...

...and here's what you see:

• How many links come from the same or from unique IP address. You'll know links from unique IPs that look most natural to Google and sitewide links that can easily be among the main reasons why competitor's site ranks #1. Your chances can also be good with sitewide links, if you use them carefully.

• Links that come from the same country. You'll pick out good-working links — those that come from the same country where you want to rank high.

• The percentage of links that have a Nofollow tag. You'll find links that may bring you streams of visitors, no matter what search engine rankings you have. Sort these links by Alexa traffic rank, and you'll see the links that can bring you very good traffic.

• And much, much more...

With all that information at hand, you'll have greater chances to find the most profitable link partners for your site. With SEO SpyGlass, you'll build the most reliable linking strategy and be sure to get thousands of visitors willing to leave their money on your site.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	SEO SpyGlass Free Edition
Gives brief analysis of keywords in the elements of backlink pages	Gives deeper analysis of keywords in the elements of backlink pages and brings out details for any number of chosen backlinks
Allows SEO level: Basic	Allows SEO level: Professional
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: Free   Download instantly >>

If you wish to build your linking strategy with a tool easy for a baby, but choose links like only a professional could do, download SEO SpyGlass right now!

Doing onpage optimization with SEO Elite

Do you keep a close eye on your site's content? Every SEO and webmaster knows that without optimized content even the best-quality links may be useless. Your site must look like a candy, and not only to people. Also, to search engines. This is what we call search engine friendliness.

Let's see how SEO Elite lets you deal with the task of on page optimization, or optimizing your site's content. In SEO Elite, you can enter keywords that you're interested in, and it will show you some numbers important for optimization of any site's content:

• density — how often a keyword is used in the text,
• prominence — how close a word stands to the beginning of text,
• link density — how often a keyword is used in the links text,
• link prominence — how close the word stands to the beginning of links' texts,
• h1 — the use of keyword in the page's biggest heading,
• h2 — the use of keyword in the page's second biggest heading,
• meta keywords — how often a keyword is used in the page's meta keywords tag.

Here's how this analysis looks like in SEO Elite:

You can look at SEO Elite's table and try to figure out what should be changed on your own site.

And now let's take a look at another tool from SEO PowerSuite. It's called WebSite Auditor and you can download it for free.

While SEO Elite can analyze only one site, the software called Website Auditor will analyze your site and ten of your competitors' sites. This will happen within just a couple of minutes, and you'll not only see a detailed "audit" of your own site.

You will immediately see why your competition is ranking higher than you in a particular search engine, for example Google or Yahoo!. And you'll see what you have to do on your pages to rank high in your particular niche.

Moreover, if you've got a paid WebSite Auditor that's only $99.75, you needn't think "What should I do with my own site?" Right in front of you, in plain text, there will be professional SEO advice, written personally for you, for your particular site. And it will tell you each step to make your site search engine friendly and to quickly increase its chances to get high rankings.

Still even if you don't want to pay a dime, with free Website Auditor you're getting so much important data that you'll never see in paid SEO Elite.

Download Website Auditor for free and start optimizing your site like you never could with SEO Elite!

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	Website Auditor Free Edition
Finds onpage characteristics for one page	Finds onpage characteristics for one web page and ten competing sites
Analyzes only some of page's element: page's h1 and h2 headings, body, anchor texts and meta keywords	Analyzes all page's HTML elements: Body, title, headings, bold and italic text, anchor text, image alt attributes, meta keywords etc.
Does not give optimization advice	Allows SEO level: Professional
Allows SEO level: Basic	Gives detailed optimization advice based on competition research
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: Free   Download instantly >>

Using SEO Elite to build links and contact link partners

SEO Elite does its best to let you find link partners on the web. It will look at your competitors' link partners, search the web for sites related to your keywords, scan all links from other related sites. And it will even try to figure out which of these links have better value: it'll show you these potential links' Google PR or Alexa traffic rank.

After that, SEO Elite lets you write an email request for link exchange, using variables to personalize it, and send the email to all link partners that seem interesting to you. Quite helpful, right?

Now take a minute to learn what else can be done to make link building more effective: check SEO PowerSuite. It includes LinkAssistant — the tool that lets you do link building practically hands down. Besides giving you more factors to judge links quality beforehand, it's got predefined templates for all link management correspondence. All your emails will be personal, and you're not only saving hours and days because you're not writing them yourself, you're sure your emails will mention all things important to link partners.

Moreover, you can build 3-way links, deep links — those that lead to different pages of your website, rather than to only your homepage, and arrange links with different anchor texts. That's how LinkAssistant makes your links look more natural to search engines and therefore bring more value for your rankings.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	LinkAssistant Free Edition
Looks for link partners.	Looks for link partners.
Sends simple link partnership requests.	Sends personalized link partnership requests (supports bulk email sending), receives replies and lets you use predefined email templates for all link management activities.
Generates link pages.	Generates link pages that match your site, and uploads them to your website right from the software.
Doesn't do 3-way or deep linking, no variations of anchor text	Allows 3-way linking, deep linking (getting links to pages other than your site's homepage) and lets you arrange links with different anchor texts.
Allows SEO level: Low Basic	Allows SEO level: Professional
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: FREE Download instantly >>

SEO Elite at checking if link partners still link back

That's a thing beginners often forget to do: check if people who promised you a link really gave you this link. Moreover, you have to make sure that they are not cheating. For example, a link can exist but use a "nofollow" attribute and therefore never add a portion of a point to your Google rankings.

SEO Elite has a part to check if link partners really link back. Here's how it works: you enter your links page, for example www.yoursite.com/linkpartners.html and SEO Elite looks up through all sites to which you link from this page, and it says whether they really link back to you. So this works when you want to check your reciprocal links.

Now how about trying out LinkAssistant from SEO PowerSuite? That's the free SEO Elite alternative that gives you possibilities that you never find in SEO Elite:

1) With LinkAssistant, you can check all kinds of links, not only reciprocal links. If you're using other link patterns (which are getting more popular), like three-way linking or links ring, or if you have one-way links, you will still save days of time, doing all checks with this fast software.

2) You find all existing links, not one link per site. So link partners will put more than one link to you. While SEO Elite only looks up one link per site, LinkAssistant will find all links that a site has.

3) You get 17 different factors that determine quality of each link (SEO Elite only shows you 10), like Google PageRank of the domain and of the link page, Alexa (traffic) rank, DMOZ and Yahoo! directory listing etc.

4) LinkAssistant works 40 times faster. It will take SEO Elite about one minute to check one link partner, while LinkAssistant only needs 1.5 seconds, which is 40 times quicker.

5) You can disclose any cheating techniques a link partner might use. LinkAssistant tells if there's no link at all, or if the partner uses nofollow tag or redirect in the URL etc.

Besides LinkAssistant is doing some unique link building tasks that are totally impossible in SEO and that can save you weeks, if not months. Want a detailed comparison of these tools? Compare SEO Elite with its free alternative right now.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	LinkAssistant Free Edition
Checks only reciprocal links.	Checks all kinds of link patterns.
Shows if a link partner links back.	Shows if a link partner links back.
Doesn't deal with cheating.	Indicates if your link partners are using any cheating techniques.
Gives some info on link quality.	Analyzes links for 17 different factors to determine the value of each link.
Pretty slow	Works 40 times faster than SEO Elite
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: FREE Download instantly >>

Using SEO Elite to see how many pages are indexed

SEO Elite will tell you how many pages of your site are indexed by search engines. However, there's a totally free and much better way to get this information, and even much more!

And, it's so baby-simple. Go to Google and use this command site:your_domain,
Just like we did for www.cnn.com:

This way, within a second you not only see how many of your pages are seen by search engines, but which is more important, you know exactly which pages will get found (this is what none SEO tool will tell you).

For example, you sell T-shirts from your site, and you added a page with seasonal discounts. Your time is limited, and it's very important that this page gets found by Google soon. So how do you know for sure that Google already found it? SEO Elite software won't tell you that. But you'll know that yourself in a few seconds and absolutely for FREE, with this simple site: command.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	"site:" command
Finds how many pages are indexed	Finds how many pages are indexed
Does not find which pages exactly are indexed	Shows which exact pages are indexed
Allows SEO level: Basic	Allows SEO level: Professional
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: FREE

Submitting articles to article directories with SEO Elite

Good that it's included in SEO Elite, but it still won't save you a second of your time submitting articles. What SEO Elite does is just open article directories in its own browser to let you fill it out with a standard form-filler. You can do the same right now, without any software.

And how about good manners? When you're trying to submit an article to a directory and SEO Elite fails to do that, it won't even say "Sorry". Just a normal SEO Elite screen, as if nothing happened.

Sure that's just a joke. No one's asking software to bow and scrape, but... you expect it to work. And if it doesn't, you'd like at least to see how to fix that.

Anyway, automatic submission is an old song. Just think: after you spent hours to write a good article, or you paid someone else to write it, would you like to waste this money and time and trust a machine to publish it? If you want to be sure that your article is submitted to the right categories in quality directories and that it will bring you the desired rankings and traffic, you can only trust a human to do that. Always submit your articles by hand, or ask another person whom you trust to do that.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	Manual article submission
Opens directories in its own browser.	You can open article directories in your standard system browser as well.
Lets you use a standard form-filler to complete submission forms.	You can use any free from-filler in your browser. For example this Mozilla Firefox AddOn for auto-filling forms.
There is big risk that your article won't get submitted correctly.	You are sure that you controlled each submission.
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: FREE

Using SEO Elite to check where your site ranks

Let's compare two SEO software tools for checking rankings. SEO Elite (price: $47 monthly) and Rank Tracker (Free Edition).

For example, we'll check where www.seoelite.com ranks for its two important keywords seo and seo software in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
Here's the screen with ranking results from SEO Elite:

SEO Elite gathered rankings fast, and now you can see them in the above screen. Sometimes rankings differ in the software and in the browser by one or two positions. For example, SEO Elite says the site www.seoelite.com ranks #2 in Google for seo software, and if you go to Google in the browser you may see it's #3:

Or, here're results from Rank Tracker:

Where it says www.seoelite.com is 56 in MSN for seo software, and in the browser it looks like 57. That's also normal.

That's natural — you and your software may look at different datacenters, and get slightly different rankings. SEO Elite, or Rank Tracker, or any other SEO tool can show rankings that differ by 1 or 2 positions from rankings in the browser.

Checking Google results

Now let's go to Google and see where www.seoelite.com ranks for seo. SEO Elite's tool says it's 69. But in Google it is not 69 in fact. And it's not even in top 100. The result that SEO Elite software is giving is wrong.

Look at the screenshots of pages 7 and 8 of Google — they would contain SEOElite's link, if it ranked 69^th or near that.

Rank Tracker shows www.seoelite.com is not in top 100 for seo, and after a check this turns to be right.

Looking at results for Yahoo!

Now let's type in seo in Yahoo. SEO Elite software says their site www.seoelite.com is 26. But that's not right. It's 19, just like Rank Tracker showed. Again, the results from SEO Elite software are wrong.

MSN rankings

After that, we can go to MSN and look through top 100 results for seo. The site www.seoelite.com isn't there. But it's 57 for seo software, while SEO Elite simply can't find it at all (and Rank Tracker reported 56^th place).

This simple and quick test proved that if you have to choose between SEO Elite and a free tool Rank Tracker, and if you wish to be sure you always get rankings that are right, the only choice is Rank Tracker. Even the free edition of Rank Tracker is more reliable than SEO Elite and lets you control your rankings with confidence.

Bottom Line:

SEO Elite	Rank Tracker Free edition
Indicates some rankings correctly, some rankings are wrong and some are not found.	Indicates all rankings correctly and presents rankings data clearly.
Price: $47 monthly ($564 annually)	Price: FREE Download instantly >>

As a conclusion to there series of mini-reviews, we have to add that SEO Elite can be as good as other tools only for absolute beginners. It gives you some basic insight into your and your competitors' optimization strategies and lets you get started. It gives you some SEO education, however alternative SEO tools also come with a free SEO guide.

So if you wish and can afford spending some time to play SEO before starting serious optimization, you may do well with SEO Elite, but you'll surely need better and more functional software in the future.

Or you can start seriously optimizing your sites right now, with the tools that are easy for a newbie but give you reliable and professional help.

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