Looking for some SEO Software. What should SEO Software do?

I'm a Marketing Strategy Consultant. I "get" the importance of SEO. But, I'm not an SEO expert, and as you can probably tell from my website, I'm not a technical expert. So, I've been looking for a Search Engine Optimization tool that will help me to "SEO" my own site. This is a "learning experience" for me.

The purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to improve your organic search ranking. That means when someone searches for phrases that are important to your company, that your site comes up on the first page right near the top. That's the goal, but of course it can be very hard to do depending on your industry, your size, and your competition.

What does Search Engine Optimization software do? Here are some things it should do. Wait a minute ... maybe it should do these things. It is important that you manage the use of the SEO software carefully so that you don't end up in trouble with the Search companies (more about that in another post or two):

• Search engine submission - helps you to submit your website to the search engines. This should hit all of the major search engines, as well as multiple "little ones". It also should allow you to do this manually and / or scheduled.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) - Provide practical advice and tips on how to improve your pages to increase their ranking advice for multiple search engines. Optimization advice touches upon factors such as general page properties, head and body areas and off-the-page parameters.
• Pinpoints possible and existing search engine visibility problems
• Give a complete breakdown of problems by the area of page
• Recommend changes to be made so that your site is found by prospective users
• Density Analysis Report - this search engine optimization report gives a breakdown on the density of phrases used on your page. This report helps you to see what keywords and phrases your page is actually optimized for and whether your optimization efforts influence your on-page parameters.
• Web ranking - Organic keyword rank reporting which tells you how you are ranking for each of your organic search terms. Reports should also show trends.
• Link popularity check - allows you to independently measure the number of incoming links to your website.
• Meta Tag generator and editor - creates or modifies keywords, descriptions, and titles for your web pages.
• Page Creator - Creates a "Doorway Page" or "Landing Page" automatically with the keywords you choose. You should be able to edit and customize this page subsequently. (Hmmm ... be careful with this one. A doorway page is clearly Black Hat. The page that is created should be a Landing Page that will be useful to a human.)
  
• Google Friendly API - Support for the Google API
• Keyword Library and Builder - a keyword research tool that will generate a list of suggestion keywords based on the keywords you provide or that it gleans from your site, in order to create or modify a keyword library database and use them for your web sites. You can target important keywords and phrases generated by Keyword Builder to use them to optimize your meta tags.
• Keyword Competitive analysis - Research each keyword's competition thoroughly.
• Page editor - Automatically tune your web pages for top-ranking in the major search engines
• Competitor Analysis - ability to see how your competitors rank and also what they are doing to rank where they are ranking.
• Maintain reciprocal links
• Generate new links from search engines
• Send "Personalized" link invitation messages
• Track and verify your link partners
• Create link pages automatically and promote them
• Site saturation monitoring - this number represents how many pages of your website are indexed by the search engine. (You can find this easily by querying on Google with the phrase "site:www.yoursite.com query".)
• Live product support
• Multiple URL capability - the ability to do run analysis on multiple URLs.
• Reports - capability to check & track your web site position on all major search engines, based on your list of keywords.
• Custom Reports - the ability to customize the reports with things like your logo, company name, and details.
• Send reports by email.
• Export stuff to Excel.
• Engine data renewal - Most of these SEO tools need you to renew your "license" with them each year.

Watch for a few more posts on this subject over the next few days. Ultimately, I'm going to select some SEO software and kick its tires. Will I get banned by the search engines ... I hope not :^).

Have you used SEO Software? Please post a comment to this blog to tell me what you chose, why, and how it has worked out.