Looking for some SEO Software. But I don't want to wear a Black Hat.

My mission to find the right SEO system continues...

The one thing to be really careful when selecting (or using) SEO software, are Black Hat SEO techniques. These are techniques that were once legitimate, but have been heavily abused by SEO practitioners, and consequently are hated by the search engine companies. Additionally, they are hated by you, me, and everyone else who uses search engines to find what we are looking for quickly.

Once the search engines discover you are using Black Hat techniques (and they will), they will heavily penalize your rankings. Black Hat techniques include: Keyword stuffing, Spamdexing, Spam blogs, Cookie stuffing, Page indexing, Invisible text, Page cloaking, and Doorway pages. You can find out more at About.com or on Wikipedia.

In short, if you ensure that every page you generate has great content on it, and follows basic rules, then you will end up ranking well.

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. My intent with the SEO software is to help me ensure that I am following the basic content rules. I'm excited to give it a whirl.

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.