Quote "There is no SEO software that can help optimize a site"
-
Hi all
I am a developer for a small agency in the UK. I am using SEOmoz for a couple of our clients and I am also using it to learn from. So far I am finding it a great tool and this forum is also incredibly helpful.
Now I also visit another forum called HighRankings.com and this months newsletter is a list of points that are defined as "SEO Mistakes". In it, point number 2 reads:
"Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of their creators).
Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target audience searches for products, services and information such as yours, and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an emotional connection with your visitors so that they'll convert into happy customers."
Now as a user of SEOmoz I wondered what others thought of this comment?
Many thanks for reading.
Kris
-
Many Thanks Rand (and Geoff).
The thoughts and opinions of other SEO community members (and CEO's!) who have "walked the walk" is priceless advice in my opinion.
Kris
-
Hi Kris - I think I'd just generally disagree with the sentiment expressed in the newsletter (despite usually being a HighRankings fan - I subscribed to their newsletter for years).
Well... Maybe.
SEOmoz's software can't literally optimize your site for you, but managing campaigns, monitoring critical stats that aren't available elsewhere (rankings + link data + social data + traffic data + crawl stats) can be extremely helpful in ID'ing SEO issues and opportunities.
I suppose when they say "There is no SEO software that can optimize my website" it's correct on a literal sense, so perhaps we do agree after all. However, I think there's lots of good ways software can make marketers more efficient and effective than they'd otherwise be.
Hope that helps!
-
They aren't software, there is a difference. But I appreciate opinions differ.
I was going to send you to the Google search results for 'SEO Software', I then noticed that SEOmoz rank and they make use of the page title 'SEO Software Simplified' so I feel pretty foolish now.
In my opinion, there is a distinct difference between what I refer to as 'seo software' and a collection of tools that each carry out a specific process to give useful insight into just one area. The tools provide users with data to then go away and work with by whatever means necessary whereas software is generally a suite with features that attempt to automate much of the 'optimisation' process.
Having spoken to Jill at HR on a number of occassions previously and being quite active within the High Rankings forum and Sphinn community previously, I'm pretty certain they are of the same mindset of myself and not perceiving SEOmoz as 'seo software' as such.
Be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts on this of course...
-
Hi Geoff
So would you say SEOmoz (or its tools) are not SEO Software? Personally I would (even though it's not software in the terms of being natively installed software) however it is a tool to help analyize and optimize a website is it not?
My reason for posting was simply because I have used HighRankings for a long time as a base of information and reading that article made me disagree with what they are saying. There is SEO software (or tools) that will help you optimize your website (or at least suggest optimizing methods) and I was surprised to see they think otherwise.
SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, gShiftLabs etc...
-
Hi Kris,
SEOmoz provide tools to assist you in analysing and identifying issues within your site and its pages. It doesn't provide "SEO software" as such. Most agencies/seo's will use a range of tools to aid their workflow, there is nothing wrong with that.
What HighRankings are referring to is automated garbage that claims to build you 10,000 backlinks while you sleep or at a click of a button it will tell you how more times you have to mention keywords a,b and c to rank for them - it's all mindless nonsense but people to still fall for it and purchase the software.
The bottom line is, there are no shortcuts or cheats with SEO, provide quality that people want, cater for your intended audience and engage with your end users. Everything else from thereon is almost a given (providing you have a decent designer and developer that knows what they are doing looking after your website).
Hope that clears that up...?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My "tag" pages are showing up as duplicate content. Is this harmful?
Hi. I ran a Moz sitecrawl. I see "Yes" under "Duplicate Page Content" for each of my tag pages. Is this harmful? If so, how do I fix it? This is a Wordpress site. Tags are used in both the blog and ecommerce sections of the site. Ecommerce is a very small portion. Thank you. | |
Moz Pro | | dlmilli1 -
When do the "just discovered" links on Open Site Explorer count?
I have been working hard to get follow backlinks but they have all been in the Just Discovered part of Open Site Explorer for a long time. So they don't count in my stats for Domain Authority and such. When do they move OUT of Just Discovered?
Moz Pro | | dealblogger0 -
403 error for a member site
Perhaps a stupid question but SEOmoz registers 403 errors for pages behind a membersite (ie. they are restricted on purpose). Should I noindex these pages or just let SEOmoz register these "errors"?
Moz Pro | | Crunchii0 -
Does Rogerbot recognize rel="alternate" hreflang="x"?
Rogerbot just completed its first crawl and is reporting all kinds of duplicate content - both page content and meta title/description. The pages it is calling duplicate are used with rel="alternate" hreflang="x", but are still being labeled as dupes. The title and descriptions are usually exactly the same, so I am working on getting at least those translated into different languages. I think its getting tripped up because the product page its crawling are only in English, but the chrome of the site is in the translated languages. The URLs look like so: Original: site.com/product Detected duplicates: site.com/fr/product, site.com/de/product, site.com/zh-hans/product
Moz Pro | | sedwards0 -
Looking to Hire an SEO Expert for Travel Site
Hello Everyone, I hope this is OK to post here. I run a travel website and we operate tours abroad. We are slowly expanding after nearly 10 years in the field. I started the company from scratch and currently do my own website design and SEO work. However, over the last couple of years I've lost the SEO connection due to being so darn busy. I started account here with SEO Moz in order to get the ball rolling again. We continually rank high for keywords, publish superb content by great writers, and overall are doing fine. I would just like to ensure this keeps happening and that we have an expert on board to help us in sustainable organic SEO practices. What I'd like to do is hire an SEO expert to help with our site. It might be part time (10 or so hours per week, perhaps?) Anyhow, I would like if this person used SeoMoz and really had their fingers on the pulse of the SEO world. I want all white-hat SEO, help with page optimization, internal link structure, and help getting quality external links. I know that over optimization is something that is now on the forefront of SEO work, so of course keeping this in mind helps. I would like to be kept up to date (perhaps weekly overviews of data and how we are doing) and am willing to make changes as quickly as needed on the site. I would like to see how we rank with competitors and what we need to do to stay on top - for the long term (no short sighted decisions). I want to learn as we progress, not because I want to do the SEO work myself, I just enjoy knowing what is going on. I will not micromanage. I am too busy for that : ) I am not sure what amount SEO experts are paid, but I have a slightly flexible budget. I really want someone will communicate when needed and is thorough in their responses. Attention to detail is a must. I would prefer an SEO expert located in the US but who also knows how to access / think about markets abroad (Canada/UK/Australia). I suppose we can discuss pay once I have a shortlisted group. I am looking to hire and work with someone starting pretty much immediately (even in May). For starters, I suppose our budget might be $500 to $1500 per month. For the first month or so, we might offer payment on a stipend basis just so we can ensure whoever is hired is the perfect fit. It would be great if this person had worked on travel sites before or has at least traveled abroad a few times. But, no worries either way. Thanks so much! Thomas at jbt@journeybeyondtravel.com
Moz Pro | | journeybeyondtravel0 -
2 SEO questions
Hello everyone 🙂 I have two questions for all you fine seo people this morning... 1 - Is there a website that I could go to to make sure that I do not have duplicate content floating around on the web that I am not aware of? Sometimes people take information from my site and post it as their own and I want to make sure that google does not ping me for it. 2 - Does anyone know how I can report a spam site to google? I have filled out the reports many times over the past year and posted it in the webmaster discussion forum and it is still up there 🙂 I sent one email to bing and the next day they contacted me with a thank you email and indicated that I was 100% correct and they removed the site from their index. Thank you all!!!!
Moz Pro | | nazmiyal0 -
How can I increase my domain authority score?
We've jumped up in our rankings, page authority scores, and our toolbar PR over the past year, but our domain authority score remains the same as it was this time last year. I have noticed that for most people's sites, domain authority is typically higher than page authority, and my suspicion is that our domain authority score staying static is capping our page authority potential to some degree. Our SEOmoz scores are quite low for our toolbar PR. I've looked at the SEOmoz page relating to domain authority, and it rather vaguely says 'improve SEO generally across your site'. Other than age, the only thing I can think of is that maybe we have backlinks ranging across too broad a spectrum of topics. Being a web hosting company, we get a lot of links from our customers' sites that aren't related to our industry. Anyone got any specific advice? To provide some context, it's a PR7 website that's around a decade old with links in the hundred thousands. We score just 59 for domain authority. Thanks in advance, Jenni
Moz Pro | | Jenni_HeartInternet0