SEO and marketing software has become quite prolific in the last few years, as more people want to get a web presence that will actually bring visitors in, rather than being an online document thats only good for directions to a company’s offices. Amazingly, people assume that the more you spend on SEO software, the better it is. It is quite the opposite. Some high priced software actually has the same features as a couple of free tools – and that’s the truth. You will have heard these two names mentioned a lot on SEO forums, and Internet Marketing sites.

Traffic Travis and SENuke.

Let us first look at SENuke. This software bypasses SEO altogether and virtually brute forces your website on to Google’s page one by creating hundreds of links and web 2.0 content with your backlink attached. Not only will over-use of a system like this get you sandboxed by Google, but it may also happen when you least expect it (like 3 months into having a good ranking position and after you have earned Adsense money). By creating hundreds of backlinks too quickly, you are openly telling Google that you are indeed using sites to gain links – and this is against Google’s TOS. Whilst SENuke is a massively popular tool that works – you need to use it carefully. SENuke costs over $100 per month.

Another piece of software that is still doing the rounds is Traffic Travis. Whilst this tool does not optimise your site in any way, it goves you a clear cut advantage over some competitors by telling you how their site got to page one in the first place. You will find out how many backlinks the site has, and how many outbound links – along with the age & pagerank of each site in the top 10 or 20. This allows you to put together a campaign that will simply out-link and out-perform what your competitors have. Traffic Travis is available as a free tool with an upgrade being optional.