A good search engine optimization (SEO) product will dramatically increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. It’ll boost your visibility and credibility on the web. And particularly for Ecommerce companies, the right SEO software will measurably increase sales and grow your business.

SEO is tedious and time consuming, and the rules and techniques are constantly changing. You can take SEO into your own hands, but entrepreneurs and marketing gurus often find themselves better off purchasing a solid product instead of trying to manage all of the details of SEO on their own. Even for professionals with a firm understanding of SEO, when they look at the time they invest in optimizing their website or sites, they usually opt for an SEO software tool.

The top ranked software products we reviewed provide an integrated view of the site. So users don’t have to have one tool for analytics, another for keyword optimization, and a third for pay-per-click (PPC) management, on top of many other manual activities they perform. Our top web optimization products provide a comprehensive analysis.

You can buy modules of different niche products to manage specific SEO campaign elements. But the most complete SEO software provides:

For more on web marketing, visit Top Ten Reviews’ Search Engine Submission Services site or Top Ten Reviews’ Online Marketing Services site.

What to Look for in an SEO Software Product

With SEO software you want to see measurable results. You want increased leads and increased sales. For the best SEO applications we reviewed, our criteria is based on both standard SEO features and elements that make each one stand out from the rest. We also evaluated the depth and functionality of the help and support for each company.

These are our categories:

Link Building & Management

Effective linking strategies are important to online visibility. The more credible sites that link to your site, the greater priority search engines will give you. We evaluated six sub-categories: Link Exchange Locator, Email Templates, Active Link Verification, Backlink Checker, Link Analysis and Customized Reports.

Competitor Analysis

Outperforming your competitors is really what SEO is all about. It’s a beautiful picture of the free market. You need to know what your competitors are doing and how you compare against them. We evaluated these five sub-categories: Competitor Keyword Analysis, Competitor Website Analysis, Ranking Comparison, Ranking Reports and Customized Ranking Reports.

Keyword Research & Analysis

Sometimes SEO and keyword optimization are used interchangeably. That’s a misnomer. There’s a lot more to SEO than keywords. But there’s a reason for this close association. Keyword optimization is one of the most important elements of SEO. We evaluated these eight sub-categories: Keyword Suggestions, Keyword Search Statistics, Keyword Density Analysis, Keyword Effectiveness Index, Unlimited URLs, Unlimited Keywords, Google AdWords Features and Local Search Tags.

Submission Tools

An SEO company with solid submission features will save you significant time and money. The best allow you to submit an unlimited number of pages to search engines and directories. The best also use credible, white hat SEO methods that are approved by search engines and will protect your site’s credibility. We analyzed these eight sub-categories for submission tools: Search Engine Submission Tool, Article Submission Tool, Submission Website Locator, Submission to Directories, Submission Status Reporting, Automated Submissions, Manual Submission Options and Submission Tips.

Performance Reporting

The only way to really understand progress and track it to your website is with good reporting tools. We were less concerned with products for SEO professionals who needed to report to their clients than we were with products that would report for business owners and marketers optimizing their own organization’s site. We analyzed these 10 sub-categories in performance reporting: Reports with Charts and Graphs, Ranking Checker, ROI Calculator, Index Checker, Traffic Statistics, Visitor Analysis, Performance Trends, Report Expert, Alert Reporting and Automated Reporting.

Help & Support

We carefully evaluated the help and support these companies make available to their customers. As with SEO product features, there were a range of options here. Some companies make it difficult to reach technical support with product questions. Others are proactive, providing live chat, user forums, online tutorials, phone based support and more. SEO Studio, for example provided support along all 10 of our sub-category areas: Live Chat, Email, Phone, Ticket System, Intranet, Forum, Tutorial/User Manual, Support FAQs, Money-Back Guarantee and Trial Download.

To learn more about the best SEO software companies we could find, read the Web CEO review. Be sure and also check out Advanced Web Ranking and iBusiness Promoter, as well as other articles on SEO software.