Is SEO Elite Recommended?

Disclaimer: This is an honest review from an ex-SEO Elite user. I am not an affiliate of SEO Elite and what I am going to say is based on my experience. It is very different from all other reviews of SEO Elite. This article is not served to bash Brad Callen and SEO Elite, but merely my thoughts of the software.

As many of you might have already known, SEO Elite is search engine optimization software. Many big guns are endorsing it. I thought I can’t go wrong with the experts’ recommendations. I bought the software hoping that it could help my website ranking. Sure I am a sucker for internet marketing product but I did spend fair amount of times using SEO Elite in my SEO efforts, only to find that it is disappointing.

Let’s look at some of the key features of SEO Elite:

- Analyze backlinks in different search engine;
- Find and email high Page Rank partner;
- Analyze Allintitle, Allintext and Allinanchor;
- Verify if your link partners are still linking back to you;
- Check if your site is ranking for specific keywords/keyterms;
- Find out how many pages are indexed in the search engine;

Before I buy SEO Elite, I did my fair share of research on all the relevant tools such as Arelis, Optilink, Webceo, Internet Business Promoter (IBP). SEO Elite was a good piece of software that helps you to find links partner and analyze your competitors. Now that search engine has evolved so much, reciprocal linking is dead. Gone are the days where the more incoming links you have, the higher your rankings are.

Matt Cutt (Google’s engineer) has made such comment on his blog:

“The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice.”

In addition, when you look at the Google’s quality guidelines:

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.”

Both statements confirmed that low quality links will hurt your rankings. Sure enough quality links that share the same theme to your source can help you to rank well in search engine, but I doubt SEO Elite can help you to do that because it does not look into co-citation data.

Another seemingly attractive feature of SEO Elite is finding and emailing Page Rank partner. In my humble point of view this method has become obsolete. Google algorithm has evolved so much that Page Rank does not seem to carry much meaning. On the contrary, the quality of a website is determined by its age and how natural the link profile is. I have a PR5 contents website that brings in less than 50 visitors a day from the search engine because it does not have many quality incoming links. One of my associate has a PR4 website that bring in thousands of visitors daily because the site has a few incoming links from the authority websites. Go figure.

I have used SEO Elite to emails potential links partner only to get into trouble. I used SEO Elite to find about hundreds of potential links partner, I then sent them link request emails via SEO Elite. Guess what, few of them gently replied me asking me not to spam them; one went as far as filing a complaint to my ISP. Some did reply to my request, but when I take a second look at their website I do not feel like linking to them as their contents do not offer much value. You can still secure quality link partners with SEO Elite but you have to constantly keep track on them, you have to constantly monitor their quality and check if they are still linking back to you. This is a very time consuming task. The quality of your link partners are totally out of your control. I feel that the time and efforts should be spend on developing quality and unique contents that will attract unsolicited incoming links.

Another issue with SEO Elite is the members forum. In the sales letter, Brad claimed that there’s a SEO Elite members forum. In fact you do not need to buy SEO Elite to register with the forum. I have no problem with that but I feel like Brad should not say that it is a “members-only” forum, the information is misleading.

As Aaron Wall (author of “SEO Book”) pointed out, there are few free tools that will do the job of SEO Elite, including Tattler, Backlink Analyzer, and Digital Point Keyword Tracking tool. He also recommends HubFinder to find high quality links.

In a nutshell, SEO Elite is not recommended.

Last but not least...

In the his sales letter, Brad claimed that his weight loss website has top three ranking for many competitive keywords like “lose weight”, “weight loss”, & “weight loss tips”. As I checked from Google, his website is not even listed in the first page for the above mentioned keywords. I think feel the claim in the sales page is misleading.