I was browsing Jennifer (PotPieGirl’s) blog recently and found a link to a pretty nice free SEO package she put up from WebCEO.com.

After downloading it, I was pleasantly surprised by the options it offers, considering its price.

Structured into 4 main categories (Find your Niche, Promote your Site, Analyze your Site, and Maintain your Site), it goes beyond traditional free bare-bones SEO programs by offering a more comprehensive suite of tools.  Not only can you find keywords & optimize your pages; you can upload files via FTP and monitor site uptime.

As far as its core SEO features, WebCEO delivers all the basics: Checking Search Engine Rankings, Search Engine submission, Finding similar sites for link exchanges, Managing PPC campaigns, Checking backlinks, Analytics & optimization strategies with their “HitLens” service. Additionally, their “Auditor” tool helps check your site for errors and warnings, helping seal up any leaks due to broken links or misstyped URL.

It’s a bit of a different workspace compared to SEOElite (more of a full-featured desktop application than a widget), but it’s definitely not a bad thing. If I were to mention anything I’d like to see in a future version, at least from a surface level, it would be making the app a little faster & crash a little less overall (trying to access some of the functionality seemed to cause it to soft-lock on me).

Otherwise, if you’re looking for a little extra help in the SEO department, it’s worth a look.

Link: WebCEO SEO Software

I can’t say I’m a huge Firefox plugin junkie… I usually have a tool bar or two running, and maybe a few other utilities (such as the PPC Webspy tool I reviewed here)… but when something catches my attention because I know it’s going to save me time, I’ll probably check it out.

So tonight, I was browsing around Aaron Wall’s SEOBook (great site for keyword analysis) – & found he’s released a pretty nifty tool called, appropriately, “The SEO Toolbar“.

I installed it, and really like it so far – not only does it include a lot of regular tools (PageRank display, Yahoo & DMOZ directory listings info) but goes beyond that and includes specially-designed IM tools such as Aaron’s special “SEO XRay”,  Search Engine Rank Checker, and even built-in RSS reader to help keep tabs on all the latest IM news from your favorite sites (like this one ).

The Site Compare tool is really handy if you want to see how two sites stack up in terms of pretty much all SEO factors – makes it really easy to see where you might want to make changes your site to rank better with the search engines.

If you’re not doing SEO because you’re doing arbitrage or something else that doesn’t involve putting up a website for any reason, you may decide to pass… but for everyone else, this toolbar is going to save you time when it comes to SEO tasks.

Aaron Wall’s Firefox SEO Toolbar: http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar