I was invited to the beta of SoloSeo already back mid November by Bill Slawski at the WMW in Las Vegas… Since then I worked with it and could even get some issues fixed by the owner Michael Jensen pretty fast… a smooth experience.

So what’s SoloSEO about?

In short, this is an integrated set of tools meant to streamline and organize YOUR SEO process, supporting repetitive tasks like link-building, keyword research and all kinds on-site tweaks by either tools or at least a cool checklist feature.

Interactive Checklist for SEOing your sites

And this checklist feature is actually where the whole approach comes from – it’s meant to deal with (parts) of typical project management issues like planning for a site’s SEO and then executing it … hopefully without forgetting important stuff. There are a ton of tasks and a pretty basic checklist already applied to each new project you start there, but you can customize it the way you want – reordering, adding, deleting stuff.

Keyword research and grouping

The Keyword research tool>http://www.soloseo.com/do-it-yourself-seo/keywords.html is one, that you might find in different implementations all over the web or as standalone programs as well, but I like that AJAXish implementation here and the fact that it makes research keywords really simple… it’s not the Keywordelite type of featurepacked power-tool, but it does it’s job 90% at least … in fact keeping your keyword repository in a central place is a good idea…

What I’m missing today is all sorts of re-uses for that keyword repository when it comes to researching links, competitors, etc… those tools got separate form fields to enter keywords again, but it’d be lovely to have those integrated with the kw researcher and have their results linked and stored to the keywords as well (like a super-granular checklist)

Link Building support

There’s a little tool to help you mark pages that you want to get links from and track the stats of the page as well as your progress with getting a link there… that’s a pretty neat idea… that bookmarklet to mark found pages comes in handy and I think I would do the marking on one of my screens and add comments and that on my 2nd screen here…

However I’m missing some feature to configure my email accounts IN soloseo and let it mail from there as well as have a way to put in some general link asking templates that are pre-populated with the page I want etc… note that I’m not doing link begging very often at all, but I bet that people who mail out 50 mails for links per day definately have some copy/paste templates ready, so they’d better be integrated in the tool as well

Competitor Link research

As you always need to do a research on where your competitors get links from, Soloseo offers that as well, but after getting 50 links for 10 competitors I found a list of link urls with a small checkbox to mark them one by one to have them added to the link manager (explained above, to keep track on when/how you got links there) ...

What I’m missing there is that you don’t really have a good way to “bulk add” domains (like if 9 of 10 competitors got a link from a site, I want to have that too, but that isn’t really supported in the interface (altough read about common links feature)

Also to judge on IF I want to get a link there too I’d need to see the urls’ and domain’s stats as well, which is not supported… obviously this would cause A LOT more load on SoloSEOs server… but again, I’d need that to judge on a site’s strength…

bulk adding ALL of them to the link manager and removed them later might be a good workaround to manage this situation

Ranking Reports

Finally we are tracking SEO results by achieved rankings, so there’s a keyword rank checker built in as well… That’s limited to 50 keywords only and there’s (at least I didn’t find it) a way to corelate the ranking reports with the link manager, which would be a very interesting thing to do…

Like adding a link and track that (linked) keyword’s stats based on the added links… This is again where the integration between these separate tools is missing for me, and SoloSeo would have all the data available

Other neaties

Tools like the “Top Subpages” tool or the “Link Search” generator ( that generators queries for “[keyword] add link” and similars ) come in pretty handy, but are available around the web as well.

The content creation tool is a tool that easily let’s you generate a web page and count the words and keyword density in that article for you… I’m not a “density” believer, but this might be useful for those that do and will create their content in that fashion.

The keyword scanner is another research tool that let’s you extract keywords from your own or even other sites. The popularity of each keyword according to Adwords is shown alongside the keyword.

SoloSeo also displays graphs for basic stats like PageRank, backlink counts and updates them every two weeks I think… I wish that automatic reporting would be done for rank checks as well (after all that’s the most important thing to track)

Overall I found SoloSeo a very nice application and I definately like the approach to have work-templates like the checklists or a common keyword database. This will actually improve SEO work colaboration in teams.

However I would love to have SoloSeo even more options and customization tweaks… All those tools are still not integrated as they could be and I’m definately waiting on some kind of plugin-architecture or at least a customization option to add own tools as bookmarklets (well, my browser has 30 r so of them on top, but SoloSeo has the data to pass to them)

Final concern is of course that you have to trust SoloSeo your urls, your way or working (if you maintain the checklists) and all the golden spots you found for linking (in the link manager)... and a lot of high-money sites won’t just be used with SoloSeo because of that.

In any case SoloSeo is a perfect tool to start your SEO efforts if you don’t have the tool arsenal that I accumulated over the last years.

And IF you got that many tools like me I suggest you shoot the SoloSeo team an email asking for improvements – I found them VERY responsive to my suggestions so far!

A more detailled overview can be found here as well as a nice review by Michael Gray here

In a year from now SoloSeo could look a whole lot different if they manage to improve their overall integration and implement some more suggestions… I guess I’ll give it a look in February 2008 again to find out it got even cooler.