| This week, we are pleased to bring you an interview with Eyal Aldema, the creator of the SEO software SheerSEO.
SheerSEO is an unique online Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service that was created in October 2006. It allows you to automate the process of SEO analysis. |
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Can you tell our readers a bit more about yourself?
I am a software engineer from Israel.
My last jobs were managing development teams for companies in the internet industry.
While working as a software engineer, I had a hoby of developing my own small websites. This is where I've found the magic and power of SEO.
I couldn't find good software solutions for SEO, and I knew I had a lot to contribute in this area.
So, I quit my job and started developing sheerseo.com, which is an online software for SEO.
What is the 3 biggest SEO challenges faced by consultants or business owners? Why and how did you create the SheerSEO tool?
The biggest challanges are:
a. Using your time wisely, by keeping away from tedious work. There are so many tasks that can easily waste your time for no reason, like getting back links, checking rankings, verify back links, check page ranks.
b. Develop your own strategy for SEO. There are so many opinions on what is right and wrong in SEO, that you need to decide what you believe in and make a lot of trial and error.
c. Adjusting your site to changes in the search market. It is simply not enough to do a one time SEO work. Things keep updating and you need to stay on top of things.
I've created Sheer SEO, so that there would be a complete automated SEO solution. SheerSEO is still a long way from this vision, but it could be exciting if we had softwares battling each other, SEO softwares against Google, head to head. Well, as I said, there is still a long way to go until this is achieved.
Your website states that you aim to provide tools to make the SEO monitoring process automated and easy.
How does SheerSEO assist in this and how easy is it to use?
SheerSEO assists mainly in tracking all indicators that influence SEO and the rankings of course. Nothing that you can't get without SheerSEO, just the fact that you have it all gathered automatically without the need to spend time and have everything presented in a clear visual format, makes things a lot easier.
Let's just take the rankings for example, you could just check your rankings yourself for a few keywords. But think about websites that have hundreds of keywords and they need to check each week all of them for the main search engines (Google, Bing & Yahoo), that would take a lot of time.
Also, that data isn't worth much without knowing what is the change we made since last time and try to correlate that with the SEO actions that were done recently. With SheerSEO, you have all that data presented in easy to use tables and graphs, which makes it much easier to understand.
Sheerseo is very easy to use. You just fill in your details, keywords and main URLs and you're good to go. All interface is very straight forward.
Two emerging challenges for the SEO industry are adjusting rankings for the effect of localized country search and personalization of search.
Does SheerSEO take these two factors into account and if so how?
I think SheerSEO answers them both. You can select which localization you want tracked for each search term, so say you are in Canada, you can check your rankings for US, Canada and Uk, regardless of your actual location. This is because all collection is done on our servers, which are located all over the world, as opposed to desktop application that will gather the info from your computer, which will in this example show you the results for Canadians.
As for the personalization, Sheerseo collects data that is not personalized, which is exactly what you want.
What innovation does SheerSEO bring compared with desktop based rank checking software like RankChecker or WebCEO?
There are many advantages in using an online service. I'll try to bring a few main points here:
a. You pay per service and not for the application, so you can stop at any time if you think this solution is not right for you.
b. You don't need to worry about the data getting lost. We keep the data on our database, which we backup regularly. In a desktop application, you might lose the info if something goes wrong with the computer.
c. Your data is available online, from anywhere. Since the data is online, you can see it in your computer, your cell phone, wherever you are. With a desktop application, you only have it on one computer.
d. Platform independent. We work the same from Windows/Mac, all you need is a browser.
e. Share information. Think of an SEO consultant, with desktop application, he'll need to send reports to his client. With SheerSEO, he can just provide a login to the client and they can both login and see the same information.
SheerSEO looks to be a powerful automation weapon for any SEO expert to possess. What are the main features in SheerSEO and how should a SEO consultant use them in their SEO activity workflow?
Main features are the rankings reports, the main referrers which shows you a lot of information regarding your main backlinks. The backlink watchdog, that can help you make sure that your precious backlinks agreements are not compromised and the white label solution, that can provide a fully branded version of SheerSEO.
A consultant should use them to track the progress he is achieving for his clients. It makes it easier to prove your client the progress made with the online reports, that can show the historical changes to the rankings, the social media mentions etc.
The nice thing here, is that there is not too much to do, you just need to enter the details once you start working for the client, and the rest is done automatically. Then, the SEO consultant, can easily login to the account of the client, get a clear picture of the status in a few seconds, and decide on the actions to follow. We recommend this repetitive test & react is done weekly, but some SEOs do this daily.
Also, we recommend adding the newly created back-links to the backlink watchdog. This if good for having a record of the links added and also for verify that they are not compromised.
In the last few months you've been busy adding new features like Summary Snapshots, Localized Tracking, Twitter Mentions and Estimated Clicks.
What are some new SheerSEO features that we can look forward to in 2010?
I believe that in this year, sheerseo has become powerful in SEO tracking, and now is the time to start helping with the actual promotion of sites. So, you can expect to see us help you get backlinks and improve your pages quality. I leave the rest to your imagination, cause I don't want to reveal my plans to the competitors, but you can expect those features coming pretty soon.
Any final SEO advice for our readers to kick-off 2010?
Pay attention to the new stuff Google is releasing these days. They promised surprises after the new year.
I also encourage you to try the 90 days SheerSEO free trial today to experience its power for yourself (no credit card is required):
http://www.sheerseo.com/seo-monitoring-tools/signup.html
Thank you for your time Eyal, and we wish you and SheerSEO another great year in 2010!
The interviewer Ivan Wong is a SEM & SEO consultant with MapleCommerce.
