14 DAY TRIAL // Each day more and more individuals and companies try to google their way to success. Good design and content are the two main attributes for successful websites, but they need a third ingredient, often the essential one: good promotion, in order to get as much visitors as possible and gain a high ranking on most search engines.
WebCEO is a program packed with ten powerful tools built to help you promote and run your websites, for the free version that we have tested. After installing it, you have to create an account using your email address (be aware that free email addresses are not allowed). Once you finish this step, you will be asked to download & install a new Knowledge Base and then you will be taken to the WebCEO Quick Launch screen.
The Quick Launch screen has five main areas organized to give you a fast start towards your final goals - promoting, analyzing and maintaining your website like a pro or even better. Let's take them one by one and see what they're all about.
The first area is Control Panel and has the following features: Add New Site, Project Manager, Client Manager, Scheduler, My Account and Settings. First thing to do in WebCEO is to add your website's address, description, and place it into a folder (or create a new one, if you like). The manager's duo can be very useful for managing projects and your client accounts. The scheduler can be a strong ally in your battle for time and efficiency. Finally, the Settings feature is a good place to start, since getting to know what can be changed in WebCEO means understanding most things that can be done with it.
Next, we have the Find Your Niche area. It has three important features that enable you to research the best keywords for your site, find out what changes you should perform in order to get a better SE ranking, and, of course, apply them. The feature works perfectly and it's very easy to use - you just have to enter your keyword or phrase and the program will analyze your website. In the end, you will get results for your website and be able to compare them to your competition (websites using the same keywords or phrases).
The third area in the Quick Launch screen is dedicated to the promotion, and to be more specific, it helps you submit your URL to search engines and directories, analyze your link popularity, search for potential link exchange partners and manage your paid search campaigns.
The good thing about this option is that you enter your general web site details once and then you are able to submit it to multiple search engines without just few mouse clicks, using the Auto Submission mode. If needed, you can select the sub pages you want to submit from your site.
For those who wish total control, there is also a Manual Submission mode available. I must say that, if you want promotion, with WebCEO you'll get all that you want. Finding link exchange partners, evaluating their websites and managing your correspondence with the site owners is easy as 1-2-3 using the Find Link Partners option.
The Manage PPC Campaigns option is another great time saver for the SEO professional, enabling you to easily access all popular PPC search engines (just think about how much time you can waste searching "PPC search engine" on the Internet and visiting hundreds of web sites to find the ones that suit your needs!), create new PPC accounts or add datasets for the existing ones.
Once you have completed your first promotion tasks, I am sure you will need to check the results. The fourth main area was conceived especially for this task, as its name says - Analyze Your Site. It can check your rankings and get your traffic reports. In the free version you can only check your rankings based on 5 keywords while using the traffic reports tool for your site requires activating the HitLens service, as a 15-day free trial. To get a taste of what HitLens does without activating the trial, you can see its results for the demo site.
We covered the first four areas of the Quick Launch screen, and now I'll get to the last one, created to help you maintain your site. The Maintain Your Website area has a built-in FTP client, a site quality checker and a site monitor. The last two options are extremely useful to track down broken links and other errors and to monitor your site uptime.
If you are stuck, you can find help in two ways - the Help button placed to the upper right of the Quick Launch screen or the support area, at the bottom. From here you can take a SEO Course at WebCEO University, access the Support Center or view the excellent online tutorials available here.
Overall, WebCEO is an impressive software that can help saving a lot of wasted time and also replace a couple of other individual applications by itself. It has two view modes, the Classic style (useful for experienced users, a classical interface with six menus) and the Quick Launch style (all commands can be issued from the Quick Launch screen).
The Good
You don't have to face any nag screens, and you also get the basic online training and search engine marketing with virtual certification (97$ value). Sounds like a great deal for free, doesn't it? The software is covered with 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee, while the bundled services (HitLens , Website Monitoring Service , Knowledge Base Support) are not.
The Bad
Payments that may be charged to you when purchasing the product will not be limited only to the program's price; you may also be subject to additional costs if you enable any pay-as-you-go services, like HitLens, website monitoring and/or need to extend your Knowledge Base Support. Also, if you run out of money and they can't charge your credit card for these services, they will stop providing them until you are able to pay. If they cancel any service provided to you, any statistical data will be lost! Beginners in the SEO field may find themselves lost, since most of the options require good SEO terms knowledge.
The Truth
WebCEO can be a bit complicated for the beginners, but it compensates with an excellent Help system and its free video tutorials. When it comes to pricing, it may not be cheap, but once you get to know it and unleash its power, you will be happy with your choice.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
