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I will
guarantee you that you will not "magically" get your client's site into search engine listings. It is a
tedious and time-consuming process that is never
complete.
I am not personally familiar enough with either of the software packages that you mention to say whether they "work", but I can tell you that
you have to look specifically at what they are doing for you to assist you in the
process of getting and maintaining listings for your client. If
they do something that is helpful to you, then they "work" to that extent.
The
search engine placement issue breaks down into two parts, listing and
ranking.
Listing involves
submitting pages that meet the requirements of each engine,
waiting until the listings have time to take effect, and checking to confirm that you have succeeded in listing. The
software you mentioned can help you with that administrative process.
Ranking, that is, getting your
client listing to appear near the top of the list of search results, is much more
complex, and is really a business for specialists. If you want to rank at the top of searches that have lots of
competition, you will have to
engage someone who does this work full time.
There is a lot you can do
on your own to improve your positioning. The site I use for information is
"www.searchenginewatch.com". This is a good starting point, and there are
lots of other sites with good information on them.
The
basics of high ranking are:
1.
Good web page design that has lots of content, loads quickly, and is
compatible with all major browsers.
2. A good network of
reciprocal links, that is, links from other sites pointing to your site. (They are called "reciprocal" because the usual procedure is "give one to get one".) More links are better, and links from high traffic sites are better than links from low traffic sites.
3. Lots of
traffic. Everything that you can do to drive traffic to your site
helps, and to have a really good site, you should do it all. This includes references in print ads, on business cards, in newsletters, in Usenet discussions, in presentations, in conversations, etc.
Getting back to your
three options, learning to do it yourself is an option, but will take
time and effort to become proficient. Using software can help with certain aspects of the process, but you
have to learn how to do it anyway, so that option is part of the first, just using
certain tools. Hiring a service is perhaps the fastest and
best solution, but you have to know enough about the process to be able to select a good service.
As for the
information that you are reading, the situation is changing so fast that the information is
always out of
date. The only question is, "how out of date is it?" This is why
ranking is a business for specialists.
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