Web CEO – Tried it, now do I recommend it? Afraid not.

Veni, Vidi, Vici. Web CEO is a program that I had bookmarked a year ago to try, then never got round to actually trying it. The web lacks objective analysis of an software like this, so I had never got round to trying it. In that year I have not actually been writing any new sites, those nice people at Google have done so much messing around with serps that it takes a lot of time to sort out ranking problems with existing sites, let alone write new ones. And further, Google are effectively discouraging people from putting up new sites, what with sandboxes, and new registered URL penalties. Tweaking Adsense as proved very profitable

However by September, I seemed to be on top of existing sites serps, and AdSense income was good and did not need any more tweaking of sites. So with time on my hands, in blissful ignorance of Jagger, I had written a new content site for the first time in a year. And had finished it just before Jagger rolled into the world. So I was looking for a SEO tool, and before I searched the inner recesses of my hard drive for my copy of Web Position Gold, I was prompted by the TW “offer” to try Web CEO.

I actually started with the premis that I wanted to buy Web CEO. I have a weakness for new software, and this looked interesting. However first thing I discovered is that the Threadwatch deal is not an "offer", you just download the normal "Web CEO limited function free offer", and that is what I am reviewing here. I have been through every facet of Web CEO that is in this trail edition.

Web CEO's "training and certification" I would ignore, and their HitLens traffic monitoring tool and Web Downtime monitor are not part of the cost package. What is left is the optimisation tool (clunky, on reflection I would not use it), Submission tool (good, but not outstanding), ranking, keywords and links tools (varying in scope and use), site maintenance tools (Dreamweaver does enough for me).

Having seen what Web CEO does, and does not do, I was not so over the moon that I would buy it. I have been back to re-evaluate it against WPG and decided that WPG is a better tool (for me anyway).


My Conclusions in detail
1. It sets out to do what it says on the box, a Swiss Army knife of SEO tools, bundled together to enable you to optimise, submit, maintain and monitor your web sites.
2. Like any kit with a lot of tools the advantage is that they are all together (analogy as with Firefox, I really helps to have things like cookie culler, http viewer, JS disable, etc in the one place). The disadvantage is that is you bought the tools individually you probably could get better tools.
3. Web CEO is only for you if you are prepared to compromise on the quality of some of the individual tools, in order to get the advantages of the whole toolbox being bundled together. Personally I am a “buy the software” guy, rather than “build my own”, so building my own was not an option.
4. I am actually looking for a bundle. On balance I personally would go for an integrated kit to do this series of jobs, rather than having lots of different programs. I guess people like M$ have cashed in on people like me over the years with the “integrated approach”
5. Within the confines of the “free trial edition” I could only make certain judgements on Web CEO. I thought to start with that they were offering TW readers something special – they weren’t!
6. I was quite happy with the product, how it worked, ease of use, results. It did have a number of niggles, but most software presents me with niggles. Would I buy it, would therefore depend on price. And remember I have WPG already.
7. How much does it cost and what do you get for the money was the obvious question that I was left with at the end of my trial – sort of an important question. And they did not make it easy to find the answer.
8. They seemed to be offering SmallBizEdition at $189, Professional at $389, SmallBizUnleashed at $339, a ProfessionalUnleashed at $479.
9. It is unclear whether the paid versions cover Traffic Reporting (a very complicated formula is quoted, which looks to be about $600 a year for a 100,000 visit a month web site).
10. And it is unclear if the paid versions cover downtime checking, at another $657 a year. I suspect they include neither, but beats me why this cannot be spelt out.
11. So why buy one version of Web CEO rather than the other? Not easy to work that out from their web site.
12. If I were to buy it I would need more information on the pricing.
13. Then I would have to compare that with WPG in price and utility. However the objective here is to evaluate Web CEO
14. Maybe I’ll drop an email to Pussy Galore, my “personal Support Angel” in the deepest Ukraine, to get some answers. She was kind enough to send her photo.
13. Dear oh me, another delusion destroyed, her reply says "Feel free to order a hard-copy certificate of CSEM marketer (costs $59)." Must think I am daft, $59 for a certificate. She then tells me the differences between SmallBiz annd Pro versions (not convinced that they are worth $200 difference). And finally "Actually HitLens traffic analysis and Monitoring are the additional paid services, which can be subscribed to optionally and need to be paid monthly. So, none of the editions cover these services." So Web CEO does not offer them, and you do not get them in the price.
14. So if you want to buy what it says on the box, Pro Web CEO version at $389 , plus traffic monitoring at say $600 a year (100,000 visits a month) and server monitoring at $650 a year 9for 5 minute checks). At around $1650 (or $1750 if you want the full training course) it starts to look a bit too pricy for me, for what it does.
15. So after the roller coaster ride, starting with the old bookmark, progressing via enthusiasm in the middle of trying it, I ended up rejecting the software as not being, for me a cost effective program. The guys at Web CEO may not like my conclusions, but nobody could accuse me of not having given it a fair tril. I did the Training and Certification Course, and I went through the whole suite with a new site, from keywords to submission and traffic monitoring. Afraid I am offnow to fire up Web Position Gold again.



What is Web CEO?
Well it’s a suite of software that claims to enable you to “promote, analyse and maintain” your web site.
1. Promoting covers
Research your keywords
Optimise your site for high rankings in search engines
Submit your URLs to search engines
Check your rankings with search engines
Know who links to your site and competition
2. Track and Analyse covers
Some 120 analytical reports on visits, transactions, revenues, etc
3. Maintain covers
Broken link checking, FTP editor, downtime monitoring

Who would use it?
1. Its big plus is that it offers Swiss Army Knife of web site maintenance and promoting programs. It has them all in the one place.
2. There are specialist programs that will do individual jobs better. IT is therefore a bit of a “curates egg”, with some good bits and some not so good bits. It depends on where your balance of “wants” lies, against that benchmark.
3. Idle people like me would use it, if the price offered better value for money against the competition.


Getting Started.
1. I ran into a number of problems almost before even starting. As far as I can see there is no “special offer” for TW, you download the same “free version” as any other punter trying it. And the free version has the sort of annoying things that free versions always have (limited to 30 pages for link checking, for example. Or half the tests in their online tuition are greyed out)
2. I was not keen on their long and obscure licence agreement, which concludes with "Any action relating to this Agreement must be brought in the state courts located in Kherson, Ukraine, and you irrevocably consent to the jurisdiction of those courts and waive any claim that those courts constitute an inappropriate venue or inconvenient forum."
3. Anyway I see from their web site that 170,000 have bought the program before me, so it must have something going for it – though it could just be good marketing. On reflection, that probably means 170,000 downloads, which would be a very different matter. And a whiz through the “testimonials” does not show many familiar names, only one I recognise, and his is a bit of an oblique testimonial.
3. On the plus side I did feel a bit like James Bond when I got an email from their support in deepest Ukraine. A very attractive photo of one Lana Ischenko was promising to be my “personal Support Angel”, presumably from Kherson, Ukraine. I was left unsure if this was really my Pussy Galore, or the some Spectre agent using her as a cover to compromise me.


“Training and Certification”
1. This option on my free copy allows me to take the Basic Course (apparently normally $97 and earn a CSEM (Competent Search Engine Marketer) qualification for free.
2. I run into silly problems here - it asks for my "username" which I never gave it, when it actually wants my "email".
3. It’s all a bit basic (and I mean basic), but I assume it is not meant for "people like me". After a couple of hours, I am getting onto more interesting stuff on how they analyse sites.
4. However it looks as if the "Free Trial" version of Web CEO does not do the really interesting bits. They are greyed out, and I cannot access them on the "free trial version" They are a bit daft getting TW readers to download something that does not actually work fully, and get them to review it. Web CEO asked for reviews, and that is different to offering punters a "trial version"
5. There are 17 steps with about 4 lessons in each step. You have to pass each to get on to the next. It’s all straightforward, though I did get bogged down and needed a second go at a set questions covering the finer points of the history of Hitlens.
6. Eventually got my "Competent Search Engine Marketer" certificate 8 hours later (breaks for dinner, sundowner, DVD, in that time)
7.1. I then discover they want to sell me a hard copy of this certificate for $59. I shake my head wondering why anyone in their right mind would pay $59 solely for this piece of paper.


Research Keywords
1. Research keywords - fairly straightforward - you feed them in and the software does the work. You then just select the keyword searches that look to be getting traffic.
2. It's similar to Wordtracker without some of the whistles and bells features. However it is probably sufficient for most people's needs, including mine, and it is part of the package.

Optimise your Pages
1. The frame with the optimisation advice is a bit small and fiddly to read, but the advice is reasonable - as you would expect it is similar to Web Position Gold, but I have found the WPG interface easier to use. In fact going back to look at WPG, WPG is much better at optimising pages.
2. It does rather annoyingly keep telling me that my keyword is not in the url, and that java script (read AdSense) should be at the end - there should be a way of turning off extraneous comments that you do not want - on the area of screen that they allow, it clutters. For example they say that Google cannot read individual keywords in a multi-key word url, unless they are hyphenated. All optimisation programs depend on making assumptions, and if you are in the business, you have your own views as to what is important. With software to do the job it needs to be intuitive and easy to use.
3. You sort of get the impression that its all about meta tags with Web CEO. Screens full of advice on improving what you have put in for your meta tags. I don’t agree with some of the advice, but I can always ignore it.
4. The "Advanced analysis" would be quicker/easier to use if it, say, highlighted in red the weaknesses that you need to address. The “on page” stuff seems to get the bums rush in Web CEO, and you have to dig a bit to see what they are suggesting you should improve. WPG does a better job here.
5. Their advice was difficult to follow with "keyword repeats". Sometimes it tells me I have keyword repeats in the body, damned if I can see them, and it would help if it highlighted them.
6.The interface is not well designed to enable quick to implementation of suggested changes
7. Anyway, many hours later, all the pages are "optimised" according to their advice.

Submission to Search Engine
1.I liked this and found it easy to use.
2. It lacked an option to select say “only UK sites” or “only English language sites”. A lot of the sites are for Polish speakers, Australians, etc, and its time consuming eliminating the ones that you do not need. OK I should have selected all, and damned the consequences.
3. The only real problem I had was sorting out all the Google regional options. I forgot to open the Google folder and select their regional sites I wanted, and before I knew it was checking around 50 Google countries for ranking.
4. The hand submission section is well done too, sorts you out with submitting to DMOZ, Zeal, Joe Ant, et al. I now have my own “ant hill” and am Zeal certified having passed their test. Seemed quicker than trying to log on with what I had at these sites before.

Links checking
1. The link checking and site maintenance tool is easy to use
2. Blasted free version is limited to 30 pages, so I cannot really give it a run. It did however find a couple of missing meta tags.

Ranking
1.Easy to do, quite quick
2. Has been thought out in terms of not getting your IP banned by the plex. You can increase or decrease your profile, depending on how you want to balance speed against the chance of being “caught”
3. Remember I was doing this with a new site that I only made live last week, but those nice people from Google had done the necessary and it was ranked.

Monitor Uptime
1. Another of the “free version” problems. It only monitors every 2 hours. However it is easy to set up.
2. So with this version, on average your site has to be down for over an hour, before you would get an email report. You may as well not bother.
3. If you want to “upgrade” to get more regular reports, then it would appear that it would cost you $657 a year to get your server pinged every 5 minutes, Or $237 a year to get 15 minute checks.
4. The Web CEO site is somewhat obscure on costs, and I am not clear if this is included in the price, if you opt to pay for one of the other versions of the product, like the Pro version.
5. If you have to pay, then I am sure there are cheaper options, never been fussed enough to monitor this myself. Uptime never has been a problem for me, and has not presented a problem that needs $650 a year spent on it.
6. Discovered you do have to pay for the service with the paid editions, so forget this tool.

Traffic Analysing
1.Signing on for their "HitLens" option seemed straightforward.
2.I put it on another site with more traffic, to see how it worked. They push "Hitlens" tracking system
3. I was his stage unclear whether all versions of Web CEO are charged extra for this or not.
4. Hitlens gives you fairly sophisticated tracking data. Certainly enough for my needs, though some of you may be using better specialised trackers.
5. I put HitLens on another site, an established one with high traffic, in order to see what it could do.
6. Whether it is included with the paid versions of Web SEO is unclear. It would appear to cost around $600 a year on a site with 100, 000 visits a month. In which case there would be little point in going for their version, without researching similar specialst software for this particular task.
7. And they have confirmed that it is not part of the price of Web CEO, so forget this tool as part of this review.