I like WebCEO and IBP (I have a pro version of WebCEO and tried the demo if IBP). What I am not following in this thread is the differences between WebCEO and SEO Elite (or SEO Spyglass). I use WebCEO for rankings reports and such, but I do not think it has the indepth inbound link analysis that SEO Elite has. WebCEO will count links coming in, but SEO Elite has a lot of extra details on the those links which I think is invaluable to any SEO effort (especially when checking on an competitor's linking strategy and where they are getting their best inbound links). Even though these packages overlap in some areas, I think that it would not hurt to have both, if budget is not an issue. Just my 2 cents and no, I do not work for any of the companies listed above.
For a trial period only. It is not enough to see the numbers once, the most important thing is to keep monitoring your site's performance on search engines over time and to correlate that to the SEO changes that have happened. I think that the most important thing that should be done if you want to improve your site's positions in search engines is to start monitoring all the related indications like positions, pagerank, number of indexed pages, keyword density, main back links, etc. over time.
That is why I do not like software that gives you only some days of trial. As I told about WebCEO in my previous post, I should admit, that there is not a trial period with it, but a free edition
Damn, I thought I was the only one giving service for free Anyhow - your welcome to try my service, no download is required, your site will be polled periodically (default is weekly) and once a drop in any indication occur you'll get alerts by email. Please see the demo in the signature to see what it does.
I have all three (IBP, Web CEO, SEO Elite). I think they're all good utilities but as others have mentioned ... doing 'manual' SEO is generally better. I think a lot of people follow the same cycle. You use SEO software for a while and then find it's easier just to properly target your pages as you're creating the website. With that in mind, I'd say Web CEO is the best if you really must have software ... mainly because they have a free version, so you're not forking out your hard earned for something you may stop using after a few months. Gary
Manual SEO has nothing to do with monitoring your site. Monitoring SEO indications by hand is nothing but a waste of time! Think about a site that sells hotel vacations and need to monitor search terms: "hotel Miami", "hotel new york", "hotel Chicago", ... so there are hundreds of search terms to monitor. Each of them is interesting since it will convert into cash eventually. Now all this needs to be done on Yahoo & Google. Really doesn't make much sense to look for each of those SERPs by hand. You are welcome to use my software for free to do that. No download is required.