Rankings that SEO tools display often differ from the ones you see if you cross-check the information manually.

First of all, this may happen if the software you are using does not get updated very often. So, the tool may be using old algorithms to rank your website. (We've talked about this earlier.) Thus, to be on the safe side, go for SEO tools that receive frequent updates, that is, get updates every other week or so.

Another reason for divergent rankings could be that the tool and the search engine draw on different datacenters to rank you site. Thing is, one never knows what specific datacenter a tool or a search engine refers to each time. In such case, rankings usually differ by 1-2 positions. So, it doesn't mean that these results are inaccurate, because you may get different results even using the same search engine on two different computers.

Also, sometimes different SEO tools qualify rankings of one and the same site differently. When ranking your site, some tools take into account webpage results only, which is the right approach, while some tools also consider image, video and news results, thus giving your site a lower ranking than it really has. For more accurate results, go for software that considers webpages only, because your actual competitors are other webpages.

• SEO tools primarily run their analyses based on US search engines like Google.com. Thus, their keyword suggestions or rankings reports are pretty much useless for websites that target, say, British clientele.

Actually, almost any SEO software tool I'm familiar with allows one to pull data for a whole variety of regional search engines. It's just that Google.com is often set as a default search engine to get results for, but that's very easy to change by going to the "Settings" menu. Besides, many tools would offer you to select a search engine you are optimizing your site for.

• SEO software is expensive. So, if you only have one website, it's better to hire someone to do the initial optimization for you, and then you can keep on adding links yourself, little by little. Saves you money.

Sounds reasonable, but something is missing here. Optimizing your site is not a one-day matter; it can never be. It's an on-going, continuous process. Not only will you have to optimize your site to get your first high rankings, but you will also have to keep it optimized and up-to-date as long as it exists if you want to stand your ground. Once site owners realize that, they sometimes end up paying up to $2000 per month to SEO companies to maintain their websites, while a good piece of SEO software may come for as little as $300 bucks.

Besides costing less than manual SEO, specialized SEO software saves you a great deal of time. It allows you to quickly overtake those of your competitors, who can't react fast to changes that take place in search engine universe every day. SEO tools are especially handy at the stage of website analysis, because with their help it takes minutes to collect the necessary data and statistics. For instance, it takes a lot of time and effort to manually check your site for duplicate content, while SEO software can do it in a matter of seconds.

Plus, SEO tools eliminate calculation and other sort of mistakes. They also make data storage and its further application easy. For example, you don't have to record the information on the websites you have exchanged backlinks with - the tool will do it for you. Moreover, with SEO tools you can generate all sorts of reports, so you don't have to toil over those MS Excel spreadsheets.

So, as we can see, a big share of SEO work can be done with the help of tools today. Of course this doesn't mean that SEO software can do the whole search engine optimization job for you. There are still things that only people can do, like writing quality content, deciding on what recommendations to follow, taking final decisions, etc. SEO software is meant to analyze and make recommendations. But what's really great is that it can do the most time-consuming and redundant part of work.

Basically, one may say that SEO software is like a chisel in the hands of a sculptor, and it's pretty useless unless one has essential SEO knowledge. But on the other hand, one may say that there's a huge difference between cleaning you house by hand and doing so with a vacuum cleaner. It all depends on how you look at it. Thing is, it doesn't hurt to let SEO software take over some manual labor ;)