Jim, I'm assuming you mean tools like the Russian software Xrumer or Scrapebox. These are comment spamming, forum posting spam tools.
It's actually not hard to get your hands on this kind of software or to contract the work.
With certain approaches, using the software will get you a lift in the rankings short term, but it's spam or in the SEO world Blackhat, and will eventually get your site cast into the mythical Google Sandbox.
I wouldn't use that crap.
If you ever want to have some fun seeing this in action Google something like "buy viagra" and check out the sites that rank at the top, and the backlinks to these sites. There's always a rotation of high PR .edu sites in China, where they've either been hacked or an administrator has been bought off to place a backlink to the money site, which has ranked at the top for that term.
They'll get shut out of Google's index and play the game again.
Anyhow, aside from the fact that most "experts" (SEO, social media gurus, etc.) are bullshit, my problem with "SEO Experts" is that SEO is a tactic. A traffic tactic.
When most people want or think they need SEO what they're really saying is they want cheap or "free", targeted traffic with commercial intention arriving to their site.
SEO is not always the best solution to get traffic. Again, it's a tactic. In some cases a big one and other cases not really an option.
Jim, I'm sure you already know a lot of this stuff, but I'll share some thoughts. This SEO voodoo is fun to talk about.
To summarize if you all don't want to read to the bottom, one of the main components of SEO, which determines rankings is high Page Rank backlinks. Page Rank is the secret sauce that Google uses to determine a site's authority and is a factor of 0 to 10. The higher the Page Rank of the site that is linking to yours and the more likely you'll get a lift in the search rankings depending on the anchor text used in the link and if Google indexes the link in the first place.
Ok, the longer version.
With SEO one of the first things you want to do is see if people are even looking for what you have to offer on your site in the first place.
If there is existing traffic you can develop an SEO strategy. If there is not existing traffic you will have to create the market for your traffic. This latter approach relies more heavily on advertising, public relations, earned media and content marketing.
An easy and free way to see what people are looking for is to use something called the [url=https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ]Google Keyword Selector Tool[/url].
This tool is for planning pay per click advertising campaigns, which use Google Adwords, but it can tell you how many searches are being performed for terms, it can suggest other terms you hadn't thought of, the average cost per click and lastly how competitive it is to rank for your terms.
It depends on what you're trying to rank for, but usually search terms with 5,000 or more monthly global searches are a good place to start. I wouldn't mess with anything less. Obviously, if you're a plumber in Columbus, Ohio and you want to rank for people who have a stopped up toilet you want to look at the local search results.
Sticking with the Columbus plumber analogy, you would then put your search term in quotes "Columbus plumber" and just Google it.
Queries, which return 500,000 or less results in Google are easier to rank for over time.
In the case of the Columbus plumber, Google returns 8,790 results.
You then analyze the existing competition of who is ranking for that query, which brings me to the two basics of SEO:
1. On page SEO
2. Off page SEO
Most of the guru expert types tend to focus on - on page SEO, but you need BOTH and off page SEO is more valuable in the long run.
On page SEO usually focuses on your content and site structure. With site content you want to have good, relevant content. For the terms you're trying to rank for you want to have what's called a keyword density (the occurrence of your keywords on the page) of around 2% or 4% total including your meta-tags (nearly useless), alt-tags, anchors, etc. Anymore than 4% and Google's algorithm might think you're doing what's called keyword stuffing and your site might be penalized.
In terms of site structure, the site should load fast, have no 404 errors, and have a Robots.txt file. There are lots of other minor things you can do, which help the Google bot more easily crawl your site.
The only other things worth mentioning here are the number of pages you have indexed, and the age of your domain (the older the better), and whether or not your URL contains some of the keywords you're trying to rank for, ex. http://www.ColumbusPlumber.com
That's pretty much it. The rest of it is about off page SEO and I'll get back to the Columbus plumber and the competition in a second here.
Off page SEO is about building links back to your site and promoting those links.
You can earn your links by writing killer articles on your site that attract traffic and links to your articles from other site owners or people using social media like Digg.com, Reddit, Twitter, etc..
This is the best kind of link, but you can also use a link building strategy, which still does work.
Link building can be creating profiles on sites that allow do-follow links, social bookmarking (delicious, stumbled upon, reddit, etc.), directory submissions, article marketing (writing articles on sites like Ezine Articles, Squidoo, etc.), and blog comments.
There are tons of creative ways to build links and some links are more valuable than others.
Other factors to consider with off page SEO tactics these days are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (there are some techniques to index, rank video), and other social, more real-time oriented websites. Google is indexing things super fast these days and is factoring these channels into search results.
So getting back to ranking for "Columbus Plumber".
Aside from the local search results the top of the search results is Rotorooter. Their site has a Page Rank of 5 and 158 other sites linking to them. They're going to be hard to compete against, but even then not impossible.
Now if you look at the second search result in Google you'll see this company:
http://www.lohmeyerplumbing.com/
First they're not in Columbus, Ohio, but beyond that they have a Page Rank of 1 and 0 backlinks.
It would be easy to rank for the term "Columbus Plumber" and rank above them with the right mix of content, backlinks and backlink promotion.
When someone is searching for a "Columbus plumber" they're probably searching because they have a problem, and are going to spend money on a solution so this term has a lot of commercial intention.
If you're a Columbus plumber trying to rank for the term might be a worthwhile pursuit because it means more people with stopped up toilets picking up the phone and calling you after they see your site.
Sometimes it doesn't take much at all for things to rank in Google.
Some forums rank really well in Google. Columbus Underground is one of them.
This site has a Page Rank of 5, 181 backlinks, and 12,000+ pages indexed in Google. The users do the heavily lifting of creating pages with content (constantly), which is one reason forums rank favorably.
Sometimes just one post that may have been Tweeted can get indexed and rank for a wide range of terms.
Remember this thread on CU?
"Queerville" - Avoid Exit Trinity Realty
Well, Google "Queerville" and look at the front page.
Now take a look at the name of the company "Exit Trinity Realty"
There are 17,000 mentions of "Queerville" in Google's index. That forum thread is near the top (3rd or 4th) with little or no work.
Again, it depends on the site, the Page Rank of the site, the pages, content, backlinks and anchor text on those links, which are indexed by Google.
Anyhow, I hope this is somewhat coherent. This is a stream of conscious post here. Sorry if it's not, but as they say "it ain't easy".
If anyone has any questions I'll be happy to take a shot at answering them.
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Launched in August 2010, TheMetropreneur.com is a local online resource devoted to small business development and entrepreneurship. Its aim is to tell the stories of Central Ohio's business community, foster regional economic development and assist entrepreneurs with its resource-heavy focus.