Well almost with the exceptions of saving contract documents or if you do web development on any level.  But over the last week, I realized that I don’t actually need any piece of software on my computer for any part of my SEO work.  Technically I could view and create new documents and spreadsheets with Google’s online office solutions.  However,  I won’t use their services just because it seems kinda slow sometimes, but that’s just me.

Let’s look at everything you can do online for SEO tasks;

*Domain registration

*Keyword research (save it in a Google doc)

*Your hosting interface (i.e. cPanel, Plesk) can install a prepackaged Wordpress and use it as an online content management system

*Upload your desired Wordpress template through your hosting interface and activate it

*Install all your SEO friendly Wordpress plugins (same method as above)

*Write the keyworded up web copy (Google Docs) and plug it into Wordpress

*Submit your XML sitemap to the search engines (Wordpress has a plug-in to automagically make it for you)

*Use online tools to quality check the site for any cross browser compliance issues (still test it in the browsers though)

*Submit press releases online about the new site

*Begin your link building campaign

*Record that link campaign into a Google Docs spreadsheet

*Monitor your analytics

*Keep expanding your online branding and awareness

*Bill your client through a business PayPal account, no paper invoices

I know that I didn’t really dive into details, but you get the jist of what I’m saying here.   SEO software has its place with many people, but when you get down to it, it isn’t a necessity to have at all.  Anything that auto-submits your site to dozens of search portals or directories is gonna be bad news in the long run.  You never had a chance to optimize that submission correctly.  Also, many of these portals can tell when software is submitting and makes it hard for it to go through. And trusting a piece of software to locate relevant sites to try and get links from is completely counter-intuitive to the whole progression of recognizing quality over quantity.

This post really serves no purpose today though.  It’s just me and my observation.  The only pieces of software I do use are my web browsers, gFTP, GIMP (Windows & Linux friendly), Bluefish HTML Editor (Mac & Linux only), and OpenOffice (cross platform).   Considering that each of those things are FREE… and I use Linux.. which is FREE… well it’s obvious that I don’t really have overhead for my operational costs.

Except for time.. there’s never enough of that.