As many of you may already know I have a close connection with the Rank4 team and have been testing their ranking tool and some of their new tools.

History of Rank4
Rank4 was originally meant to be a subscription based indexing and ranking tool based around many tried and tested practices of social bookmarking submission, directory submission, link baiting, search engine baiting and other proprietary techniques. While this aspect of the membership site is still intact it is changing its focus slightly away from simple indexing and ranking tool to a fully blown community site with many tools for generating and scraping content for a vareity of platforms.

Current status
It is currently treading water with the Rank4 tool making sure that all facets of it are working and stay current and expanding on the nature of the system by rotating through hundreds of accounts with hundreds of link baring websites.

The interesting part of the site is the new tools that will be available to members they are now going to be offering a content generation system for forums and blogs based around Yahoo Answers and article sites (such as ezinearticles and many more). They have a downloadable script in the works that is a PHP based server side script that mimmicks the features of PRStorm, the bonus of this is that many servers have very quick connections and it will search for sites to spam based on keywords you input rather than a standard list of overused URLs.

Another tool in its very early stages of development is the auto commenting script based around a common blog plugin that allows a very easy way to generate hundreds to thousands of instantly approved blog comments, again based around keywords that you a targeting rather than a static list of URLs.

Conclusion
While Rank4 has been disappointing with its constant delays and lack of any real press releases (other than the inside scoop by myself) it is showing some real promise, hopefully I can get my hands on the other tools (Yaho Answers content poster for forums is fully working and tested by myself) to test and will get back to you guys to let you know how it is all looking.

Until I have seen the whole package I will reserve total judgement as a lot can happen with the Rank4 tools techniques in a matter of weeks let alone months. If you want to be the first to know when Rank4 opens its doors go there and sign up now, it is free and they wont send any mail that isnt related to opening its doors.

If you want to know anything more about Rank4 leave a comment below and I will make sure that it is answered at some point by them, they do check here fairly regularly.

Roboform  (download here) is not the same as the other applications I will be looking at in this round up of directory submitters, what makes roboform different is the fact that it isnt a directory submitter at all and if im completely honest it isnt useful to me as a directory submitter. So why the hell would I be sat here writing about a program that has nothing to do with the topic of choice and is no good to me as an SEO? The short answer is that its functions suit the purpose of directory submissions and lots of people swear by it so it cant be all bad. Lets look a lil deeper.

What exactly is roboform if it isnt a directory submitter? In short it is a web browser extension that remembers form details (that you want it to remember) and can auto fill at the click of a button. This is usefull in directory submissions as it will remember all teh usual form field information, URL, title, description etc and fill it in for you at the click of a button. This obviously has many more uses than simple directory submissions but it fits in just nicely with the needs of a directory submitter.

Roboform is a cheap (read free) browser extension with a small footprint and offers lots of features that will come in handy to any SEO given enough time to find uses for it. It is definitely a great time saver when it comes to remembering passwords or filling in form after form, what it isnt good at though is finding directories to submit to. This is where I fell out with roboform, I found that with the amount of submissions I was wanting to do I couldnt be arsed to find the directories to submit to and then manually navigate to the submission page, I know im lazy but meh im also worried about efficiency.

So basically for the cost (free) you would be daft not to at least give it a try, especially if you already have a good list of good web directories (dont forget that the best ones often arent on semi-automated application lists (digixmas and submiteaze) and these give the most benefit) then Roboform is absolutely what you will be looking for. If you are a professional SEO looking for software to semi-automate 100s to 1000s of submissions in the space of a day you are not looking for roboform.

SubmitEaze is a desktop application that runs similarly to DigiXmas in that you input a set of criteria such as name, URL, titles and descriptions. It also supports all the randomisation you would expect in titles and descriptions so it has plenty of functionality. SubmitEaze has one very distinct advantage over Digixmas in that it is a pay once use forever style program which costs $65 (costs less than the submission price for 4 websites through digixmas) which is quite considerably cheaper if you are looking to submit more than just a couple of websites through the software.

I bought this program a long time ago and was pleasantly surprised with the functionality that it brought with it, it splits the directories into free, paid and reciprocal (free but you must provide a link to the directory from your website before you can submit your site) and the whole package is very easy to use and geared towards the non to middling technically minded people. It isnt the quickest software out there, taking a lot longer to submit to each directory (about 12x slower than digixmas and 15x slower than fast directory submitter). It really comes down to how many sites you are going to be submitting through the software and what level of speed you need.

If you are starting out and you just want to submit to a bunch of sites without getting to know a system inside out or you dont quite fully understand the hows and whys of better directory submission this is a great tool for holding your hand through the earlier stages of learning to do proper SEO. Also if price is a big deciding factor for you you can do a whole lot worse than SubmitEaze.

If you are a professional SEO with little time on your hands to burn then you may want to overlook this offering as the $15 per website of digixmas will save you lots of time and effort. This is not for the professionals out there though it is a great place to start for those with less than a year or two of SEO and web promotions under their belt.

Digixmas, I have to state right now, is one of my favourite directory submitters. It is quick, simple to use and has a no frills user interface that just works and gets the job done. In stating this I am not saying I will give it preferance or saying that you should go ahead and get it and use it blindly. It is my favourite for one reason only in that it is easily the quickest submitter I have come to use.

As most professional grade softwares digixmas is capable of rotating titles and descriptions to create a more human-ised directory submission process, SEs just love randomness in anchor text. As you first use the software you need to enter your account details to enable the software and download the 1700+ free (non-reciprocal) directories list. From here you will need to start a new campaign and enter  in some of your basic details like name, username and password, URL, titles and descriptions and some keywords. There is room for as many titles and descriptions as you could possibly think up so go crazy and stick in a big bunch of them.

When you have a new campaign setup you can start submitting right away. There is a free version which allows submission to 100 directories, this takes very little time and is a great way to showcase the good features of the software.

Once the submission process has been started the software learns what categories you are submitting to and after about 15 or 20 begins to predict, with some accuracy, your desired categories. Good thing about digixmas is the input system, any alphanumeric keypress is logged in the captcha field whereas all arrow keys are mapped to the category select box which makes choosing a category and filling captcha info is very quick and intuitive.

If you have some websites that you wish to add to lots of directories quickly this is a very good tool, sadly it doesnt handle any paid submission directories or any reciprocal directories, but why pay for something that you are getting free elsewhere, and SEs dislike recip links anyway so its no major loss.

Now pricing is a little different here than it is with most products, it uses a sliding scale for number of campaigns (or sites) that you want to submit. A single site is $15 and price goes down to $150 for 20 sites, good about this is you are only paying for the sites you want to submit but the bad is that you are paying for the service for EVERY site you ever want to submit ever. Could get costly in the long run but I think the time saved using this software is beyond the cost of submission.

If you have a lot of sites that you want submitting you could do a lot worse than this, it isnt the cheapest but it is definitely one of the fastest, absolutely the ultimate tool for any SEO company looking to streamline their directory submissions.

In my last roundup I looked closely at some of the markets Social Bookmarking Tools and how well they stack up against each other and the expectations of them from customers. Well now it is time to talk about another mainstay of the day to day SEO and that is Directory Submissions.

I know some of the more seasoned SEOs will be thinking that we have jumped in a time capsule and travelled back in time a few years but you may be surprised to hear that directory submissions alone can do absolute wonders for a sites rankings. If I was to tell you that I got a site to the #1 position in Yahoo and MSN and #4 in Google for what I would say a mid to highly competitive keyphrase within a couple of months ( and its sat there for over a year now) based purely on directory submissions would you still think it was worthless?

When I started in my line of work of being a general web designer I was always pissed off that my sites, no matter how beautiful or clever, would never reach the top SERPs. I would tear my hair out wondering what these miserable MFA sites had that mine didnt, easy answer was links. Most average SEOs realise early on that you need links to survive so I set out to find easy ways to gain links and at the time directories were all the rage.

I will not lie and say that directory links still hold the same weight they used to but if you have a white hat or grey hat site that you want to stick around in the SERPs long time you should really justify a bit of time to submit to directories, there are some great tools out there that will make the arduous task of manual submissions out of the equation, some tools get you submitting upto 10 a minute.

The tools I will be looking at today are:

• Digixmas
• Roboform
• SubmitEaze
• Fast Directory Submitter

Right away I can tell you there are a couple of real stand out softwares here that need talking about as they are head and shoulders above the others in terms of ease of adding lots of sites, some cost more than others but lets get to the reviews so you guys can make your own minds up.