Software program information and feedback

Hi everyone,

Background:
I am a newbie at SEO, my main business is real estate brokering and mortgage brokering. Both businesses are changing from face-to-face meeting to acquiring prospects via the internet. My web presence is important to me. I have 3 sites - one site is on the first page of about 10 search engines (including Google) PR4. The second site has been around for about 4 and one-half years - falling in SERP (I think that is the right term) so that it is lost. I use a webmaster to maintain it. Oh, this site has a PR3. The third site is relatively new - it has been up for about 3 months and not being developed as agressive as site #1, it does have a PR1, surprising.

Accomplished:
1) Selected keywords and did analysis on Wordtracker to get a feel if the words were good.
2) Looked at the competitions websites to see what they were doing with keywords and the other meta tags.
3) Changed keyword phrases where needed and description. Used various tools to accomplish it.
4) Used a tool here called keyword analyzer and ranks.nl(?) to see if my homepage had the proper keyword phrases, density and prominence.
5) Worked on gaining link popularity - finding links - what a pain!

I can see on site #1 that link popularity does wonders for search engine placement. The links from this site have been placed on site #3 and emailed site owners that I have added them to site #3. Hoping that if they linked to site #1 they will link to site#3 as well.

Recently I found that a site not related to real estate has moved into the #1 position for some of my keyword phrases. I was shocked, so I started to probe around the site and see how many links the site add - surprise over 150 for Google and overall more than 15,000. As I probed deeper I found that they were a product called AddWeb - which is a web site promotion software suite. One feature is the link trader. Obviously, this is what I am interested in.

Has anyone used it? If so, what did you think of it? Also, there is another link finder software program called Arelis. Has anyone used? If so, what did you think of it?

What are the pro's and con's of using either of these software programs to increase my link popularity.

Thanks.

I have been in the business since 1996 and I have never used any of these "tools". Using them is against the Google quality guidelines and should be avoided at all cost if you what to do ethical SEO. Clean up titles, copy and markup on the site in question and get a few good links with the achortext you are tageting and you should be back in the fight. If if doesn't work get more links and write more copy.

How ever if you like to try some "black hat" strategies let me know. I am here to help.

The best of luck.