Today, using search engine marketing software is more crucial than ever. A large part of online marketing is search engine marketing (SEM). For most online businesses, SEM accounts for the majority of their traffic. This also means that it accounts for the majority of their profits. Whoever does not do SEM is depriving themselves of plenty of earnings. The fact that search engine marketing is crucial to the success of online businesses has not changed. But what has changed is the list of the most effective methods to do effective SEM. It was only a couple of years ago that online marketers would do search engine marketing manually. By hand, they would type in hundreds of keywords in search engines, count the number of keywords on their web-pages, and painstakingly mine data about their top competitors. Such a task was tedious. Only the most committed internet marketers successfully gathered the much needed information.However, manual methods have been now mostly abandoned by the top internet marketers. Today, the top two per cent of internet marketers make use of search engine marketing tools. Such a tool allows them to conduct their campaigns at an exponentially more efficient rate, and with much more success. Without an SEM tool, it may take six months and a lot of keyboard typing to get a website in the highest ten positions on Google. In contrast, it may take just thirty days to do the same thing with the assistance of a search engine marketing tool. But with that said, there are some features that a search engine marketing application must have for your campaigns to be successful.Perhaps the most important feature of any search engine optimization tool is that it automates all of the tasks that take a considerable amount of your time. At the very least, the software should be able to automate keyword research, keyword analysis of your web pages, competition research, the identification of valuable back-link sources, and the tracking of your website’s position. The software should be cutting down your workload from hours into minutes for each significant SEO task. The amount of time you save can translate into more money you make with your online business.There is another feature that you should look out for. The software must have the ability to thoroughly analyze your top competitors’ websites. Analyzing the top ten competitors on Google is usually sufficient. The software should tell you how well your top ten competitors’ websites are optimized. This includes on-page and off-page optimization. Therefore, the program that you buy should tell you the following things about your competitors: domain age, Page Rank, the number of pages indexed, the number of back-links to the page, and the number of back-links to the domain. Additionally, the program should notify you of how well the page targets your selected keyword. All of this information is essential to have. You would be in a much better position to reverse-engineer the success of your competitors.Finally, the search engine optimization tool must assist in link building. Getting links, and more links constitutes the majority of any successful search engine marketing campaign. Any tool that makes this easier is a gift to internet marketers. Find a tool that automates the task of finding worthwhile and relevant link sources. In addition, ensure that the tool automates, or at least facilitates, the posting of the links at the sources you find. A link building feature will immensely enhance your off-page optimization efforts. You will be outranking your competitors with less effort and in less time.The largely dynamic nature of internet marketing has meant a shift in the methods people use to increase the visibility of their online businesses. Currently, the top two percent of online marketers take advantage of search engine marketing software. Such software helps in getting websites on the first page of Google in a much shorter amount of time than it is possible using manual methods. To ensure that you have the most effective search engine marketing tool, you should make sure that it has a couple of things. Firstly, it must be able to automate a variety of tasks. Secondly, it must have the capacity to analyse your online competitors. Finally, it must have a robust link building tool.