Keeping track of your SEO efforts can be overwhelming. Until recently, my own efforts have been pretty scattered. Whenever I needed to check my keyword lists, I logged into Google Adwords. If I wanted to work on directory submissions, I dug up my copy of the Vilesilencer SEO friendly directory spreadsheet. And you don’t even want to look at my SEO bookmark folders. You could get lost in there for days.

But I’m starting to get things under control with Solo SEO, a project management tool that helps you organize all of your SEO efforts into one place. When you log in, you see an interface very similar to the Wordpress dashboard. Each domain you manage is a project, and under each project you can organize several topics. For example, my company sells medical equipment, so that would be my main topic. But I might also create topics for hospital beds, exam tables and other key product lines.

If you click on the Tasks tabs, you can organize your to-do list. If you’re not sure where to start, Solo SEO has built-in checklists to help you get going. The Keywords tab houses a number of handy tools. The Keyword Finder searches Google Adwords, WordTracker and Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) to help you find relevant keywords. You can also use Site Scan to pull keywords directly from your pages.

Under the Reports tab, you can find out how well you’re ranking for your chosen keywords. The report will be delivered promptly to your e-mail inbox, or you can check it out in your browser. You can also find out who is ranking in the top 10 for your keywords, or enter your competitors’ websites to check for those specifically.

The tab I’ve been using the most recently is the Links tab. Confession: I hate link-building. It’s slow and tedious, and it sometimes it seems like the only people who will add your links are the absolute bottom-feeders of the Internet. Solo SEO doesn’t eliminate the bottom-feeders, but it does make the process a bit less painful. It keeps track of who you’ve contacted for a link, the status of that link request and other important stats, like the linker’s PageRank, in-bound links and a general indicator of page strength. You can use a bookmarklet to add new sites automatically (although I have found the bookmarklet to be a bit buggy).

But besides tracking your link-building efforts, Solo SEO can help you find new places to look for links. A great place to start is checking out your competitors’ links, and then getting a link for yourself on the same pages. I have also found the Link Search tool to be very helpful. You type in a keyword, such as “medical equipment”, and Solo SEO spits back a number of search phrases like “medical equipment ‘add url’ ” and “medical equipment directory”. This is a great way to search for relevant links, rather than simply spamming the general directories.

There’s a lot more inside Solo SEO that I haven’t mentioned, so I encourage you to give it a try. There’s a two-week free trial, and after that, it costs $29.00 a month for up to five domains.

Disclosure: As I was finishing up this review, I noticed that Solo SEO has an affiliate program and I signed up. So if you like SEO Woman and want to support this blog, please sign up for Solo SEO using my affiliate link. Thanks!

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