Essio Studio is officially live today. This isn’t the end because all of the sweat equity that has brought us this far has culminated in the launch – instead this is just the beginning.

We’re taking the Getting Real approach and launching with a fraction of the features we’d love to build. Because if we went the route of waiting to ship Essio Studio until we considered it “feature complete,” you’d never get to use it. There are just too many good features to roll out. (Thanks for publicizing that lesson 37signals gang!)

Instead, we’re starting with the basic features that allow you to successfully track SEO success – specifically search engine postion tracking and search volume metrics. Our release methodology is to improve features in small batches and continually release improvements into the wild. That is the only way we’ll get your feedback on what works (and what doesn’t work).

Expect a lot more to come! And don’t hesitate to drop us a line (or leave a comment here) if you have any questions at any of the following spots:

Essio Studio on Twitter

Essio Studio Support Email

We use Eclipse as our primary IDE for software development. Today I experienced an error I have never seen before, but for all you software developers out there you’ll find it comical:

“An internal error occurred while showing an internal error.”

This takes the cake as far as exceptions go.

I suppose this is one way to recover gracefully from a crappy situation. Now I have to go launch Eclipse and see if it has trashed my local copy of my  project due to whatever error it can’t tell me about. Wish me luck.

Through Web Aware Media (the company who is behind Essio Studio) I do a lot of SEO consulting for small and medium sized businesses. Not the Fortune 500 who have uber budgets and spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out where their sites rank at any given hour for their brand name. Instead I work mostly with entrepreneurs who have worked hard and bootstrapped themselves to the top of niche businesses.

In my work I have not come across good SEO software that either isn’t gimmicky, terribly organized and difficult to use, or just plain overpriced. If I’m missing something, definitely drop me a line and let me know. Sure, there are a lot of piece meal tools out there that let you check the number of backlinks here and your pagerank in Google there. But really, who wants to have to browse around to 20 different questionable websites to get all that information? There’s a better way.

Enter Essio Studio.

Essio Studio is being built from the ground up to be an SEO Swiss Army Knife of integrated SEO tools meant to help you track the success of your SEO initiatives.

The goal for SEO studio is not to tell you exactly what you need to do to rank #1 on Google. Among the SEO experts specific techniques are highly debatable and are always a moving target as search engines change their ranking algorithms. It takes an experienced and educated SEO expert to wade through all the variables that cause a specific website to rank well or poorly for a specific search term in a specific search engine and then determine what to do about it.

Instead, Essio Studio is meant to give you the information allowing you to make great decisions about what to do next so your site ranks well. What Essio Studio gives you are hard data about how your SEO initiatives are actually performing – search engine position, search volume for targeted keywords, statistical analysis on long term trending and performance.

How much time do you spend now trying to track where your website is ranking? Or how many people are searching for a given keyword? Trying to figure out which search phrase is that sweet spot of low competitiveness and high volume searches so you can go after it for one of your web sites? I bet you spent a large amount of your time not focused on your SEO strategies, but instead on just gathering the data and metrics to determine if your strategies are on target.

What if this was all automatic? What if you didn’t have to spend any time gathering this type of information? What if it was there for you when you logged in each day or each week or whenever you had the time. Or if it was emailed to you? What would you do with that extra time? That extra time must be worth something.

All of these reasons are why I set out to go forward with building Essio Studio – it’s meant to be the Grand Central Station of SEO data capturing for SEO professionals or those who don’t consider themselves SEO professionals, but are interested in how their site measures up in natural search results.

Have questions about features? Recommendations for features? Just general comments? No problem! Leave a comment and I’ll reply.