Who do I trust.

As an affiliate marketer I recently decided to become a webmaster and begin building my own websites to help build my online income.
I had previously sold affiliate products using a variety of advertising methods. Realising that building Niche websites to rank highly in google could help my campaigns.

Although I have a large amount of knowledge when it comes to computers I am not really into HTML and website building. Researching the ideas behind building a niche website and using search engine optomisation(SEO) helped me to build enough knowledge to get started.

My idea was to create a niche website around a certain product, using wordpress enabled me to quickly add content which helps SEO. This content mixed with some cleverly placed advertising from related content could quickly earn me a few dollars.
While researching all this I managed to find numerous programs to help me on my way. These consisted of both programs to help me build my site as well as promotion and SEO techniques.

With my site built I resisted the urge to automatically go for fast traffic techniques and decided to go with what I had learnt, get it to the top of google using SEO and this traffic is more likely to purchase products or click on affiliate links.

I began this process and using several different programs to do link building, SEO optimisation and website optimisation began to see my site grow.

As I use several different programs I was amazed with the contrasting data I began to recieve. Each program was suposed to give me information relating to my position in google, amount of backlinks, google ranking and alexa ranking.
One program reported my position in google as 276 on a phrase match I was actually at 190, I do not consider that bad for a website online for 4 days.
Other programs had me not listed at all. Same as backlinks where through 4 differnt programs I had anywhere between 0 and 29 backlinks.

If your serious about building any type of niche website I would suggest finding and sticking to one program to track your site statistics. This will save confusion over what your actual site statistics are.

Moral of this story is don't trust evrything you hear.
Knowing the contrasting difference between how different programs work and records data has helped me and saved me money by not trusting any of them and sticking to google analytics. Totally free, not brilliantly reliable and about 24 hours behind reality, then again it's free and simple to use.