SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the common trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to abandon utilizing automatic SEO solutions. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your SERPs. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a field where the amount of boring routine tasks is immense. Doing all of it manually is much more difficult and is a time-waste. So in this review we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to find which actions can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Content creation. There are a lot of products that offer automatic synonymizing of any text. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable site content generated 100% automatically. Obviously, until tools will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to produce a more or less quality automated content. So this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a good, unique content for your website, instead of putting those money into some “powerful” tool that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second crucial SEO action, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to look over a bunch of potential linking partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, having a quality text and a trust rank at the same time. This task can be made automatic a little, because you don’t have to locate appropriate linking websites manually. However, the final resolution still is upon you. It is you who should investigate the quality of websites and measure their relevance to your theme. Locating link partners is as low as 10% of the entire job. The rest is done manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rank. Basically, you need this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing fine, or your activity doesn’t fit the target. One of the biggest mistakes at this step is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. In most cases you don’t need such a large depth. If your site isn’t found within the first 20-30 results – nobody locates it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to restrict web position checks with first 40-50 results. However, if there is a large volume of keywords to check, the process may still use up a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really needed! With an automated position checker you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should stick with search engine friendly applications, to prevent possible worries with your IP being blocked by Google or Yahoo.
4) Social media. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon – all of these can be automated quite fast. However, true gems in that field are still achieved through a manual job.
5) Obtaining keywords related to your field is another job that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself thinking that you can handle without any of the automated tools over there. You can save a lot of time and lose virtually nothing. There are a lot of ways of finding good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
In conclusion, every SEO work needs its own approach on SEO software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still want you to work with your hands and your brain.