SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the common trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid using automatic SEO solutions. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your search engine rankings. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a ground where the volume of boring routine tasks is immense. Doing all of it by hand is much more difficult and is a real waste of time. So in this review we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to decide which tasks can be performed manually indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Content creation. There are a lot of applications that offer automatic synonymizing of any given text. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable site content produced totally automatically. Obviously, until machines will begin to comprehend the sense of a text, they won’t be able to make a more or less good automated content. That is why this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a quality content for your site, rather than putting those funds into some “powerful” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second crucial SEO action, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to look over tons of possible link partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, having a quality text and a trust rating at the same time. Such operation can be automated a bit, since you don’t have to discover appropriate linking platforms by hand. Though, the final decision still is upon you. It is you who should measure the quality of websites and evaluate their relevance to your site. Finding link partners is merely 10% of a work. The rest is performed manually.
3) Checking search engine rank. Generally, you want this to value your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity misses 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. Generally, you don’t need that amount. If your site isn’t located within the first 20-30 positions – nobody sees it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to limit web position checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a significant amount of keywords to control, the process may still consume a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated SERP monitor you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should prefer search engine friendly products, to prevent potential issues with your IP being banned 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) Finding keyword synonyms related to your field is another job that is automated with minimum efforts. And you are really cheating yourself thinking that you don’t need any of the automated tools over there. You can keep a bunch of time and lose virtually nothing. There are many ways of finding good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
So, every SEO job needs its own approach on SEO software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still require you to work with your hands and your brain.