SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Software: Pros and Cons
One of the recent trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid using automatic SEO tools. It is even said that using automated tools can hurt your SEO stats. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a field where the amount of tedious routine actions is really large. Performing all of it yourself is much more complex and is a real waste of time. So in this text we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to determine which jobs can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to do automatically.
1) Creating content. There are many products that provide automatic synonymizing of any given text. There are products that even claim to create human-readable site content generated fully automatically. Obviously, until machines will learn to comprehend the sense of a text, they won’t be able to produce a more or less good 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 throwing those money into some “powerful” utility that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second irreplaceable SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to examine tons of potential linking partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, with a quality content and a trust rating simultaneously. Such operation can be made automatic for a small percent, since you don’t have to find potential linking platforms manually. Though, the final judgement still is upon you. It is you who should investigate the quality of websites and judge their relevance to your site. Locating link partners is merely 10% of the entire job. The rest is performed manually.
3) Monitoring search engine positions. Generally, you use this to evaluate your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t fit the target. One of the biggest mistakes here is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. Normally, you don’t need that amount. If your site isn’t located within the first 20-30 results – nobody finds it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to limit web position checks with first 40-50 results. However, if there is a large volume of keywords to check, the process may still require a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really irreplacible! With an automated rank checker you can save a lot of of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that yourself. However, you should only use search engine friendly applications, to exclude possible problems 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) Obtaining keyword synonyms related to your sphere is another task that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself if you think that you don’t need any of the automated tools over there. You can save a lot of time and lose virtually nothing. There are hundreds of methods of finding quality keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
To summarize the above, every SEO task needs its own approach on SEO tools. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still need you to work with your hands and your brain.