SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the common trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid utilizing automatic SEO applications. It is even said that using automated software can damage your search engine positions. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a sphere where the volume of tedious routine tasks is immense. Doing all of it by hand is much more complex and is a real waste of time. So in this article 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 do automatically.
1) Making content. There are hundreds of products that offer automatic synonymizing of any text. There are products that even claim to create human-readable texts produced absolutely automatically. Obviously, until computers will begin to comprehend the sense of a text, they won’t be able to create a more or less natural looking automated content. So this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a quality content for your site, instead of throwing those funds into some “advanced” tool that does this automatically.
2) achieving backlinks. This is the second important SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to overview tons of potential link partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, having a quality content and a trust rating at the same time. Such work can be automated a little, since you don’t have to locate possible linking sites manually. However, the final conclusion still is up to you. It is you who should measure the quality of websites and rank their relevance to your theme. Locating link partners is as low as 10% of a work. The rest is performed manually.
3) Checking search engine positions. Basically, you use this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity misses the target. One of the most frequent mistakes with this task is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. Usually you don’t need such a large depth. If your website isn’t listed within the first 20-30 positions – nobody sees it anyway. So in a SEO practice it is better to limit search engine position checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a significant amount of keywords to control, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated SERP monitor you can save quite a few of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that yourself. However, you should prefer search engine friendly tools, to avoid possible issues with your IP being blocked by Google or Yahoo.
4) Social media. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon – all of these can be automated quite easily. However, true gems in that field are still achieved through a manual job.
5) Obtaining keyword synonyms related to your industry is another task that is automated easily. And you are really cheating yourself thinking 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 good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
All in all, every SEO task needs its own approach on SEO software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still want you to apply your hands and your brain.