SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Software: Pros and Cons
One of the common trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to try to not utilizing automated SEO tools. It is even said that using automated tools can damage your SEO stats. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a ground where the amount of dull routine work is enormous. Performing all of it by hand is much more complex 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 decide 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 provide automatic synonymizing of any text. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable site content produced fully automatically. Nevertheless, until machines will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to produce a more or less readable automated content. So this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a quality content for your website, rather than putting those funds into some “advanced” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second irreplaceable SEO action, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to overview a bunch of possible link partners and filtering only those sites that are highly related to your one, with a quality content and a trust rank at the same time. This work can be automated a bit, since you don’t have to locate appropriate linking sites manually. Nevertheless, the final resolution still is upon you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and rank their relevance to your niche. Finding link partners is merely 10% of the entire job. The rest is performed manually.
3) Checking search engine rankings. All in all, you need this to track your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t hit the goal. 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 that amount. If your website isn’t found within the first 20-30 results – nobody locates 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 check, the process may still consume a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated position checker you can save quite a few of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that yourself. However, you should stick with search engine friendly applications, to avoid possible issues with your IP being banned 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 niche is another task that is automated with minimum efforts. 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 many methods of finding good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
So, every SEO task needs its own approach on SEO tools. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still require you to apply your hands and your brain.