SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the recent trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to abandon utilizing automated SEO solutions. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your SERPs. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a sphere where the amount of boring routine tasks is enormous. Doing all of it by hand is much more difficult 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 understand which jobs can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to perform automatically.
1) Content creation. There are hundreds of tools that present automatic synonymizing of any content. There are tools that even claim to create human-readable site content produced totally automatically. Nevertheless, until tools will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to create a more or less natural looking automated content. That is why this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a quality content for your site, rather than throwing those funds into some “advanced” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second irreplaceable SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to consider hundreds of potential linking partners and filtering only those sites that are highly related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rating simultaneously. This operation can be automated a little, because you don’t have to locate appropriate linking platforms manually. Nevertheless, the final decision still is upon you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and measure their relevance to your website. Finding link partners is as low as 10% of a work. The rest is performed manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rankings. All in all, you want this to value your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity misses the goal. One of the biggest mistakes at this step 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 listed within the first 20-30 results – nobody locates it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to restrict web ranking checks with first 40-50 results. However, if there is a significant number of keywords to check, the process may still use up a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated rank 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 potential 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 keyword synonyms related to your industry is another job that is automated easily. And you are really cheating yourself if you think that you can handle without any of the automated tools over there. You can keep hours of time and lose virtually nothing. There are many approaches to finding quality keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
To summarize the above, every SEO work needs its own approach on SEO tools. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still require you to work with your hands and your brain.