SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the recent trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to abandon using automated SEO tools. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your SEO stats. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a ground where the volume of dull routine tasks is huge. 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 tasks can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Creating content. There are a lot of products that offer automatic synonymizing of any text. There are tools that even claim to create human-readable site content produced absolutely automatically. Nevertheless, until machines will start to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to offer a more or less natural looking automated content. So this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a good, unique content for your site, rather than throwing those money into some “powerful” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second important SEO task, 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 strongly related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rank simultaneously. Such job can be made automatic for a small percent, since you don’t have to find appropriate linking websites by hand. However, the final decision still is up to you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and judge their relevance to your niche. Locating link partners is only 10% of the entire job. The rest is done manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rankings. Generally, you want this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing fine, or your activity doesn’t hit the goal. One of the most frequent mistakes at this step is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. In most cases you don’t need such a large depth. 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 restrict web ranking checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a significant volume of keywords to check, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really needed! With an automated rank checker you can save a lot of of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should prefer search engine friendly software, to prevent potential problems 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 field is another task that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself thinking that you don’t need any of the automated tools over there. You can keep a lot of time and lose virtually nothing. There are a lot of ways of finding quality keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
In conclusion, 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.