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 automatic SEO solutions. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your search engine positions. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a sphere where the amount of tedious routine tasks is enormous. Doing all of it by hand is much more difficult and is a time-waste. So in this article we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to find which jobs can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Writing content. There are a number of applications that supply automatic synonymizing of any content. There are products that even claim to create human-readable texts generated fully automatically. Nevertheless, until machines will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to offer a more or less good automated content. That is why 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 funds into some “powerful” tool that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second vital SEO task, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to consider many of possible linking partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rank at the same time. This operation can be automated for a small percent, since you don’t have to locate possible linking sites manually. Though, the final conclusion still is upon you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and measure their relevance to your site. Finding link partners is as low as 10% of a job. The rest is performed manually.
3) Checking search engine positions. Basically, you use this to evaluate your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t hit the target. One of the most frequent mistakes here is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. Generally, you don’t need that amount. If your site isn’t found within the first 20-30 ranks – nobody finds it anyway. So in a SEO practice it is better to limit web ranking checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a large amount of keywords to control, the process may still require a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really irreplacible! With an automated position monitor you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should only use search engine friendly products, to avoid potential problems 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) Discovering keyword synonyms related to your field is another job that is automated with minimum efforts. And you are really cheating yourself if you think that you can handle without any of the automated tools over there. You can keep a bunch 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.
So, 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.