SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the popular trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid using automated SEO tools. It is even said that using automated software can damage your search engine positions. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a field where the amount of tedious routine job is enormous. Performing all of it yourself 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 tasks can be performed manually indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Writing content. There are a lot of products that present automatic synonymizing of any text. There are tools that even claim to create human-readable site content generated totally automatically. Nevertheless, until computers will begin to comprehend the sense of a text, they won’t be able to offer a more or less good automated content. So this action should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a good, unique content for your website, rather than putting those money into some “powerful” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second vital SEO action, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to scroll through hundreds of potential linking partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, having a quality content and a trust rating simultaneously. Such work can be made automatic a bit, since you don’t have to discover appropriate linking websites manually. Nevertheless, the final resolution still is up to you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and judge their relevance to your website. Locating link partners is as low as 10% of the entire work. The rest is done manually.
3) Checking search engine rankings. All in all, you use this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t hit the goal. One of the biggest mistakes with this task 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 website isn’t located within the first 20-30 results – nobody locates it anyway. So in a SEO practice it is better to restrict web position checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a large number of keywords to monitor, the process may still use up a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really needed! With an automated rank monitor you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should prefer search engine friendly software, to exclude possible difficulties 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) Finding keywords related to your field is another task that is automated with minimum efforts. And you are really cheating yourself thinking that you can handle without any of the automated tools over there. You can save hours of time and lose virtually nothing. There are different approaches to finding quality 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 need you to work with your hands and your brain.
Tags: check search rankings, search engine position, seo software, web ranking