SEO Software: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the popular trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to try to not utilizing automatic SEO tools. It is even said that using automated tools can hurt your SEO stats. On the other hand, search engine optimization is one of those fields where the amount of tedious routine actions is immense. Performing all of it manually is much more difficult and is a real waste of time. So in this article we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to decide which tasks can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to perform automatically.
1) Creating content. There are many tools that provide automatic synonymizing of any content. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable texts generated absolutely automatically. Obviously, until computers will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to provide a more or less readable automated content. So this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a quality content for your website, instead of putting those money into some “powerful” tool that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second important SEO action, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to overview a bunch of possible link partners and filtering only those sites that are highly related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rating at the same time. Such operation can be automated for a small percent, since you don’t have to locate appropriate linking websites manually. Nevertheless, the final conclusion still is up to you. It is you who should investigate the quality of websites and measure their relevance to your website. Finding link partners is as low as 10% of a job. The rest is done manually.
3) Checking search engine positions. Basically, you want this to evaluate your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity misses the target. 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. Normally, you don’t need such a large depth. If your website isn’t found within the first 20-30 ranks – 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 control, the process may still consume a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really irreplacible! With an automated rank monitor you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that yourself. However, you should stick with search engine friendly applications, to exclude potential 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) Finding keyword synonyms related to your industry is another task 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 hundreds of ways of finding good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
To summarize the above, every SEO job 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.