SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the recent trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid using automatic SEO applications. It is even said that using automated tools can hurt your SEO stats. On the other side of the coin, search engine optimization is a sphere where the amount of boring routine work 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 find which actions can be performed manually indeed, and which ones are better to do automatically.
1) Writing content. There are a lot of applications that provide automatic synonymizing of any given text. There are tools that even claim to create human-readable site content created totally automatically. However, until software will learn to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to offer a more or less natural looking automated content. So this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a quality content for your website, rather than throwing those funds into some “advanced” tool that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second crucial SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to look over many of possible linking partners and filtering only those sites that are strongly related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rating at the same time. This job can be made automatic for a small percent, because you don’t have to find potential linking sites by hand. Though, the final decision still is upon you. It is you who should evaluate the quality of websites and rank their relevance to your theme. Finding link partners is only 10% of a job. The rest is performed manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rank. Basically, you use this to track your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t hit the goal. 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 big depth. If your website isn’t found within the first 20-30 ranks – nobody sees it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to restrict web position checks with first 40-50 results. However, if there is a large volume of keywords to monitor, the process may still consume a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated rank checker you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that manually. However, you should prefer search engine friendly applications, to avoid 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 fast. However, true gems in that field are still achieved through a manual job.
5) Obtaining keyword synonyms related to your field is another job 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 save 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 software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still want you to apply your hands and your brain.
Tags: check search rankings, search engine position, seo software, web ranking