SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the popular trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid utilizing automated SEO tools. It is even said that using automated software can damage your search engine positions. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a field where the amount of dull routine actions is huge. Performing all of it manually is much more difficult 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 by hand indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Content creation. There are many applications that present automatic synonymizing of any text. There are tools that even claim to create human-readable texts generated fully automatically. However, until machines will start to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to produce a more or less natural looking automated content. That is why this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a quality content for your website, rather than putting those funds into some “advanced” tool that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second crucial SEO task, though someone could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to look over tons of possible link partners and filtering only those sites that are closely related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rank at the same time. This job can be automated a bit, because you don’t have to find potential linking sites manually. However, the final judgement still is up to you. It is you who should consider the quality of websites and judge their relevance to your theme. Locating link partners is merely 10% of a work. The rest is done manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rankings. All in all, you use this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing right, or your activity misses the target. One of the biggest mistakes here is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. In most cases you don’t need that amount. If your site isn’t found within the first 20-30 positions – nobody sees it anyway. So in a SEO sphere it is better to restrict search engine position checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a significant volume of keywords to control, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really needed! With an automated position checker you can save tons of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that yourself. However, you should prefer search engine friendly applications, to exclude 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) Discovering keyword synonyms related to your industry 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 save a lot of time and lose virtually nothing. There are different methods of finding quality keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
In conclusion, 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.