SEO Software: Pros and Cons
SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
One of the common trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to try to not using automated SEO applications. It is even said that using automated software can harm your SERPs. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a sphere where the amount of dull routine actions is really large. Doing all of it manually 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 understand which actions can be performed manually indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Content creation. There are hundreds of applications that provide automatic synonymizing of any content. There are products that even claim to create human-readable texts produced absolutely automatically. Nevertheless, until tools will start to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to provide a more or less quality automated content. So this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a good, unique content for your site, rather than putting those money into some “advanced” utility that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second important SEO action, though somebody 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 closely related to your one, having a quality text and a trust rating simultaneously. This task can be made automatic a bit, since you don’t have to find appropriate linking platforms by hand. Nevertheless, the final decision still is upon you. It is you who should check the quality of websites and rank their relevance to your website. Locating link partners is merely 10% of a work. The rest is done manually.
3) Monitoring search engine positions. In short, you want this to value your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity doesn’t fit the goal. One of the biggest mistakes at this step 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 site isn’t located within the first 20-30 results – nobody finds it anyway. So in a SEO practice it is better to restrict web position checks with first 40-50 results. However, if there is a significant volume of keywords to monitor, the process may still consume a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really irreplacible! With an automated rank checker you can save a lot of of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should prefer search engine friendly tools, to prevent possible worries 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 keyword synonyms related to your field is another task that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself thinking 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 many methods of finding good 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 require you to apply your hands and your brain.