SEO Software: Pros and Cons
SEO Software: Pros and Cons
One of the popular trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to avoid using automatic SEO applications. It is even said that using automated tools can hurt your search engine rankings. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a sphere where the volume of tedious routine work is immense. 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 determine which actions can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to do automatically.
1) Content creation. There are a number of tools that present automatic synonymizing of any content. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable texts produced 100% automatically. However, until tools will learn to comprehend the sense of a text, they won’t be able to offer 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 website, instead of putting those money into some “advanced” utility that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second vital SEO action, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building needs you to examine a bunch 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 task can be automated a little, since you don’t have to find possible linking websites manually. However, the final resolution still is up to you. It is you who should check the quality of websites and rank their relevance to your website. Locating link partners is only 10% of the entire job. The rest is done manually.
3) Checking search engine rank. Generally, you want this to track your efforts – whether you’re doing right, or your activity doesn’t fit the goal. One of the most frequent mistakes here is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. Generally, you don’t need such a big depth. If your website isn’t listed within the first 20-30 ranks – nobody finds 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 significant amount of keywords to check, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where the automation is really needed! With an automated rank monitor you can save quite a few of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that by hand. However, you should prefer search engine friendly products, to avoid potential 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 keyword synonyms related to your field is another task that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself if you think that you don’t need any of the automated tools over there. You can save a bunch of time and lose virtually nothing. There are a lot of approaches to 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 tools. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still want you to apply your hands and your brain.