SEO Software: Pros and Cons
SEO Software: Pros and Cons
One of the recent trends in a modern SEO is a tendency to avoid utilizing automated SEO applications. It is even said that using automated software can hurt your SEO stats. On the other hand, search engine optimization is a sphere where the volume of tedious routine tasks is immense. Performing all of it yourself is much more difficult and is a real waste of time. So in this review we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to decide which jobs can be performed manually indeed, and which ones are better to do automatically.
1) Content creation. There are hundreds of tools that provide automatic synonymizing of any content. There are products that even claim to create human-readable site content generated 100% automatically. Obviously, until tools will begin to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to create a more or less good automated content. So this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and create a good, unique content for your site, instead of throwing those funds into some “advanced” tool that does this automatically.
2) Building backlinks. This is the second irreplaceable SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to examine a bunch of potential 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. Such task can be automated a little, since you don’t have to find possible linking sites by hand. Nevertheless, the final decision still is upon you. It is you who should investigate the quality of websites and measure their relevance to your niche. Finding link partners is only 10% of the entire job. The rest is done manually.
3) Checking search engine rankings. Basically, you want this to monitor your efforts – whether you’re doing ok, or your activity misses 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. Generally, you don’t need that amount. If your website isn’t found within the first 20-30 results – nobody locates 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 monitor, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really irreplacible! With an automated rank monitor 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 software, 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 easily. However, true gems in that field are still achieved through a manual job.
5) Finding keywords related to your sphere is another task that is automated easily. And you are really cheating yourself thinking that you can handle without any of the automated tools over there. You can save hours of time and lose virtually nothing. There are hundreds of methods of finding quality keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
All in all, every SEO job needs its own approach on SEO software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still require you to work with your hands and your brain.