Internet marketing offers a lot of automated tools but often they sacrifice quality for quantity. Things like article spinning and auto blogs spring to mind here.

It’s difficult to get precise figures and it’s natural for someone promoting a particular method or system or piece of software to claim that theirs is the best way.

So how can you find out which method works best without spending months (and lots of money) testing?

The first thing to realise is that – as ever – there’s no single correct answer and also there’s no easy answer.

The biggest problem with this is Google.

They’re probably the biggest source of website traffic on the planet but naturally they keep their “secret sauce” algorithm very secret and it’s forever changing.

There are one or two minor tweaks to the algorithm every single day and major ones on a regular basis.

Behind the scenes, they’re testing more things. Some of which work better (at least in their view) immediately, others of which need more tweaking and yet others fall into the category of “seemed a good idea at the time”.

Often even their major updates are subject to some big extra tweaks soon after release as unintended consequences show up.

But there are usually two different main methods that people suggest you go:

• Automate as much as possible with software and (maybe) low paid helpers from sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and – on a smaller scale – Microworkers, etc
• Do everything by hand – creating your own articles, videos, etc. and doing your own promotion

It’s no secret that I use and recommend the second method.

But that doesn’t mean the first one doesn’t work either.

And it’s not the best feeling when your hand crafted site gets thrown out with the algorithm change bath water. Which can still happen.

Whichever method you choose, you’re at the mercy of Google’s algorithm.

And the only way you can find out how that works is to watch.

Sure, Matt Cutts will put out videos about best practice but he’s a master at saying what Google would like you to do in an ideal world rather than what works even if they’d prefer it didn’t.

So I tend to ignore his videos most of the time or treat them as entertainment rather than news.

Google ranks pages, not websites.

So that’s the first thing to remember, whichever method you choose.

They take into account the signals on the page – titles, headings, page content – and outside signals such as social media “likes” as well as links from other websites.

Then it’s down to the amount of competition.

As a general rule, unless you’re prepared to spend a very large sum of money, lower competition phrases are easier to get ranked in a relatively short space of time.

So niche research where you look for long phrases that Google suggests as you type is my preferred method.

And actually I’d suggest that whether you’re going to do this by hand or automate the task.

They’ve got next to no competition – often none for the suggested phrases despite the fact that people are searching for those precise phrases – which means Google’s robots are keen to find them and rank them so they can show they’ve done their job thoroughly.

If you could scrape thousands of ultra long tail keywords (which you can – there’s software out there that grabs Google’s suggestions) then you’re a long way there.

The snag if you’re automating that process is that you then need content to display.

And by definition there’s not much out there that you can grab and repurpose.

Some people suggest putting almost blank pages up – just the title and a heading – and I’ve even seen some people boast about getting ranked that way. But that kind of page won’t last in the results (Google is smart enough to downplay it fairly rapidly) and it’s difficult to monetise it as it’s unlikely that kind of site would stay approved for Adsense for any length of time.

The other way round is the manual method – it takes slightly longer, you won’t get thousands of pieces of content created almost overnight but it’s likely to stick around in the search results for months or years.

Write a piece of content – I personally aim for at least 500 words but, truth be told, you could probably easily get away with as little as 300 words. Write it fast – probably no longer than 20 to 30 minutes. And then move on to the next item.

Again, for either method, make sure there are social sharing buttons so that people can easily like your pages when they find them.

In my view, quality is a better aim.

It’s a longer term business model that’s more likely to give you a return on your time investment for a longer time.

Push button solutions are either expensive or played out.

It’s unlikely that a push button solution that costs much less than $500 will still be working.

That kind of price puts up a barrier to entry that means you’re not competing with hundreds or thousands of other people doing the same thing, each with tens, hundreds or thousands of sites.

But even that won’t give you an edge for long.

Sooner or later – and usually sooner – someone will bring out a $47 or $97 piece of software that does the same thing. Which is normally the end of the method working as Google has a lot more data to analyse and eradicate.

Of course, the frustrating thing if you’re going the quality route is occasionally seeing your hand written, informative, pages being beaten in the results by junk.

But come back to those same results in a few weeks or months and the junk will have been removed from the results by Google, leaving your pages in the position they should be.

And, finally, the answer to the question in the title: can you do both?

Yes – because there’s no rule that says you can’t.

But if you go down that route, I’d suggest that you keep as much separation between the two as possible because Google tends to work on a “guilt by association” basis at times. So if it suspects that you’re trying to game its algorithm with one or more of your sites, it’s likely to assume you’ll do the same with your other sites at some stage.