sorry but GSA and SER are??You should create 10 links daily and then blast them using GSA SER and share them on social media sites as well.
Focus on the quality which means if you are doing directory submission then use only high authority directories such as dmoz.com and for blog commenting comment of pages with 0 OBL don't worry about the metrics lower or higher but OBL should be less.
Also, build some web 2.0s and social media sharing they will also impact on the SERP positively. If your website is new then build 5 to15 links per day. How many articles on your website? and what is the domain age?
It does not matter if you're doing it manually or not, it's the quality of your backlink that matter. If you do shit backlinks manually then it will be spam, and if you do high autority backlinks with a bot then it will be not categorized as spam. If you want to do it manually then don't submit to spam dir but do great content like guest posts, amazing comments, or only post on very strict dir that you can only get manually.