SEO Analysis – Tools of the Trade
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
If you’re an SEO nut like me, you probably find yourself working under two main scenarios. One: you’re doing SEO work for your own site. Two: you’re doing SEO work for a client.
In either case, you’re probably faced with two more sub-scenarios. One: you’ve got an old site that isn’t ranked well and needs to be fixed. Two: you’ve got a brand new site that has no ranking at all.
Whether you’re working on your own site or a site for a client, in this article I’m going to assume you’re looking at an old site that needs fixing and isn’t ranking well.
What to do, what to do?
Well, first things first, you have to analyze the web site and determine exactly what the heck is wrong with it.
The problem is, the site could be pretty old and/or have a TON of web pages and it would be pretty hard and time consuming to analyze each of them. It’s not uncommon for me to have to analyze a web site that has a few thousand web pages in it. Looking at each of those pages simply isn’t economically or realistically feasible.
So what’s an SEO nut to do?
Use a tool of course! There’s a ton of great paid SEO tools out there to help you in your SEO work, but every once in a while I get a kick out of being able to tell you about an SEO tool that’s wildly useful and COMPLTELY FREE.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case today.
No, I’m kidding…that IS the case today. (It’s Monday, just trying to keep you on your toes a bit!).
FREE SEO TOOL: Xenu Link Sleuth
As you might guess from the name of the thing, it’s a broken link checker/site crawler….but not just any broken link checker.
First off, it checks for internal and external broken links. This is important because the search engines index your site by following the links they find. Broken links = crawl errors and bad indexing. The older and larger a web site is, the higher the chance that pages have been removed but are still linked to; it’s very common.
It also shows you the title of each page. You can see at a glance if the site has heavy duplicate title use (ie if you’re using the same title on each page as a lot of non-SEO savy site owners often do). And you can see right away if any web pages are missing a title or use a title like “Page 2” etc. Since title tags are one of the most important on page SEO factors, this feature alone is priceless.
Likewise it shows all the images on the site and if any of them are not using ALT tags. Search engines like to see images with ALT tags, this tool helps you take advantage of that.
Next, it shows you the number of outbound links and inbound links for each web page on your site. Very handy to know.
It also shows what kind of server your site is running on. If the site is yours, you probably already know what kind of server you’re running, but if it’s a client’s web site you may not know. And believe it or not there are SEO issues, for instance, with -say- URL connotation and upper/lower case file naming issues if a site is running off a Microsoft IIS server; or any number of other things that can trip up the search engines.
Next, it shows you the file size of each page and image so that you can catch extra large file sized pages and shave them down a bit to optimize your page load time.
It shows the level of each page, ie how deeply buried the page is within your sites navigation, and it shows if a page has been redirected and what the status is (ie 301 redirect or 302 redirect etc) which is an area rife with potential problems that you can now easily catch.
Oh, and it outputs all the data to a nice HTML report, or a spreadsheet if you like.
Another handy little tidbit worth mentioning… you can right click on any URL for any page and a menu pops up allowing you to instantly check the Google Cache for that page, and the changes of that page over time at the Way Back Machine, and also it’s Alexa info if you’re into that sort of dubious Alexa data (which I am not).
The output for the tool is color coded in blue, green, and red (for errors) which allows you to glance through the data and see things that jump out at you easily.
I could go on and on, but discussing the details of this tool is beyond the scope of this article. To make a long story short, Xenu Link Sleuth should really be your first step in any SEO analysis, be it for your own site or a clients site.
It will give you a treasure trove of information nearly instantly and keep you from the tedious task of sifting through thousands of web pages yourself. BANG! Color coded and nicely sitting right before your eyes.
And it’s FREE, which you just can’t beat.
Got a Xenu success story or tip to share, or a suggestion for a different tool that you like to use? Comment Below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
