Friday 21 August 2009

Webware review: SEO Analysis Tool

Webware: SEO Analysis tool
Owner/Distributor: SEO Workers Consultants.
Technical Details: The tool is webware and can be used without downloading anything from the internet. There's an option to download Firefox browser extension (not tested). This is what it claims to do.
  • Analyze most common meta tags;
  • Analyze keyword density from the page content;
  • Analyze page load time from the page;
  • Analyze size from the page;
  • Analyze title meta tag relevancy to page content;
  • Analyze description meta tag relevancy to page content;
  • Analyze keywords meta tag relevancy to page content;
  • Check robots.txt file if user agent is allowed to spider the page;
  • Display meta tags returned from the web server;
  • Display headers returned from the web server;
  • Search for keywords on the page;
  • Search for keywords in the anchor (URL) tags;
  • Search for keywords in the images alt tag.
Summary: A useful tool for reviewing the titles, text and meta tags used for individual website pages. Identifies quickly and easily issues which might cause a site to fail to rank well in SEO terms.
Suitable for: people wanting to assess whether their website is search engine friendly
Highlights:
  • webware - can be used without installing anything on your computer
  • helps siteowners to improve the page ranking of individual pages of their website by removing aspects unfriendly to Googlebot and other spiderbots
  • tests for a good match between title tags and page descriptions (in text)
  • helps focus attention on how a website page is described - and whether that will be scanned by spiders
  • checks that meta tags are a good match with text
  • produces results very quickly and very simply
  • uses a traffic light system of colours plus text to highlight issues which need to be addressed
  • you can test and retest easily - identify what makes a difference by being able to tweak, republish and check again very quickly
Think Again?
  • debateable how important meta tags are these days (however titles and text and congruence between the two remains very important)
  • it's a bit too addictive - ration your time!
  • inability to understand the coding of blogspot blogs
Suppliers: Available from http://www.seoworkers.com

Before I comment further on the tool it's important to provide some context so here's......

A preamble about SEO and Page Rank

Google crawls webpages to look for changes roughly in order of the page rank of each page. This is how Google rates and ranks web pages for search purposes
PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.

Google - Technology Overview

This is a summary of Google SEO Ranking Factors with comments based on the SEOmoz survey of Search Engine Ranking factors v2.

Earlier this year I reviewed which factors were relevant - or otherwise for artists in

What this SEO Analysis Tool will NOT do

This tool is:
  • NOT going toimprove a site's page rank in terms of how many links you get (as described above)
  • NOT going to tell you what your page rank is - but it will show you how you're messing up your chances of getting a good page rank.
  • NOT going to tell you all the things you need to do - but will highlight some important things to address.
How this SEO Analysis Tool can help
This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.

It doesn't only analyze the Meta Tags of your pages, rather it tries to use the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self.

Before you can get a link you first have to be found! This tool might improve the chances of a page being found as a result of a search due to the page being accurately described in a way which the Google bot and other spider bots like.

All you have to do to use this tool is insert a URL for a website (for the home page) or any URL of any website page and that page will be analysed as to its SEO effectiveness. Then complete a quick spam check.

An example of a report produced
(for my portfolio website
http://www.pastelsandpencils.com)


On the right I've provided an example of a page. i'd like to just emphasise that this was after paying attention to the warning messages and tidying up my site description and meta tags.

In general, I found it very helpful to focus in particular on the title tags and the description as that is where Google starts in its hypertext analysis.

I've personally found it very helpful for reviewing the set-up of my information pages on Squidoo and the individual pages of my two main websites. The thing I liked best is that you could tweak a site, republish and then check to see what difference a change made - for better or worse.

The one problem I identified while trying it out is that it is not at all helpful in analysing blogspot blogs.

The website also provides some useful SEO tutorials in layman's language and general terms.

Incidentally, one of the things I liked about SEO Workers was that they identified who they are - see About Us which lists names and provides pics, addresses, and contact details.

Pay attention to Matt Cutts too!

It also pays to review what Matt Cutts, the SEO GoogleMeister, has to say from time to time. he's got the most up to date perspective on what counts and what matters.
Think about the keywords that users will type. Include them naturally in your posts
  • "usb drive" "thumb drive" "flash drive" "pen drive"
  • ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
  • Don't forget image search, videos, etc.
Matt Cutts - Straight from Google: What You Need to Know
Plus this is a YouTube Video by Google about Google for Webmasters Tutorial: Crawling and Indexing

Links:

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