Tools For On Site AuditsDon’t Leave Home Without Em!

Mark GinsbergJWP

July 10, 2012

In Browser◦ Browser Extensions

Chrome Sniffer, Mozbar, etc.◦ SaaS Tools

SEOMoz campaign tools, and lots more

Standalone Applications◦ Screaming Frog SEO Spider◦ Xenu Link Sleuth◦ IIS Crawler

Types of Tools

Chrome Sniffer - http://bit.ly/NgrMlx ◦ Quickly find out what CMS the site is using, like wordpress,

drupal, magento, prestashop, etc.

◦ Are they using Google Analytics or another analytics tool?

◦ Which social plugins do they use?

Canonical- http://bit.ly/MMPgAY ◦ Shows if page has a canonical tag different from the page you

are currently visiting

Chrome Extensions I use ALL THE TIME

Click on the icon for more info about the page

SEO Site Tools - http://bit.ly/MMMLyH ◦ Lots of Info about your Site and your page◦ What type of server are you running?◦ External link data – PR, data from open APIs – SEOmoz, Alexa, SEMRush,

indexed pages, lots more

Chrome Extensions I use ALL THE TIME

Mozbar - http://bit.ly/LyWhWi ◦ Nice clean interface◦ On page data◦ Backlinking data◦ HTTP status codes, canonical tags, and much more

Chrome Extensions I use ALL THE TIME

User Agent Switcher- http://bit.ly/OJTJUb ◦ Allows you to change your browser’s user agent

◦ View a webpage as Google does

◦ Use this for checking if website is cloaking

Firefox Extensions I Use for Audits

Quirk Search Status- http://bit.ly/LyYZuZ

◦ Lots of SEO information – like Chrome plugins previously mentioned

◦ Show other domains on IP – shortcut to Bing search

◦ Highlights nofollow links – other tools do this too – I leave this on by default in Firefox and use Chrome as primary browser

Firefox Extensions I Use for Audits

Web Developer Toolbar- http://bit.ly/Nf7DsH

◦ Disable elements to mimics search engine bots◦ Quickly disable:

Cookies Css Images JavaScript

◦ Show link information by default if checking links and are not broken

Firefox Extensions I Use for Audits

General Site Audit - Homepage

Is the site trustworthy?

Would you buy from them?

What is the site about – does the homepage convey this?

Would you give this site your credit card?

General Site Audit - Homepage

Is the site cloaking – showing different content to you and Googlebot

How to Check – view cache in google◦ In Chrome, just add a cache: to the URL and hit

enter

Change user agent in Firefox to Googlebot and then view the page

Compare to the live version you see in Chrome and other browsers

General Site Audit - HomepageNormal User Sees What Googlebot Sees

www.kesherisrael.org

General Site Audit – Homepage - Cloaking

In our example – cached version of the page doesn’t show the cloaking/hack

Google Instant preview does though

Always check with multiple resources – cache, instant, user agent switch

If detected, work with developer to clean up

General Site Audit – Homepage – URL and Canonical Issues

Does the homepage redirect to another page?◦ What type of redirect – 301 or other?

www vs non-www- is there only one version of the page?◦ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

http://campshutaf.org/◦ HTTP/1.1 200 OK http://www.campshutaf.org/◦ Note – wordpress sites usually pretty good with this,

other cms’s cause lots of problems

Is there a canonical tag pointing somewhere else?

General Site Audit – Homepage – Meta Data

Title tag◦ Proper length?◦ Keyword stuffed?◦ Descriptive?◦ Incorporates brand name?

Meta-description◦ Proper length?◦ Keyword stuffed? Descriptive?

Unique?

Keywords Tag◦ Is it in usage? Is it unique?

Canonical Tag◦ Is there a canonical tag

pointing somewhere else?

General Site Audit – Homepage – Navigation and Site Structure Is the navigation crawlable?

◦ Turn off javascript, images and CSS in Firefox with developer toolbar

◦ Can you still navigate to the main sections of the site?

URL site structure◦ Does the main navigation point to clean urls or

search engine unfriendly URLs?◦ Do the URLs contain capital letters or spaces? Does

the server force lower case letters in the URLs? Live pages - http://ishopforisrael.com/Deals/ and

http://ishopforisrael.com/deals/eSportsonline/

General Site AuditCustom Search Commands site:www.wdcgroup.com

◦ Searches only the domain you specify – tells you how many pages indexed

◦ Shortcut to this query from tools like Searchstatus & SEO Site Tools

◦ If not many pages indexed, could be problem with navigation

cache:http://ishopforisrael.com/deals/esportsonline◦ Checks if page is stored in cache

More advanced search queries: http://bit.ly/OKcLd9

General Site AuditRobots.txt and sitemap.xml Robots.txt

◦ Check if the site has a robots.txt – check to see what it’s blocking

◦ Use Google Webmaster tools to check their access and see if specific URLs are blocked by robots.txt

◦ Are they accidentally blocking access from all search engines? This means they’re blocking everyone:

User-agent: *Disallow: /

Sitemap◦ Does the site have one? Is it linked in the robots.txt file?◦ Does it include errors or URLs no longer live

General Site AuditCategory Pages Content

◦ Is there enough content?◦ Is it organized, laid out nicely?◦ Interlinking◦ Crawlable by the search engines◦ Check for duplicate content – text in quotes

Meta Data◦ Title tags, meta descriptions, keywords◦ Meta robots – are these pages blocked by the search engines

General Site AuditScreaming Frog Awesomeness Why check SEO info on one page when you

can look at the whole site, sections of it, etc?

General Site AuditScreaming Frog Awesomeness Check crawl errors, etc. Supplement this data with Webmaster Tools

data

General Site AuditXenu Does a lot of good

stuff as well

Not specifically an SEO tool, but does produce relevant reports

It’s Free (Screaming Frog full version is £100 a year – free version doesn’t have all features and only crawls 500 URLs)

General Site AuditIIS Crawler

It gives a lot of data and information about the site

Is free and easy to install (if you have Windows 7) – follow the instructions here - http://mz.cm/MdaTuw

Independent SEO Consultant

@markginsberg

www.marksginsberg.com Google+

Skype: msginsberg

Mark Ginsberg