Does a program called Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool ring a bell? If not, it is high time to change it. Among hundreds of SEO applications, this one is special: it can help you to improve your SEO results almost immediately, for free.
What can Screaming Frog exactly do for me?
Screaming Frog is a desktop application which crawls websites the same way as Google does. It helps you to audit websites from SEO perspective and to find errors. By getting rid of flaws you can improve website performance in search engines.
It is screaming at me!
After you scan your website you get a report on 18 sheets. It is a lot to analyse but imagine checking your website manually, page by page! These are the most important reports which you can get and questions for which you can find answers:
- Internal – combined data from most of the tabs which can be downloaded to an Excel file
- Protocol – are you using the desired version of protocol?
- Response codes – do you have any page with 404 error or with a broken internal link? Are redirections correct?
- URI – are URL short enough and descriptive? Do you see any ASCII characters, underscores, uppercase, duplicated and dynamic URLs?
- Page titles – is any page title missing, duplicated or too long? Are the keywords used at the beginning?
- Meta description – is meta description added to each page? Is any description truncated?
- Meta keywords – do all the pages have unique meta keywords?
- H1 – is any H1 missing, duplicated or too long?
- H2 – is any H2 missing, duplicated or too long?
- Images – do you have any too large images? Is alt-text added?
Let’s crawl a website
To see how Screaming Frog works in practice let’s crawl a website of the Guinness Storehouse, one of Dublin big tourist attractions. While performing links and contents audit
I have discovered quite a few flaws that should be fixed:
1.Response codes
By filtering response codes I have found 5 websites with error code 404 what means that the page does not exist. This error can be fixed by implementing permanent redirections. I also checked pages response times – most of them keep it under less than half a second what is very good. However, there are pages which have much longer response times, between 4 and 6 seconds. Most of this pages lead to… press releases.
2. URI
There is a lot of long URLs leading to photos on the Guinness Storehouse website, for example:
By using a filter I have also found two links which lead to exactly the same content:
3. Page titles
36 pages have duplicated titles “Guinness Storehouse” what accounts for 29,5% of all page titles. These titles should be changed as the pages’ contents are unique (mostly various press releases). For Google search spider those duplicated titles indicate duplicate content what can be penalized. One page has a title which exceeds Google 600 pixels title limit and results in truncating it. You can see it thanks to SERP Snippet tool which can be found on the bottom toolbar.
4. Meta descriptions
36 pages have missing meta descriptions while 1 page has a meta description which exceeds the limit of 920 pixels and is truncated in search results.
5. Meta keywords
All of the Guinness Storehouse pages with meta descriptions are missing meta keywords!
6. H1 and H2
Many H1 and H2 are duplicated (respectively 39,3% and 21,3%) and multiplied (23,7% and 18,03%). A lot of H2 headers are missing (31,9%).
7. Images
I have found 76 high-resolution images, above 100kb. The images should not be that large as they may slow down pages. Page speed is also taken into consideration when ranking web pages. What is more, 18 images are missing alt text which acts like a description for an image.
This article does not show the full Screaming Frog potential. It only means that there is a lot more to explore! Check out how your website is doing (and maybe spy your competitors as well).
One thought on “Your best SEO friend”
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