Online Tools for Onsite SEOs
seo tools
Part of my job here at Blueclaw is to perform technical onsite audits on new clients in their first month of working with our team.
As you might imagine, this amounts to a pretty significant chunk of work; an onsite audit on any site is a lengthy, involved process, but when you’re dealing with a large eCommerce client or even a smaller site that has fundamental architectural or duplicate content issues, it can take hours of investigation to come to a conclusion on how to proceed.
I’ve found it extremely helpful, with that in mind, to have a suite of quick, reliable and accurate online tools that I can use to either get me an immediate answer to a query I have about the site in question’s configuration or give me a insight into some of onsite issues that allow me to hone my approach to those problem areas as quickly as possible.
Here’s a few that I come back to time and time again:
Angular Marketing Duplicate Content Tool
A great little tool that used to be called the Virante duplicate content checker. Perfect for checking canonicalisation issues, this web-based tool quickly diagnoses common issues such as www vs non-www duplication (by checking header responses, the current Google cache and PageRank dispersion) and duplicated versions of your homepage on common extensions such as /index.html, /index.php and others.
Additionally it’ll check whether erroenous URLs on the site in question return a 404 Not Found or 200 OK response. Finally it checks whether any of the top 1000 results for your site in Google have been omitted or removed to the supplementary index for being overly similar.
My tool of choice for checking HTTP request and response headers. It allows you to switch between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0 (with or without Host header) for a wide variety of user-agents and different request types (GET, POST, HEAD, TRACE). Just fill out your details and the (thankfully usually pretty comprehensible) captcha and you’ll receive a host of data, including the status code, server type, content type, encoding and more.
It also dumps out of the source of the page in question, which you can chose to output in raw HTML if you prefer. The only drawback to this tool is that it seems to be down fairly frequently, but thankfully it’s too handy not to have its own array of copycat alternatives out there.
It may seem like a deal-breaker that the free version of this duplicate content, broken link and page power crawler will only allow you to analyse 250 pages, but I’ve found it extremely useful for getting a near-immediate handle on the footprint of these particular problem areas on a site.
While you’ll undoubtedly have to dig deeper to understand all the architectural and content issues on a problematic site (I’ve never had the chance to test the Premium version, which allows up to 25,000 pages) this is an effective way of getting an overview and may pick up a couple of instances that your manual review or other tools may have missed.
I’ve found it a little over-zealous on the duplicate content front but it runs quickly, outputs its data in a clear and effective GUI and is nice enough to let you export the results, even in the free version.
I typically use this alongside old favourite Copyscape.com when I start the process of looking for duplicate content on a site both internally and externally. Unlike Copyscape, which simply allows you to input the URL of the page, Plagium allows you to copy & paste a chunk of the actual text, which allows for a bit more flexibility and reduces the chance of it being caught out by repeated navigation elements and suchlike.
The Quick Search function is free and I’ve had generally good results with it when I’ve tested it out on content that I know is duplicated or scraped elsewhere – I’ve also found it is highly effective at tracking down development/staging servers that clients have accidentally left open to indexation…
A recent beta addition is the ability to search over social networks, which could be helpful if you find your content is being gobbled up by the hungry social audience without your knowledge!
This rather bare-bones tool is great for all kinds of reasons, as it simply checks the difference between two text files and then flags up how many lines differ between the two.
Most recently I used it on a site that had hundreds of rather opaque URL parameters – as it was difficult (impossible, in some cases) to see any change to the page when the parameter was applied or removed I chucked the source code for the page with parameter and the page without into this little tool and could immediately see any changes, additions or omissions.
It also comes in handy when looking to see the difference in content or source for pages that initially appear very similar, or where you suspect that an external site has been copying your content.
A super handy site for generating blocks of schema.org microdata. While it’s effectively a foolproof wizard, it can be a way of getting to grips with customising and writing Schema from scratch.
It includes templates for some of the most commonly implemented types – Person, Product, Event, Organisation, Movie, Book and Review and also offers a WordPress plugin.
This has also come in handy for me when I’ve had a block of Schema that isn’t working right (or returns an error in the Structured Data Testing Tool) – having a properly formatted version to compare it against usually gives me what I need to pick out the error.
There are hundreds more tools like this floating around the web and it’d be great if you could let us know some of your favourites in the comments. These are just a selection of the tools I’ve used and ones I know that I can rely on to give me one perspective on a client’s site.
Obviously they’re not going to replace the painstaking manual review process any time soon, but often they can help speed up your processes and give you that little bit more data than you’ve started with.
