Looking for free tools to help your SEO?
Making your website visible on the internet can be difficult. Even more difficult, is knowing how to improve your site’s visibility! But there are some online tools which can help you. Keep reading to discover one of our favourite and free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools.
Your SEO is the key to getting more visitors to your website. SEO put simply, is increasing both the quality and number of people visiting your website, by making it more visible when searched for on the internet. There’s a lot of ways to perform SEO, with varying levels of costs for the different features offered. However, there’s also a wide variety of free options that can help you make a start. One of the best free tools is Screaming Frog SEO Spider; a powerful and effective tool that can help you discover areas where you can improve your website’s SEO.
What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?
What exactly is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool? Put simply, “The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues. Download & crawl 500 URLs for free, or buy a licence to remove the limit & access advanced features.” (from the developer’s website)
A powerful tool able to look at every nook and cranny of a website, finding issues damaging your SEO. From missing titles, image text inconsistencies, all the way to broken links. The available features may overwhelm you, so we will break down some of the basic features that can help you to improve your site’s health.
What does it do?
- Find Broken Links. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly find broken links (404 redirects) and server errors. You are also given the option to bulk export the errors or individually source the URL’s to fix them.
- Audit Redirects. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly find any temporary and permanent redirects, redirect chains as well as loops. This can be looked at individually or checked in a bulk list to audit in a site migration.
- Analyse Page Titles and Meta Data. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly analyse each and every page title and meta description. Identifying whether or not they are too long, short, absent or duplicated across the site.
- Discover Duplicate Content. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly find duplicate content from URL’s to page content (titles, descriptions or headings) as well as low content pages.
- Extract Data Path with XPath. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly extract the data from the HTML of a particular web page using CSS Path, Xpath or regex. Data includes the social meta tags, additional headings, SKUs and many more.
- Review Robots and Directives. Screaming Frog can perform a crawl on a website to instantly find the URL’s that are being blocked by robots.txt, meta robots or X-Robots-Tag directives.
- Generate XML Sitemaps. Screaming Frog can also generate XML Sitemaps and Image XML sitemaps with an advanced level of configuration over URLs to include details such as when last modified, priority and change frequency.
- Integrate with GA, GSC & PSI. Screaming Frog can also connect to Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insight’s API’s and Search Console to locate both user and performance data for URL’s within a certain crawl. (NB. Some features require a subscription)
- Crawl JavaScript Websites. Screaming Frog can render web pages, utilising the integrated Chromium WRS to crawl JavaScript rich websites and frameworks.
- Visualise Site Architecture. Screaming Frog is also able to evaluate internal linking and URL structure by using interactive crawl and directory force-directed diagrams as well as tree graph site visualisations.
How does this help website owners to improve their sites?
The features listed, allow the user to locate common issues which can affect your SEO position. The Screaming frog tool provides the means to locate a wide range of errors and problems. An error free site will definitely boost your SEO; improving both site quality and site traffic.
To download this tool, visit the Screaming Frog SEO Spider website https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/.
If you would prefer to have your SEO improved by experts, visit our our SEO page to learn more about our services.
