The Perfect SEO Audit In 2018: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• You should know how to use a PC at a beginner level
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (FREE Version at least)

Description

If you are looking to perform an SEO Site Audit – YOU NEED THIS COURSE!

OVERVIEW: This is a highly recommended Site Audit tool that is a must-have for any serious SEO work! It indexes your entire site and creates a spreadsheet of all your pages and their SEO elements. Plus it finds broken links, bad tags, and much, much more.

Before optimizing any website, it helps to have a big picture view of the website.  How many pages does it have?  How are the titles and meta descriptions? Are there broken links?  Site audit software is required for this job. What does Screaming Frog SEO Spider do?  It “crawls” through your whole website and creates a list of all your internal pages. It tracks:

• Crawl level
• Internal and Outbound links per-page
• Keyword elements like Title and Description and their lengths.
• HTTP status codes
• Exports your data to a spreadsheet
• Finds duplicate pages with duplicate content
• Tracks the Meta Robots tag so you can find the noindex, nofollow problems
• Measures file size
• Tracks Page Depth level (how many links from the homepage)
• Organizes Inlinks and Outlinks to any given URL
• Tracks the Follow and NoFollow status of all links
• Custom Source Code Search – find anything you want in the source code of a website
• XML site

First, I index the whole website (as I show you inside) and save the results as the “before” crawl. This is helpful to demonstrate to a client what changes I have made to a website in the future, by having a snapshot of the website before I started. Site Audit software is essential for any SEO job.

Second, I get the big picture of a website’s SEO elements and find what needs updated or fixed.  Screaming Frog SEO Spider collects the vital SEO elements for each page during the crawl: title, description, keywords, H1, h2, etc.  This makes it easy to examine the whole website and see what needs to be updated.  I like to make sure that every page has a unique title and descriptions using this tool and also see if the H1 tags are used and the meta keyword is not being abused.  Then, I review the lengths of the titles and descriptions and make sure there aren’t ones that are too long or too short.  Keep in mind, I try to get all this info out of Google Webmaster tools first before I use the Screaming Frog website audit tool.

Third, I use it to find and fix broken links within a website.  Websites, especially older and larger websites, often have many interior links that are broken.  Screaming Frog makes it easy to find pages that are generating 404 errors and then it shows you every page on the website that links to that 404 page so you can fix all the links.  Additionally, it also shows you 301 redirects, so you can update internal links to point to the new and actual location of the pages instead of being redirected.  This is called the “canonical URL” and any link that doesn’t point to it should be corrected.  My goal is to fix every single 404 and 301 pages!

Fourth, I use it to find and fix broken links pointing to external websites.  One of Screaming Frog’s website audit reports shows external links and their HTTP status.  This allows me to fix 301 redirects and especially in links resulting in a 404 page.  I believe that Google may dislike websites with lots of bad out-going links and also web pages with bad external links.  Plus, broken links frustrate visitors and reduce your credibility.

Screaming Frog is for indexing a website with less than 500 pages. It works on PC, Mac, or Linux.