Improve Your Site With Screaming Frog for SEO
Have you ever gone to a marketing website only to realize that they didn’t use any of the techniques that they advertise on their own site? At LevelTen, we like to practice what we preach. We’re constantly working on evolving our site and ensuring that we’re utilizing best practices for inbound marketing and SEO.
Currently, we’re focused on our SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search engine optimization is the process of making your website rank higher in organic (unpaid) search results. Primarily, this includes optimizing for the Google algorithms and using targeted headlines, keywords, backlinks, content, alt text, and metadata. Proper search engine optimization will help your potential clients find your website and increase your brand visibility.
Our favorite tool for improving our SEO is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a downloadable program that allows you to crawl a site. It presents you with a summary of the elements, including things like errors, redirects, duplicate pages, page titles, and inlinks & outlinks. If you’re having issues with your page titles, it can provide you with a list of which titles are missing, duplicate, or over 65 characters.
For example, if we owned BuzzFeed, we might want to crawl our site and check for errors. Once we launch SEO Spider, we can plug the URL for the site in and click “Start.”
Once the crawl has finished, you’ll be presented with a list of the site addresses on the left side of the screen.
Also, you can use the “Overview” display on the right side of the screen to find specific issues, such as missing page titles or images that are missing alt text.
In addition, if you’re interested in more information on a particular site address, click on the address and extended information will appear below with tabs for navigation.
We’ll be using this tool primarily to review our blog posts (H1, H2, keywords, alt text, metadata) and ensure that they are all optimized appropriately. Having an organizational tool like this saves time since we no longer have to crawl each post individually.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is just one of the tools we will use for our SEO overhaul. Keep an eye out for future blogs that will go further in depth on how to clean up website content for SEO and how to use old blogs for new purposes.
