Last week we featured interview with Scott Hendison of SEO Automatic and it prompted me to go ahead and try their free SEO tools. The Instant SEO Review was my first choice because I like comparing various on-page SEO analyzers and all-in-one diagnostics tools.
This one stands out for a couple of reasons:
- It doesn’t so much focus on pure numbers (number of characters in title and meta tags, amount of text and links, etc)
- It provides helpful information on each section it diagnoses.
The tool uses the following icons to visualize the free SEO report:
Notable Issues
Worth Reviewing
Correct Items (or are they?)
The Free SEO Report Contains the Following Sections:
1. Title Tag
The title tag is generally considered the single most important “on page” ranking factor there is.
It’s what’s shown as the “headline” in your search ranking results, and helps determine whether a viewer will click on your result or not.
The title tag also shows in the blue bar at the very top of your browser window, but it does not actually show “on page”.
2. Description Tag
The description tag is what the visitor will read in the search results when deciding whether or not to click on your listing.
While not necessarily a “ranking factor” per se, it should be completely unique for each page, and relevant only to that page. That’s why Google Webmaster Tools points it out when you have duplicates.
3. H1 Header Tag
The H1 tag is arguably the most important tag to have after the title tag, since it’s the headline for the page.
If your headline isn’t visible and relevant, then how is anybody supposed to know what your page is about?
4. H2 Header Tag
If you have a page long enough for multiple headlines, you want to be sure you’re only using one H1 tag, but you can use an H2 tag or more all you want.
Some people prefer to use “bold” instead of H2 tags, or number them H3, H4 etc. and I believe they all have a positive effect on your ranking. Use them.
Note: what was missing for me here was some basic analysis of heading structure – which reflects the semantic structure of the web page.
5. Keyword Meta Tag
The keyword meta tag is NOT considered a factor for ranking at this time by the search engines any more, and most SEO’s ignore them.
However, I personally believe that the importance of this factor could again change someday, and tagging your pages, photos, videos etc. is a very good thing, since the effort is so minimal.
6. ALT Tags for images
The ALT tag was originally designed to help sight impaired visitors “see” what an image was.
With the addition of Google’s Universal search, ALT tags for key images will help your site appear more often in the search results.
Besides actually signalizing the absence or presence of each element, the tool also extracts it and provides you in the list which makes it easier to structuralize the SEO report.
Overall the tool seemed useful enough for the beginner user. It didn’t seem too in-depth to be overwhelming and too straightforward to encourage the user to apply some instant changes.
