I haven’t posted an entry here for a while. That’s because I’ve been really busy reviewing SEO tools for you. I filter only the best and simplest SEO tools – making sure it’s user-friendly to every SEO newbie out there. For this entry, I’ll be reviewing a crawler tool called Screaming Frog.
What’s with the name?
I have no idea. But what does it matter? The tool is a crawling tool that displays SEO related data. Unlike Xenu which displays data only related to your links, Screaming Frog displays data that will matter to you as an SEO specialist.
It crawls and studies all your links: Internal, external response codes and URI. It also shows data about your on-site optimization such as: Page Titles, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, H1 tags, H2 tags, Images, Meta & Canonical. Not only that, you can filter the data display to see only the data that you’re concerned with.
Here’s how the interface looks like: (Click the Pictures to Enlarge)
Very simple and easy to use. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to navigate this tool and be familiar with its functionalities.
These are the different kinds of data that Screaming Frog can provide you with the links that it crawls in the URL that you enter.
Choose to filter the data that will be displayed to you in each and every category available.
See all the outbound links in your website that don’t have nofollow tags.
Check out your URI data including the canonical address and hash ID
View all the page titles inside your website. You can filter if you just want to see those that have missing title tags, long title tags (more than 70 characters), same as H1 tags, duplicate and/or multiple.
View your images and the size of your image files. You can also see which ones are missing Alt Texts and which have over 100 Characters in the Alt Text.
Meta and Canonical data are displayed. You can filter them as you like too!
One of the problems I detected in my God and You website. Fixed it.
See all the inbound links inside a single link on your website.
Screaming Frog SEO Crawler Tool Video
Why do you need this tool?
There are LOTS of links inside a website and not all links are good. Sometimes there are broken links and you need to fix them or else it’s a turn-off to search engine spiders. This tool helps you look out for the obvious broken links that you have.
Sometimes you just need to check how a search engine spider crawls through your site. This tool helps you see which pages get indexed, which doesn’t . You can even activate the follow internal/external nofollow option if you want to see how Yahoo and Bing’s spider crawls your site (since Bing and Yahoo ignores nofollow tags)
You can also check out if your pages are missing canonicals or which of your images are missing Alt Texts. It’s a very handy, very useful, and FREE tool!
You can download Screaming Frog any time of the day for free!
About Sean
I just found your site by searching #SEO on twitter. Thanks for all of the great information. Very informative and cut through the chase. Eventually Ill read all of your posts. So far this is my 4th.
I’m hoping there will be a mobile app recommendation so that I can search my site while I’m having a micro boredom moment. Good work!
Hey Brian,
Thanks! Glad you like it. As for mobile search – right now there is really no renown mobile search engine that will show you only all mobile websites as results. I’ll inform you if there is such a development already.
Oh yeah, I was a little hesitant to follow because of “hacker” in your twitter handle.
Brian,
I think you would need to get used to that. Haha!
This review is a bit out of date – the search function has been available for months!
Hey buddy,
Yes the review has been up for a while. And during the time they told me that the search function is under development. Good to know that it’s out as I advised them. Thanks for giving me a heads-up!
Pretty serious tool you have here mate. Saves me lots of time with on-page stuff!
Paul recently posted..Learn SEO with 5 SEO videos
Thanks for the review Sean. I’m currently looking for a good SEO tool. I understand there’s a paid version of this tool too, but is the free version good enough?
Hazel recently posted..How to Create SEO Friendly Blogs
Hey Hazel,
Free version is 99% always not enough – coz there’s always a paid version which is way better :)
Love your site. And I like the share buttons that appear at the top of the page when you scroll down is that a wordpress plugin? if so can you let me know what it is called?
Hey Jac,
It’s called activeshare by Orangesoda :)