Packt, Zach Miller – The Perfect SEO Audit in 2018: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider 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 more.Before optimizing any website, it helps to have a big picture view of the website. Screaming Frog is for indexing a website with less than 500 pages. It works on PC, Mac or Linux. It “crawls” through your whole website and creates a list of all your internal pages. In this course. first, we index the whole website 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, we get the big picture of a website’s SEO elements and find what needs to be updated or fixed. Screaming Frog SEO Spider collects the vital SEO elements for each page during the crawl: title, description, keywords, H1, H2 and so on. This makes it easy to examine the whole website and see what needs to be updated. We just have 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, we review the lengths of the titles and descriptions and make sure there aren’t ones that are too long or too short. Third, we use it to find and fix broken links within a website. 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. One of Screaming Frog’s website audit reports shows external links and their HTTP status. This allows us to fix any 301 redirects and especially in links resulting in a 404 page. 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.

Style and Approach

With this 3 hour course the author index the whole website, get the big picture of a website’s SEO elements and find what needs updated or fixed, use it to find and fix broken links within a website and use it to find and fix broken links pointing to external websites.

• Introduction
• Starting your SEO Audit

2. Software Overview