5 Features In The SEO Spider Tool You Should Really Know

Spiders are those creatures that crawl around with the eight legs and clustered eyes. Well, that is one kind of spider. It is also where the SEO spider tool got their name from.

This spider is software that the search engines use to keep tabs on content on the internet. This includes any new content or that which may have been removed, updated or modified in any way. It is also referred to as ‘robot’ or crawler.

The software crawls through the internet, finding and cataloguing data for the search engines. The spiders may also find broken links; analyze the data to see duplicated content and no longer existing pages among other things.

Basically once the spider gets to your page; it collects and files away the relevant information then finds links on the webpage and goes to the pages linked. They track these links page after page.

These spiders can be used by SEO professionals. They may come in handy to fix issues with the websites and clean them.

You can find the tool, and download and install it to your PC to use it. So what are these ways that the SEO spider tool can help you with your website?

1. SEO Spider Tool Finds Broken Or Missing Pages

Once you find the spider software of your choosing, you may use it to crawl your site. This may take some time if the website is big.

Upon completion of the crawl, the spider shows you the results. One of the things it does is find pages that do not exist anymore.

This information is found on the status code. If a page doesn’t exist anymore for instance, the results may show a 404 error to mean the page has been deleted.

For pages that have been moved, the status code may show a 301 or 302 redirect. You can select the 301 or 302 redirect.

This informs the servers to take anyone who tries to access a certain page which now doesn’t exist to the new page. If the status codes read 200 and such, then the website is good to go.

This helps you reduce the amount of traffic you might be losing due to missing pages and broken links, by directing your clients to a live page.

You can also reopen previously closed pages. All this will be aimed at enabling the visitors to actually get to your page, and not the annoying error 404.

2. SEO Spider Tool Checks Titles

The crawlers are also able to check the title tags for each of your pages. Title tags are very important to SEO signals.

They are the ones that appear on the search engine results. This makes them a vital part of your campaigns as well.

You want to avoid anything that would be a hindrance for them. Your title should be well-worded and custom.

Where there are no custom title tags for a specific page, the results on the crawler will clearly show these pages.

The column for the title tags may be empty to show that there is no title page. This is where you step in and open all these pages, adding title tags to them.

Come up with a title that would be worth being seen by any searcher who uses your keywords on the search engine. Try not to miss any pages.

You need to maximize the amount of traffic coming your way, and having title tags is a good place to start from.

3. SEO Spider Tool Audits Links

Auditing links can be a tough job to do without any kind of help. A page has quite a lot of links to begin with.

The information you need to get from these links to do the audit is also a lot making it a lengthy task to perform. This is one of the reasons why you should consider using the spider to help you.

How to Perform the Link Audit

• Navigate to the configuration menu of the spider and tick all options that you need, excluding those like JavaScript, images and CSS.

• Start the crawl and wait for it to finish.

• Go to the Advanced Report menu then to ‘All Links’. This should provide you with information on all the links it crawls. It displays data such as the location of the links, their anchor text, destination, and directives.

• Export the data. The actions you perform after this step depend on your preference. You may:

• Sort the information by the links going out. The data should show you which pages have the most links on your site.

Too many links may cause a problem with Google. You may want to find ways to minimize the number of links using this information, or find out why they have so many links to begin with.

• Click on the status code. This shows you the status of the links and whether they still exist. Fix the links with the 404 error as these are broken.

Those showing a 301 code are redirecting to another page. Look into the pages being redirected to by these links as they may be harmful.

You may remove them or keep them depending on what you find upon research. For other status code types such as 3XX or 4XX may have different reports gotten for them. Just head on to the Advanced Report drop-down to access these reports.

4. SEO Spider Tool: Content Audits

Search engines put a lot of importance in content when doing their ranking. Content audits are therefore important to ensure that your rank is not lower due to the content of your website. To perform the content audit;

• Go to the configuration menu, and tick all options to perform a full site crawl. Include those you excluded for the links audit such as JavaScript and images.

Filters:

• By HTML.

• Word Count - Sort from low to high. The pages that have fewer words may be removed or improved, as you see fit. Those without many words but with valuable information may be kept.

• Images - filter by ‘missing alt text’ or ‘alt text over 100 characters’ so you only have those images not associated with alt text and those with too long alt texts. These are the ones to fix.

• Title - those over 70 characters. Reduce them so that all are displayed in the search results.

• Duplicate - Filter to get duplicated titles and change them where necessary. Also filter duplicated URLs and meta descriptions, and fix all these issues.

5. SEO Spider Tool: Getting Sitemaps

These allow the search engine to know where your pages are and their last update. There is a sitemap option on some spiders. You can get access to it, read online, edit and upload it to Google.

Ensure that all your pages have internal links pointing to them to allow them all to be indexed by the spider software. So if you fail to see a page on the report, check to see if it has an internal link pointing to it.

Spiders are useful in diagnosing various problems that could be pulling you website back. Do use them to ensure your website is running smoothly and maximize traffic to your site.