Search Engine Optimisation Features

Download The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).

Web Robot View of Website

The Website Utility creates a simulated web robot (crawler) view of a website. As such it shows what a page will look without images, JavaScript or interactive forms. This can prove very helpful in ensuring that each page in the website contains enough search engine indexable text - something that is not always easy to check when viewing the actual website in a web browser.

Missing Page Titles

The Website Utility can identify pages with missing page titles. Since many search engines place significant weighting on a page's title, it is essential to ensure all pages have a title.

Duplicated Page Titles

The Website Utility identifies pages with duplicate page titles. The report will show each duplicated title and which pages share the specific title. A surprising number of websites use the same page title for each page in the site, which is in most instances an obvious waste of potential site optimisation for search engines.

Creation of Table of Contents/Site Maps

A table of contents page (often referred to as a Site Map) contains a list of links to all of the other pages in a website. There are several good reasons for adding a site map to a website:

• It is another page of content for your website
• It allows search engine spiders and robots easy access to all of the pages in a website. By submitting the site map page to the search engines it allows their spiders and robots to visit most of your website by following the links from just that one page.
• It allows human visitors another method of finding what they're looking for on a website.
• It increases the number of links to each page on your website.

The Website Utility creates a very basic table of contents, sorted alphabetically by page title. It was used to create the basis of the site map for this website.

Missing/Blank Description and Keywords Meta Tags

Although most search engines now give much less weighting to the content of meta tags than they once did, it is still a good idea to include them. In particular, the description meta tag is often used as a page's summary in search engine results pages.

Extraction of Description and Keyword Meta Tags

The Website Utility is able to extract the content from Description and Keyword meta tags in all of the pages in a website. This saves substantial time compared to having to extract the information manually.

The Site Descriptions Report [view sample] created by The Website Utility displays the Description meta tags by page.

The Site Keywords Report [view sample] displays keywords by page. It also displays a list of all of the keywords on a page, ordered by their frequency of occurence.

Don't forget that The Website Utility can be used to crawl your competitors' websites to determine what keywords they are using!

Page Size Report

The Website Utility shows the site's pages ordered by page size. Search engines normally prefer pages to be of a certain size, so The Website Utility makes it straightforward to identify pages that may be too small or too large for efficient search engine indexing and placement. Needless to say, The Website Utility will also identify pages that may be too large for human visitors as well! Consider splitting up large pages - increasing the number of pages in your website will help with search engine placement as well.

Usage of Meta-Refresh Tags

The Website Utility identifies pages that use Meta Refresh Tags with a short refresh interval. Pages that make use of these may be indicative of websites designed to confuse and mislead human or web robot visitors, so their usage should be avoided where possible. Furthermore, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser allows the user to disable the action of this tag in its security settings. Handy tip: The refresh tag can be replaced with the Response.Write() statement in websites that use Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. PHP has the "location:" statement equivalent.

Splash Screen Detection

The Website Utility can detect the use of splash screens on a website. Typically these are home pages that display the organisation's logo for a few seconds before redirecting to the main content page, or they contain a Macromedia Flash animation and a click to continue link below. Whilst splash screens look attractive (and keep web designers in business!) they result in human website visitors being an extra click away from the content they may be looking for. Splash screens can also adversely affect a site's search engines rankings as they mean the first (and most important) page in the website has very little indexable content on it.

Detection of Outward Links

The Website Utility shows which pages contain links to other (3rd party) websites. Putting links from a website to other websites may influence a website's search engine rankings.

Detection of Excessive JavaScript

The Website Utility shows the amount of client-side JavaScript on each page of the website. Excessive amount of JavaScript in pages may have a detrimental affect on search engine friendliness of a page.

Detection of Robots.txt or Meta Tag Issues

Most web robots, including those used by search engines to seek out new content for inclusion in their directories will obey both a web server's robots.txt file as well as the 'robots' meta tag that may be present in individual pages.

If a website, or portions of that website cannot appear to be submitted successfully to search engines it is possible that the search engine is not accepting that website due to it being marked as non-retrievable in either the robots.txt file or in individual files through the use of the 'robots' meta tag.

The Robots Exclusion Report lists any pages that may not be retrievable due to either robots.txt or 'robots' meta tag restrictions.

Download The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).