We are very pleased to announce the beta release of Found’s SEO Tool. This free tool will provide you with an initial snapshot of what is, and what isn’t, working on your website. This will ensure you are in prime position to make the right decisions to feature ahead of the competition in search listings.
The goal of this project was to produce a useful tool that allows you to enter a URL and receive an instant automated SEO audit of your site, with an overall score and advice on how to improve it, without incurring any cost.
The data returned can act as a starting point and quickly alert you to some key issues that may need to be looked at. Whilst this beta version the tool does not complete a full audit, nor can it be expected to replace human checks by a seasoned SEO’er, we believe it is currently at a stage where it provides extremely useful pointers.
The Tool has 3 Main Parts:
• Technical issues, such as domain canonicalisation & XML sitemaps
• Content issues, such as keywords found on the page and in meta data
• External link analysis
The tool will indicate whether the task is successful, if there is an error or just provides a warning. This ‘traffic light’ warning system is then displayed in the top left of the page.
How to use the SEO Tool
Step 1. Enter a domain into the box provided
Step 2. Click go and wait for the checks to complete!*
As the tool completes each task you will be displayed the results, and then it will scroll onto the next task.
Full list of Tool Features
• HTTP header check
• Domain canonicalisation – checks for duplicates of the homepage. This checks www and non-www versions and for multiple index files. This is probably one of my favourite features
• Robots.txt check – checks existence and sitemap location
• Sitemap check – checks for existence
• On-page links analysis – summary, internal links and external links within HTML
• Header check – checks H1 tags
• Image analysis – checks for missing alt tags
• Keywords analysis – checks density of keywords found
• Metadata analysis – looks at title tags, description tags and keywords tag
• SEOmoz URL metrics analysis – domain authority and total links
• SEOmoz Links Analysis – checks for strongest links by page authority
Foundlabs
This tool is a direct result of Foundlabs, which is an internal system where staff can submit innovative ideas. All of these ideas are then considered by our Technical Director and his team to see how feasible they are. The idea for this tool was submitted by our Head of SEO & Social, Guy Donnelly, and I then worked with our amazing web development studio to see the tool through to completion. The team has done a fantastic job on this, with David taking on the coding lead and Dean presenting the information in a rather slick manner. A great team effort for our first publicly available SEO tool.
Also, big thanks to SEOMoz for allowing the use of an excellent links API. We hope they like the use of their API, and I am sure we will do a lot more interesting things with this data in the future.
Access the Tool on the following URL: https://www.found.co.uk/seo-tool/
Although we have tested on a variety of domains, we still may have some issues under load. We appreciate feedback, so if you come across any problems, let us know on the tool’s [feedback form] or in the comments below. If you have found this audit tool useful then please share to those who might like to check it out.
Update 05/12/2012
The tool has now been updated, and is out of beta. (I think we had a beta of a beta version at one point!)
•Results can now be saved and exported to PDF!
•We now have an iOS mobile app version which is free to download from the AppStore.
