Wednesday 16 September 2015

Using Scrutiny to make important checks over your EverWeb website


In this new video we take a look at how to use Scrutiny to make some important UX and SEO checks over your Everweb website.

The checks themselves apply to any website, but EverWeb makes it easy to correct the issues, as we demonstrate here.

This tutorial uses Scrutiny for Mac and the EverWeb 'drag and drop' content management system.

Links become broken over time (link rot) so a regular link check is important. Everweb helps with this issue because it manages the links in your navigator, but links in your content are still vulnerable to your own or external pages naturally being moved, changed or deleted. Fortunately, finding them and fixing them is easy, as demonstrated.

The title tag and meta description are very important (and a good opportunity) for SEO. Scrutiny will highlight any that are missing, too long or too short. EverWeb makes it a breeze to update these where necessary.

Alt text for your images is also important (depending on the image). Once again, Scrutiny can highlight any potential issues / keyword opportunities and the video shows you how to update your site.

On the subject of keywords, it's very important to do your keyword research and ensure that your pages contain a reasonable amount of good quality content. Once Scrutiny has scanned your site, you can see any pages with thin content, keyword stuffed pages, check occurrences of your target keywords and even see a full keyword analysis:

5 comments:

  1. Hello Sheila, i'm using your tool more and more. I like the way it performes, It's quite fast. One thing that i'm missing is a reporting tool. It would be great to be able to get a summary report (pdf?) and an extensive report, with all of the information in it. I know how to get reports of all the different elements of the research, but one report with all the information in it would be a tremendous addition to the software.
    Hope to hear from you.

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  2. Hi Dick, thank you very much for your interest in Scrutiny and your feedback. Note that there is a summary report, pdf or html. But it's not so conveniently available - you must go into the advanced settings and switch it on (and choose a save location) then from the Tasks screen, 'scan with actions'.

    I'm not sure whether it'll be as comprehensive as you'd like, it lists bad links, minimal SEO information (pages with missing title / description) and html validation, which is unfortunately currently (hopefully temporarily) unsupported.

    Better reporting is definitely something I will keep in mind as we go forwards.

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  3. Thanks for looking into this. I didn't see you answer until today. Sorry for that. I found the option under 'Schedule' instead of 'Advanced'. It looks like the report is only generated when i schedule a research on a weekly or monthly base. This is not very conveniant if you just want to do a first initial scan of a site.

    Well, it's good to know you're working on the reporting. It's the one thing that is missing at the moment, i think.
    Keep it up.

    I'm happy to test, by the way, if you need testers.

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  4. Hi Dick, Thanks for the offer. You'll find that v6 is now the full stable release and it has Export > Summary Report under the File menu. I'm working on a more full report, though this is likely to save a summary + a number of separate files because of the sheer amount of data that can be contained in the individual reports

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  5. Great! It's much easier to access now. A more full report would be very nice. A summary and separate files is ok too, when they are as easy to access and to generate. Nice to see the constant development of the tool.

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