SeoKitten.com

irelandstats

Hi guys!

I just started the seokitten.com. It's still in beta version. Can you check some sites and give me feedback?

jmcc

It should be able to tell the difference between a 200 and a 403. It is an interesting site though.

Regards...jmcc

irelandstats

Thanks jmcc,

I think there should be an alert with 403. There is a 403 in header tab but it's not enough.

Peterdalkey

Very easy to use and interesting to compare one's own sites versus competitors. Got a good few slaps, which only confirms that we are nowhere near as good as we would to think we could (should!) be!

Is is possible to get the detail of the errors etc?

Great tool and well done. Hope you have great success.

irelandstats

You're right. It will be much better with error details. There are some tooltips within the table - have you seen them Peterdalkey?

Peterdalkey

irelandstats wrote: »

You're right. It will be much better with error details. There are some tooltips within the table - have you seen them Peterdalkey?

I did indeed and that is what prompted me to see how to get the specific detail, so that I can make sure that those who look after this aspect do what is needed. I am way out of my depth on this topic and would be cluless as to how to fix them. The important thing is that they do get fixed rather than who does the fixing!!

As a real life experiment I took the best performing US site in our sector and the best mainland Europe one. We scored 2.3 but they scored 5.0 and 4.9 respectively!!

Now that I know I have a problem , how do I harness and use this information to achieve industrty best performance?

irelandstats

SeoKitten is a tool, and like any tool - it should be used for what it's designed for. It's aim is not to do everything for you, it's there to signal there are errors that should be fixed, it's an automated analysis tool that does the evaluation.
If you want to know how to correct the errors, follow the Seo Blog we will start shortly, we'll be dealing with the issues the kitten points out.
Seo is a very broad topic, it's virtually impossible to cover everything in one place.

Peterdalkey

As Terry Wogan used to say on the Eurovision, the Poles are polling well!! 24 of the top 50 scores are for Polish domains!! www.seokitten.com/top50/

irelandstats

Only three .ie domains in top50. Time to manage your meta tags

mneylon

Peterdalkey wrote: »

As Terry Wogan used to say on the Eurovision, the Poles are polling well!! 24 of the top 50 scores are for Polish domains!! www.seokitten.com/top50/

it's based on who has used the tool to test their site ..

Peterdalkey

Blacknight wrote: »

it's based on who has used the tool to test their site ..

.... and then only how good they are at scoring on it!!

jmcc

irelandstats wrote: »

Only three .ie domains in top50. Time to manage your meta tags

Not really a good way of ascertaining the SEO level of a site. Google's decision a few years ago to concentrate more on content rather than keywords meant that a lot of websites dropped the keywords metadata. (I know because I work with full TLD web usage surveys and surveys involving over 350K websites at a time so I see the raw state of the web). Also Alexa is not a reliable metric as it is too easy to get some meatbots to reload the page with an Alexa toolbar.

Regards...jmcc

Peterdalkey

Jmmc

I would be in no way in a position to comment on the posts of any expert in the field but I have found it most useful to identify the errors and Mistakes of some others work on my sites. I completely accept that errors do occur and am not seeking to blame those who have done work for us.

However, Some of them are pretty fundamental, so having them pointed out puts me in a position to get someone to fix them and give them a pretty definitive list!

The sites properly repaired have to be significantly more effective than the state they are currently in! As a dinosaur, I don't care about how or why it works, just that it does! And I feel the same about my sites and my new putter!

Cheers

Peter

jmcc

Peterdalkey wrote: »

Jmmc

I would be in no way in a position to comment on the posts of any expert in the field but I have found it most useful to identify the errors and Mistakes of some others work on my sites. I completely accept that errors do occur and am not seeking to blame those who have done work for us.

Some of what may appear as errors, Peter, might not be errors.
Google's search engine algorithm changes over the last few years have left a lot of the old certainties about SEO in ruins. It was, at one stage, all about getting links. The recent muppetry from Google effectively destroyed a lot of that in favour of some really iffy changes. Now you have SEOs spamming site owners to remove legitimate links. Another issue is where a site owner uses Joomla as the CMS. If they then forget to update the metadata, the default Joomla metadata will be used. Now to a simple metadata check, the page has a title, keywords and description but they are just so much noise.

However, Some of them are pretty fundamental, so having them pointed out puts me in a position to get someone to fix them and give them a pretty definitive list!

Use more than one site or source to build your checklist. Otherwise you could be trying to fix the trivial issues while missing major ones.

Sites like this are useful but you would really need to get proper SEO help to fix any issues.

Regards...jmcc

Peterdalkey

Thanks jmmc. Sound counsel.
I have just done exactly that and he started working on it today but this little cat is what gave me the nudge to do something. May not be a tool for the professionals but very useful for us Luddites!

SEO and digital marketing are fast getting the reputation of Y2K consultants/commercial rates reduction artistes, etc among site owners but the basic fact remains, it is a critical component to achieve success on the web. The key skill is picking them, and you never even get to see their mothers... Unlike when selecting a bride!

Cheers

Peter

irelandstats

jmcc wrote: »

Not really a good way of ascertaining the SEO level of a site. Google's decision a few years ago to concentrate more on content rather than keywords meant that a lot of websites dropped the keywords metadata.

I meant <title> tags. These are still important. We don't check for keywords as major search engines don't use it.

Also Alexa is not a reliable metric as it is too easy to get some meatbots to reload the page with an Alexa toolbar.

Regards...jmcc

SEOKittens don't count Alexa into the final SEO score.

SEOKitten surely isn't really going to make your website automatically rank number one. It will help you to remove errors and rank better though. It can give you some ideas of competitors' sites as well. I hope that by the end of the week there will be first case studies on the blog. The 10 second audit helped a lot to solve Google problems.

blue4ever

I think the site has its merits - but some of the aspects of its reporting are subjective.

For ex: I have one site that has no facebook presence, none. Its not facebook orientated or even leaning and it would be (in this site) peanilised due to its lack of likes/shares/comments etc.

Anyway a "like" can be a sincere as a kiss for a brazer - so we're automatically putting huge store in that number.

I certainly am not going to figure out a way to stuff a pintrest page for my site because it might, subjectively, help my overall metric here.

Same with Google plus - I, the site owner, am the verified author of the articles on my site - via my personal G+ account - and that's how it will say. I promote me!

Like we've seen of late, Google has relied on 'manual intervention' ie humans! A manual site audit will throw up 99% of issues that do not fall into the category of best practice. Once these are corrected, then you have a good platform to extend and advance on your SEO.

irelandstats

I don't agree with human interventions. The most sites are evaluated by the algorithm - the search quality team comes into play only after you trigger some algorithm alerts.

SEOKitten.com helps to rank better and the social signals will be a factor for search engines. Even if they don't play a major role now it is good to have them. I know that every website is different but generally it is important to have FB, G+ or Twitter followers. Maybe not for direct correlation with positions but you gain more possibilities to gather backlinks, which are still one of the most important ranking factors.

blue4ever

Agree and Disagree!

I'd use a suite of applications to assess a website - but i'd make the call based on the results. Human intervention!

tricky D

irelandstats wrote: »

We don't check for keywords as major search engines don't use it.

Bing still uses it, but only for negative marking for keyword stuffing.

irelandstats wrote: »

I don't agree with human interventions. The most sites are evaluated by the algorithm - the search quality team comes into play only after you trigger some algorithm alerts.

Panda is now algorthimic, but the algorithm was developed using machine-learning based on human testing of many thousands of sites.

Kent Brockman

Tried that site and got a rank of 4

Also got this:
"Why do you use html code and images in H1 header? It’s definitely not OK. Have you considered applying H2 headings to underline what is essential?"

I have no idea what this means or how to fix it.

(We built the website ourselves mainly using the wordpress.org site & youtube tutorials. All put together on a template using widgets & plugins.
We then had 3 different friends with some experience give it a look over to iron out any issues we were having.)