The Free SEO Tool You Haven’t Thought Of Downloading Yet
Do you know when it comes to your possessions, how easy it is to overlook their value? The Opera browser is a perfect example.
Please no jokes on the singing fat lady. Done to death.
Opera is a software (or app if you prefer) designed first most for surfing the web. Given its shockingly low market share, Opera isn’t the first to mind as an SEO browser, but there are many reasons why it should.
The primary factor is it’s a free program that you can download and use beyond one time or one use.
No, you don’t know all the free SEO tools out there
You can search for “seo software” all day long. Just as there’s no doubt you’ll find decent tools free of cost, there’s also no doubt you’ll encounter scammy ones.
Have you ever considered the possibility that these same programs can be used by its creators (read: competitors) to spy on your efforts? There is value in data aggregation. Just ask Google the next time you conduct your keyword research. What better than using software not intended for the search engine optimization industry?
Being one of the few who not only is aware of but surfs the web with Opera for many years now, am able to tell you firsthand what’s possible.
Uncover the header tag hierarchy for any page
For any webpage, wouldn’t it be cool to see a table of content? Or to be more precise, how well a site utilizes and organizes its HTML header tags? (eg h1, h2, h3)
Depending on which SEO you ask, perhaps this is of more value to a web developer. However, for those who find this useful, activating the “Table of Content” button will hide everything on the webpage except the text between header tags.
Definitely an easier and quicker recourse than viewing the HTML markup via “view source code”.
HOW: Simply click the Opera button on the upper left corner and navigate to Page > Style > “Table of Contents”.
Quickly discover all images without alt text… visually
Having an empty alt attribute for an image is a lost optimization opportunity. Not only is it bad HTML markup but there’s less information for search crawlers to determine how relevant that picture is to your content. Goodbye image search. Well, maybe not that drastic but close enough.
HOW: Click the Opera button and navigate to Page > Style >”Alt Debugger”.
Any visible image seen, you’ll know lack the HTML image alt tag. Once again, no need to view the source code. Definitely a time saver when you’re examining a website.
Instantly check the HTTP header status of any webpage
A crucial technical test to look out for is server response. Search engine crawlers can only determine the status of a page by the returned HTTP status code. When you or a search engine robot visit a page, the server tells you what’s up with the requested page.
- 200 Success – If there is no problem, you’ll want your server to say so.
- 301 Moved Permanently – If you want to explicitly tell Google, for example, that www.example.com/seo.html has been moved to www.example.com/search-engine-optimization you need to ensure the old URL is throwing back this status code. This is also known as a 301 redirect and the most search-friendly method to update a page’s URL.
- 404 Not Found – If a page no longer exists, you’ll want to tell the search engines. This will speed up the process of removing a page from the search listings (SERP).
- Of course, there are more HTTP status codes to be aware of but these are the most common ones you’ll run into.
Now these HTTP status codes are not visible to normal users so you’ll need a special tool… like the one built-in.
You may think this is something to overlook but imagine you just created and optimized the hell out of a page but if your server is telling the search engines the page doesn’t exist… well, that’s just so sad. You’ll never rank for squat.
HOW: Check the HTTP header by going to Page > “Developer Tools” > “Opera Dragonfly” (or via the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + “I”)
Next, click on the “Network Tab” and then the “Make Request” mini tab.
At this point, type whatever URL to test and click “Send Request”. Good to see if your site accounts for proper redirects.
Easily view a quick summary of the meta data
Sometimes you want to see if a web page contains the proper title and meta tag and who wants to check via the source code? Opera has a left panel that neatly displays all this in a nice cohesive way. In addition, the panel shows the page info like size, CSS and JS files, if that matters to you as well.
More importantly, you can navigate from one page to another and the panel will automatically update. Great if you’re examining a whole site
HOW: Click the Panels button located on the bottom left corner (or via the keyboard shortcut F4) and then the “Info” button (has an “i” inside a circle)
Check all embedded links on a website
With this program feature, you can easily
- Generate a list of all internal & external links – Sort the link table by address to group by domain.
- See if a page links to you – Start typing the domain name and should appear if it’s there. You can even see the anchor text used. Useful verifying those link building campaigns… the ones where you need to check multiple sites
- Extract all page links and save – Select the links you want (with some filtering from above if needed) and paste into you excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the link text doesn’t come along but can still be useful. You know, Opera, that would be a cool feature. Just saying.
HOW: Press CTRL + SHIFT + “L” and the dialog should pop up. Take it from there.
Other useful SEO features & addons
- SEO Toolbar – Install the SeoQuake extension. With this, you’ll be able to see the Pagerank, what links are nofollowed, # of inbound links, # of pages indexed, and domain age Just make sure to disable the seo bar by default since it requests all this information for every page load and you might get banned from Google and Bing.
- Install the YSlow Extension – Allows you to see how well your site is in terms of speed. Important now that speed is a ranking factor. With this tool, you can see what hanging fruits you can go after first.
- Do a quick search with personalized search off for sure – Right click on the tab bar and hit “New Private Tab. You start off fresh with no cookies. Also great to quickly check your ranking without worrying to log off.
- Emulate a search engine crawler – Disable images, flash, JS, and other plugins to see it at its plainest via “F12″. Then remove all CSS stylesheets by clicking Opera button > page > style > “user mode”
Will this convince you to try this SEO browser? Well, if you’ve never heard of it, how can you skip FREE? If you’re more experienced, it’ll at least be something to tuck into your toolbox. A lot of these features are already built in, so you don’t need to do much. Install it into your flash drive and take it on the go.
I don't know. Sometimes it feels like my writing & thoughts are way off. Who knows if it'll help anyone or if it means anything.
Written by Steve Villaverde