Putting the Data in Context

With our aim of providing an easy-to-use tool while focusing on what truly matters in mind, we decided to provide context for some of the data that you see in Browseo. I've been putting this off for a while and deliberately decided against including it in the initial releases because I was afraid of making any generic recommendations. Seasoned SEOs know what they are doing, and they don't need me to tell them why redirect chains might need to get fixed, or what place headings have on a page. In fact, depending on how you do your work and what you are working on, things can be very dramatically different. And reading industry blogs, it is obvious that everyone has a different opinion about those things.

Contemplating my own reactions to recommendations and context menus in various applications, I found myself complaining about recommendations that are either too generic or too specific (and hence not addressing my problems).

However, Browseo has been used by many thousands of users, and many of you use Browseo on a regular basis. You blog, tweet and talk about Browseo. Even Bing mentions us on their Blog. We are grateful to all of you for making Browseo a standard application in your SEO tool set. And because of this, we feel very much obliged to listen to your requests. Guess what the number one request we received over the last couple of months was?

Explanations.

So I've written a first version for each item in Browseo's sidebar. I am fully aware that what I've written is not perfect, and by no means comprehensive. It may even be incorrect on some cases, depending on how you use the tool and what you're looking at. So please bear with us while we try to get closer to decent explanations and recommendations. They are meant to help new users make the most out of Browseo, and to dispel doubts.

Here is what I've come up with:

Response Code

 

Ideally, you should see a 200 (OK), which means you are fine. If you see redirects, a general rule is to always use 301 redirects, and only use them if absolutely necessary. For example, redirects can be used to combine https://site.com and https://www.site.com into one. If you use several redirects in a chain, search engines tend to get lost.

Text Information

This sections informs you about the amount of words and links on the page you are browsing. Browseo displays these amounts so you don't have to count them yourself.

Head

Here you typically see several entries with varying degrees of importance. The tile and description are two of the most important parts of a page, whereas the keywords tag is ognored by most search engines. The robots tag can tell you whether there are any specific directives for search engines regarding crawling and indexing the page, while tags such as "generator" or "date" are only displayed here for your convenience.

SEPR Preview

This is Browseo's attempt in predicting what this page might look like in search results, based on the title and meta description tags. Please note that the actual snippet in the SERPS may look different, because search engines use several sources and also display different snippets based on the particular search query.

Headings

Use headings where it makes sense for users. There are six sizes of headings, H1 being the most and H6 the least important. Headings are used to describe the content of a page, and to catch the user's eye. Search engines look at them to find out what a page is about, just like they look at all of the text on a page.

If you would like to suggest alternative explanations, feel free to contact us here or get in touch with me on Twitter.