XLplus Add-On: Webpage Report
This XLplus XLplus Add-Ons supports you, creating your website more search machine friendly. To do so a report is generated which:
- analyses the internal linkage of your webpages
- analyses your page descriptions for repetition
- analyses your page titles for repetition
Excursion: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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This help cannot give you a comprehensive explanation of possible Tipps&Tricks regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimization); for this please check available tools and service provider. In the following a short explanation will be given of how to generate a search engine friendly and more over visitor friendly website.
Content
Put content on your page. The more content the more your visitors benefit. Additionally search engines will find more information to index. Your chance to be found within this index increases. Actualize your content frequently so that search engines come back often.
List qualified content. Use complete sentences instead of keywords only, explain a topic detailed and precise instead of using advertising slogans. Structure and present your content in a way, blind people can access it.
Presentation
Imagine, you are blind and visit your site. Read your pages source code and you read what a blind person hears. Blind persons can experience your website just by special programs which tell them your page. A design made by huge, nested tables, without headers and endless nestings is not easy to access if not completely inaccessible.
A search engine, indexing your page, experiences it like a blind visitor does.
Therefore mark relevant information by the available HTML tags, i.e. Headlines with h1, h2, etc. Highlight important parts by bold font or increased font size.
Offer your information structured to all visitors, whether being blind or not or a search engine. Use Meta information.
Meta Information
A blind visitor does not want to get told your entire page just to understand the information provided is not what was searched for. Therefore give a meaningfull description within your page. This, additionally, is the information, a search engine will display in its search results. Within your description use terms which often appear on your page and therefore are listed in your keywords list. Doing so results in a page which is giving content well shaped and search engine friendly, automatically.
Use an individual Title on every page, which contains your keywords and fits to the content of your page.
Internal linkage
Your website content will be linked together, some pages might detail topics of other pages or extend them. Set a link to these pages. Try to link as many pages as possible. If needed, use bridgehead pages which link to other parts of your site. A well linked page increases the chance to push received page rank to other pages of your website.
Additionally create a Sitemap of your site. |
Webpage Report
This tool analyses your webpage regarding internal links, descriptions and titles plus makes some suggestions.
Internal Links
You receive an overview about all links of every page. Additionally a Link Matrix will be created, showing which page is linked to which other page.
You can now start to eliminate white spots on this map.
Descriptions and Titles Analysis
This analysis checks for repetitions within your description or title texts. Repeating elements will be color coded. You should rework this information until individual information is given at last. You receive comments regarding optimal length of description or title text as well - these are just hints, no mandatory recommendations.
Using the Dialog / Tool
The tool is as easy as possible. You specify
- the files to work with,
- the URL of your webpage (domain)
- and the directory your files are stored in. This can be a local drive or a network based drive.
After you specified the directory, all files will be displayed.
Tip: Use the lower right hand corner of the dialog to change its size.
You can amend the given list now, i.e. delete unwanted files.
Within Options you can specify how to handle filenames - showing the path, too, or not. Analysis will become more easy to read in case paths are discarded. Furthermore you can specify which action shall take place when double clicking a list entry.
Coded URL
When creating websites you have the option to create links dynamically. Use option Coded URL to specify how to convert this to a correct link which can be used in the link matrix.
Ex: The XLplus website is hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and uses ASP (Active Server Programing) to dynamically generate required content. One sort of dynamically created content are links. This allows testing a website without limits using a test system. After copying the website onto the live system just one file gets changed and the website will function on the live system regardless of a new domain.
To do so, a domain name is stored in an include file and assigned to a variable. Every link will be created by use of this variable. The web server will include the correct domain, always. Within XLplus webpages, an internal link looks like:
<a title="Online Help" href="<%=baseurl%>/en/help/xlplusonlinehelp.asp?lang_id=de">Online Help</a>
At runtime, means whenever a user requests this page, the variable <% =BaseURL %> will be replaced by http://www.xlplus.de.
To allow this Excel Add-In to analyse these codings specify what to replace here. In the example of the website www.xlplus.de each occurance of <% =BaseURL %> will be replaced by the named domain. <% =BaseURL %> is the text you would enter here.
Depending on the programming language you use, this might read different.
In case you do not use programming, simply ignore this option.
Creating the Report
You create an analysis by pressing OK. A new file will be created which contains the analysis.
Features & FAQ
Features & FAQ
Features
This Excel Add-In supports you to create your report as convenient as possible. Therefore the following tasks will be processed automatically:
- Conversion of relative to absolute Links
All relative Links (i.e. ../../MyFile.htm) will be converted into an absolute link. Links become comparable therefore. This happens for analysis only - your files will not be changed.
- Correction of erreneous HTML Coding
In case an additional empty character got into the code of an anchor, this Excel Add-In will correct this and generate a correct Link Report. Automatically two empty characters between <a and href will be corrected.
- When using Option Coded URL a check for ASP coding will be performed automatically. In such a case, an additional check will be performed, recognizing empty characters as well.
Ex.: <% =BaseURL %> was entered, <% = BaseURL %> will be checked additionally.
FAQ
"The results I get are somehow strange - partly correct links are reported but partly links are incorrect or missing."
You have to start your analysis in the root of your website always. Otherwise some links cannot be resolved correctly.
Ex.: The website www.xlplus.de differenciates between German and English by keeping related files in special sub directories (/de or /en). In order to perform a correct analysis of only the German part of this website the root XLplus has to be chosen - a limitation to only the German files has to made afterwards. In such a case the directory: D:\Data\XLplus will be selected and all English files will be deleted from the list (all files within subdirectory /en). This asures all links are interpreted correctly and a correct link matrix is created.
Tip: Alternatively proceed as follows: Read all files of sub directory /de. Then amend the directory in the dialog so that it points to the root directory, before you start creating the report.
Versions:
Ver.: 2.1.42 and Ver.: 3.1.42 support the new MS Excel 2007+ spreadsheet dimensions.
See also:
XLplus Sitemap Builder