Shortly before Tom Critchlow’s excellent post on using Javascript bookmarklets to help make us more efficient in our jobs as SEOs I had begun work on a bookmarklet that lets me review a variety of on- and off-page SEO factors at a glance without having to leave the page I am looking at.
I wanted something that could quickly tell me how the page title and meta description tags are formatted, how the heading elements are used, and give me access to more external tools for every page I review. Without having to search through the source code.
Tom asked me to share it here, and I assured him I would once it was polished. Well, I’m happy to say that I have now polished it to a point where I feel comfortable sharing it with all of you here at SEOmoz! It has saved me a ton of time already and I hope that it helps you out as well.
Here’s a shot of the bookmarklet in action:
Install It
Just drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar => SEO
If you want to create it manually you can copy the code below. You will need to create the bookmarklet manually on your iPad, where it is very useful for quickly looking at on-page SEO factors while on the go or sitting in front of a client.
javascript:(function(){var d=document,z=d.createElement(‘scr’+’ipt’),b=d.body;try{if(!b)throw(0);z.setAttribute(‘src’,’http://twkm.ca/min/f=gadgets/resources/seo-bookmarklet/seo-0.1.js’);z.setAttribute(‘id’,’twkmSEOScript’);b.appendChild(z);}catch(e){alert(‘Please wait until the page has loaded.’);}}());
There is also a “Bleeding Edge” version of the SEO Bookmarklet that will receive new features and updates before the “stable” version. You can get more information about installing that one at my blog.
Enjoy the bookmarklet, and let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions.
The Full List of Features
The bookmarklet is broken into four main sections, and each can be hidden or expanded by clicking the title:
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On-Page Factors
- Title tag length and value
- Meta description tag length and value
-
Count of
tags with the alt attribute set, and total number of tags on the page
- Count of tags with the title attribute set, and total number of tags on the page
- Count of heading elements from h1 to h3 on the page
- Whether or not sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are present in the root folder of the domain (i.e. “www.seomoz.org/sitemap.xml” or “www.seomoz.org/robots.txt”)
- Whether or not rel=canonical or meta robots tags are present, and what their values are
- The site cookie
- The referral URL to the current page
- A set of links that will perform various tasks on the page, such as the SEOmoz Term Extractor, the W3C Link Checker, and others
-
Research and Intelligence Tools
- Open Site Explorer links for the current page and current domain
- An historic backlink graph for the site
- Access to the Google AdWords keyword tool
- and links to research and market intelligence resources
-
External Tools
- De-personalize Google results pages
- Get Whois data from GoDaddy
- View past versions of the page you’re viewing through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine
-
Text Length Checker
- Paste a chunk of text in the text box to find out how many characters are present
