SISTRIX Optimizer – setting up your project
To analyse a webpage based on OnPage factors with the Toolbox, you have to set up the website as a project in the “Optimizer” module. We will use thsun.co.uk for this tutorial.
To start using the Optimizer, sign into the Toolbox and click on the “Optimizer” link in the top blue navigation bar. Alternatively you can just use this link: https://uk.sistrix.com/optimizer.
Create a new project
You can evaluate up to 5 domains with the default version of the Optimizer, at the same time. If you need more domains you can upgrade the Optimizer simply swap out an existing project domain. Now, we will create a new project that will lead us through the Optimizer wizard.
It makes sense to use comprehensive project names in the Optimizer – especially if you want to analyse multiple subdomains. For the domain (startpage + all sub pages) we will use the description “thesun.co.uk” so we always know what we are dealing with.
The second step asks us to choose the domain, hostname or path. For this tutorial we will use the domain option and then enter the complete domain into the text field. When choosing “Domain”, you only have to provide the domain as well as the TopLevelDomain – we will then analyse all pages therein.
During the project setup you can also add “Keywords” and “Competitors”. We will skip both of these steps in this tutorial. If you would like to know more, please visit our tutorial “Create your own Visibility Index“. You can update the keywords and competitors at any time by going into the project settings.
The topic we want to focus on now are the weaknesses on the webpage in terms of OnPage-SEO. For that, finish creating your project by clicking on the final “Create project” button. Afterwards, the SISTRIX crawler will visit the website and analyse it. You will get an E-Mail once the results are ready.
The OnPage analysis
The OnPage analysis is there to unearth weaknesses a website may have. Those could range from technical errors to content problems. However, most errors can usually be found on the technical side. Every error has a detailed explanation in the Toolbox. The explanations of each error, warning and notices will usually also include additional, external sources, in case you want to learn more about each issue. You can also find a large amount of articles about OnPage-Optimization in our Ask-SISTRIX knowledgebase.
The Optimizer distinguishes between errors, warnings and notices.
Once the initial crawl has finished, you can immediately access all the information and start optimising your website. To do so, just click on “OnPage” in the left-hand navigation in the Optimizer.
You could say that, now, you are now the “dashboard” which contains everything you need to know, as far as errors, warnings and notices regarding the OnPage optimization of your website are concerned. At the top you will find the information when the next crawl will take place automatically, when the project was last crawled and how many HTML-pages and URLs were been crawled at that time.
If you want to restart the crawler, just click on the green “Restart Crawler” button, anytime you like. Left to itself, the Optimizer project will be crawled once a week by default. You can also add every box in the Optimizer to a report and have it sent to your inbox every week, or change the frequency in the project’s settings.
Evaluate errors
Our example has errors in three categories. There are pages without a title attribute. Some pages cannot be found at all and there is some duplicate content. If you click on one of the errors, we will show you an explanation of this error as well as the exact URLs where they occurred.
Let us choose the error “Empty Title-Tag” as an example.
There, we are shown all the URLs that do not have a title tag 1 . On top of the list with URLs you will find the description for the error 2 . Most of the time, the description will also include videos, as well as links to additional articles on that topic from Ask-SISTRIX as well as other sources.
If you understand the error, you can immediately look at the URLs on the bottom that are afflicted by this error 3. My first step is always to open the URL in a browser and check manually if the error still holds true.
In the next step, I click on “URL-Explorer” to see more details for this URL in the Optimizer 4 .
We will get more into the information that the “URL-Explorer” has in store in our tutorial “Onpage-Evaluation of individual URLs in the Optimizer“.
