The New and Improved Ryte Inspector

If you use Ryte’s software regularly, no matter whether you’re a free or business user, you’ll definitely recognize this feature (if not, you should start using it right away!). The new Inspector delivers the same useful information, but incorporates many more features in a brand new user interface. In this article, we’ll explain what’s new, and how you can use the Ryte inspector to optimize your website to its maximum potential.

The Inspector can be found in every single Ryte report on the right hand side by clicking on the magnifying glass.

Figure 1: Find the Inspector in all reports

User Interface

The new user interface delivers all important information about the URL in one glance, meaning that you no longer have to click through tabs to find the information you need. We’ve also introduced color codes to highlight problems so that you have an even easier job of optimizing your website and prioritizing tasks. A red exclamation mark means something isn’t quite right, and you should probably look into this to ensure a technically correct website and a good user experience. If you see mostly green ticks, this means you’re already doing a great job with optimizing your website (but of course there’s always room for improvement!).

These are some of the important facts you see in the overview. Click on any of the items in the overview to be taken to a more detailed report.

OnPage score

The OnPage Score is a value between 0 and 100 that shows the optimization status of the URL (this would for example include any image URLs). This is calculated using a complex algorithm which takes into account many different On-Page factors. It gives you a quick idea of how optimized this page is.

All incoming and outgoing references

Here, you see the number of incoming links, whether regular internal links, redirects, hreflang tags, canonicals, or from the sitemap. Outgoing internal links, external links, and hreflag tags are also displayed here. Click to dig deeper, or click on the tab "links" above to get a comprehensive list, including the anchor texts. This can be particularly useful for many reasons. You might want to find out how many external websites link to this webpage, or maybe you just want to check how many times a particular landing page is linked internally.

Figure 2: OnPage Score with overview of incoming and outgoing links

Figure 3: List of all incoming links

Google snippet for mobile and desktop

Your snippet in Google gives users a first impression of your website - this is the first aspect of your website they will see, and it could even be their first exposure to your brand. It’s important that you portray the content of the landing page concisely, and preferably with a call to action so that users are encouraged to click. In this section of the super Inspector, you can check how your snippet looks on desktop and mobile devices. If the title or meta description is too long or too short, this will be indicated in red so you’ll know whether it needs to be optimized or not.

Check out this article for more tips on how to create the perfect meta description for a great snippet in Google for more visitors and conversions.

Important page metrics

See the status code, indexability, Onpage rank and click depth of your page here. These reflect how easily search engines and users can find your website:

• The status code should be 200. When a user calls up your website and and the client makes the request to the server, the server responds with a status code 200 if there are no issues.

• Indexability tells you if the page is available in Google’s index - if you rely on users finding your webpage with organic search, it’s essential that this page is indexable, otherwise users will not be able to see this webpage in the Google search results.

• OnPage Rank determines the quality of a webpage, for example using the quality of incoming links. It works in a similar way to Google’s PageRank.
  Click depth shows you how far a user has to click before they reach this webpage. If this webpage is particularly important to your website or business, you should ensure that the user doesn’t have to navigate through too many pages to reach it.

Page loading time

The loading time of your page is very important for many reasons. Users will not spend a long time waiting around for your page to load and they will jump straight back to the search results if they get bored of waiting. This will provide Google with pretty negative signals about your site. In the Ryte Inspector, you see an overview of the page speed, with information about the page size, server response time, time to first byte, and the compression. The useful rainbow coloured bar will give you an indication of whether the page speed is good or not - if your page speed isn’t in the green area, it needs to be urgently optimized, otherwise you could be losing potential customers. Take a look at this article for more insights and information about different tools you can use to improve page speed.

Figure 4: Page speed

Duplicate content

Duplicate content isn’t penalized by Google (despite what you might hear), but having too many pages with very similar or identical content will make it harder for Google to judge which page is more important, and the search engine won’t know which one should be ranked more highly. In this section, you’ll be warned if any other pages on your website have similar or identical content, or identical titles or descriptions. There are many ways of dealing with duplicate content, for example, setting a canonical tag referring to the more relevant page will show Google which page should be indexed. This article provides more useful insights about how to deal with duplicate content.

Content and images

Find your important content statistics here, such as headings, content to code ratio, and language. The color icons show you if there are any issues. You also see which terms on this page have the highest TF*IDF value - these are the words that Google will judge as most relevant. You should be able to see your brand keyword here, and if not, you should incorporate this in the text more.

Don’t miss out on the information about your images at the bottom of the overview. You’ll see how many images are on your page, whether there are any broken images, and whether you have any images without alt tags. Alt tags are short descriptions of images, and they’re important for both users and search engines. If a picture is not displayed correctly, an alt tag can give the user context about what the image should be showing. Furthermore, alt tags are important for accessibility - screen readers can help disabled users understand the context of images if they contain alt tags. Alt tags also inform search engines about the context of the image, meaning that your picture could end up ranking in the Google image search. So don’t neglect your alt tags - they’re significant to SEO, usability and accessibility.

Figure 5: Information about images

Problem solving with the Inspector

The Inspector makes it really easy to solve critical errors on your page. From the project dashboard, you immediately see how many critical errors are on your site. Often, the main cause of this is broken pages, so 404 errors. When looking at your list of 404 errors, you can use the Inspector to find which pages are linking to the 404 error pages. Maybe you deleted some outdated URLs but these are still linked internally. You can then easily go through your list of incoming references and delete the internal links. The same applies to broken images - the critical error report also shows you how many broken images you have on your site, and you can easily find out with the Inspector which pages link to these.

Conclusion

The Inspector is a really useful resource for getting an overview of all important metrics of one individual web page. It’s available to all users, both free and paid, and is suitable for beginners and experts. You can use the Inspector for all aspects of website optimization, whether problem solving or simply checking how many incoming links an internal landing page has. Get started with the new and improved Inspector today!