Browseo is one of the many SEO tools available, that can help you identify certain things on your site or any site to better understand how Google sees it.
Recently, I had been looking through a list of SEO tools and this one came up. Being that was free to use, I decided to personally test it out and it didn’t really take long for me to realize that it’s not very helpful.
Much of the information it provides is quite obvious or useless for someone like myself, and is available in other, more important options that I will provide you (which are also free, just better). But since this is a pretty popular program, let me go over it and explain it’s benefits, while also explaining why those benefits aren’t that big of a deal either.
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How does Browseo work?
You enter your URL (or any other) and it will basically give you a report on how search engine spiders crawl and view it (info available here). That is pretty much all there is to it, but while this sounds like a useful service, the truth is, things like Webmaster Tools would tell you the same thing.
Plus I felt the overall report I got from Browseo was pretty basic.
I ran a few sites through it and overall, the reports it gave me didn’t really help me to understand the page I was looking at better, even if it was mine. Here is an example of me running a test on this service (using this site):
In this report, all that is really given to me that is of use is the “text information” area where I can see how many internal, external and nofollow links there are. If you are unfamiliar with these 3 things, don’t worry…
- You can get plenty of info on internal and external links here.
- Regarding nofollow links, here is info.
Now this kind of information is “slightly” useful because normally, if I wanted to see this information for my site, I’d have to log into a specific tool from Google to see that. But in this case, someone who is analyzing my site could use this service to see that info, and I could do the same to theirs.
And I don’t really care much about this information being public, because it doesn’t hinder my rankings or give away some important information that could be used by a competitor, but one can better analyze a site this way, just not by much…
Other than that info, all this service does is it analyzes my home page and tells me other data the search engine spiders would look at.
Overall, I wouldn’t bother with Browseo (and what I would do):
The reason I wrote this article is because there are so many tools for this subject available and in truth, most of them are unnecessary for a website owner to use.
Very often, these services aren’t up to date with things like this:
- How rankings really work.
- They often provide information on useless things/terms that people who don’t know better, may waste time focusing on.
I see a little bit of that with Browseo, but I don’t think badly of it. I just don’t find it useful at all to me.
Let’s face it, the purpose of all these types of programs is to use their information or have them help you make good decisions on optimizing your site to rank better and get more organic traffic right?
Well let me advise you to follow this goal a different way, and here is how I do it:
For better rankings, here is what I focus on first:
I make sure to optimize my content according to these tips. I can assure you that focusing and applying JUST the guidance in that article will already put you above 99% of other competing websites and help it rank better and I have used the checklist in that article over and over and have seen many high rankings thanks to it.
It universally works for just about any site that tries to get high rankings for important keywords. So just follow that.
As for the tools, here is what I mainly use:
For my WordPress site, there are 5. Here is the list and why they are beneficial for better rankings. They are also free.
Now there are also additional ones that I use outside of my website to basically help me check things like the ranking reports on how the site is doing, what keywords it’s appearing for, loading times and which positions they occupy on Google and other important search engines like Bing and Yahoo.
And finally, I also use a separate one for helping me rank better on Bing. Here it is.
Now it may seem strange that someone who just spoke about there being too many options and most of them being unnecessary to start mentioning all these options, but let me assure you that many of them are one time set ups and/or so easy and quick to use that you don’t need to do anything major or monitor several different things. Just check out those articles and you will see that yourself.
Plus, they are also the most relevant options today with regards to better rankings because many of them are designed by the very search engines we are all seeking to get higher rankings on in the first place.
For example: Google and Bing’s Webmaster program.
These options will give you the best information on how your site is doing with regards to those search engines so there’s no need for you to look at other options like Browseo or even other, more advanced options. These free ones will suffice.
Now since I circled back to Browseo, let me finish by saying that again, I didn’t find much use for this service and probably won’t use it again. I can also predict that this will be the case for many future SEO tools I’ll probably end up reviewing on this site, and again, the thesis for why that is has already been explained (Too many options, and too much unnecessary info).