Start Page

This is the first page you are usually presented when you launch Visual SEO Studio. It gives you an overview of all the projects you created along with the crawl sessions contained in the active project.

In this page also is the list of Verified Sites; sites you have demonstrated to administer. For these sites Visual SEO Studio will let you increase the performance during a crawl, and use more advanced crawl options.

Projects

Crawl Sessions and all other data are stored in project files.

The product works with one active project at the time.

You can organize your projects the way you like; for example, you could dedicate a project file to a particular site, storing crawl session of the same site taken at different times, or you can for example dedicate a project to a group of sites belonging to the same customer.

Current project

The name of the currently active project.

Create new project

You can create a new project by clicking on the Create new project... link; you can also create a new project from the program main menu with File->New Project....

Project Name

Name of the project. You can change the name of a project if it is not the active one, by clicking on the pencil icon in the third column of the project row.

Last Modified

Date of the last time the project was modified.

Rename

You can rename a project by clicking at the icon in the third column of the project row.

Open

Click the icon at the fourth column in the grid to open the project of the corresponding row.

Delete

A project can be removed from the system clicking the icon in the fifth column of the row related to the project you want to remove

Sessions

A project can contain several Crawl Sessions, stored data resulting from the spider visiting web sites.
The table lists all the Crawl Sessions present within the active project.

ID

Each crawl session is identified uniquely by an auto-assigned ID progressive number.

Name

You can give your sessions an optional descriptive name. The name can be assigned when choosing the crawl parameters, or at a later time.

Start URL

The address from where the spider started visiting the website. You will typically insert at the start of a new exploration the website Home Page, usually the "root" address. For explorations of list of URLs the field is not populated.

Crawl Type

The type of exploration. The first times you will normally perform just explorations of type "Link Search", i.e. you will use the spider to explore a website starting from the root address and explore it by following all links found. With more advanced uses you might also audit XML Sitemaps, or explore lists of URLs.

Visited Pages

The number of web pages visited during the crawl session. Just web pages, it does not count HTTP requests to images or other resources.

Crawl Start

Date and time when the crawl session was launched.

Crawl End

Date and time when the crawl session completed. When the crawl session is still in progress, this field is not populated.

Duration

The time it took to complete the crawl session. When the crawl session is still in progress, this field is not populated.

Completion Reason

The reason why the crawl session completed. Normally we expect it to be completed because all links found were visited, but it could have been stopped by the user, or it could have stopped due to other reasons.

Domain

The domain name of the Start URL. For explorations of list of URLs the field is not populated.

Open Session Management

The button Open Session Management will open the Manage Crawl Sessions main tab sheet (or select it, if already opened).

Verified Sites

Some crawl options would break the code of conduct for polite bots (identify yourself, respect robots exclusion protocol, do not hog web server resources...).
Since it would be unethical using them on someone else's website without consent, they are available only for websites you can demonstrate to administer. Then you will be able to set options such as override the directives set in the robots.txt file, spoof the user-agent, and use more parallel threads to download the site resources.

To enable these options you just have to verify your site, it only takes a few clicks.
You can demonstrate to be a site administrator by using "Google Search Console" credentials, or a "Bing webmaster tools" API key, or using the native Visual SEO Studio verification.
For local development web servers running on localhost or 127.0.0.1 you are automatically considered an administrator and the options will always be enabled.

You can learn more about Verified Sites at the page Managing the Verified Sites list.

Site

Root address of the verified site.

Valid

A symbol to confirm or deny that the site were verified.

Verified With

The method used to verify the site ownership.

Valid until

Date when the verification will expire. Verifications are valid for one month, because site owners could withdraw their permission.

Notes

You can add an optional note for your convenience.

Edit Notes

Click on the symbol on this column to edit the Notes field.

Delete Row

Click on the symbol on this column to delete the row. You will be able to add it back by repeating the verification process.

Manage Verified Sites

The button Manage Verified Sites... will open the Verified Websites window where you will be able to verify your website and add it to the list.
You can learn more about Verified Sites at the page Managing the Verified Sites list.