Manual: Start Page
The feature "Start Page" of Visual SEO Studio, documented in detail.
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
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
You can learn more about Verified Sites at the page Managing the Verified Sites list.