Getting Started with Visual SEO Studio

So, you downloaded and installed Visual SEO Studio. Good choice.
What follows is the "Now what?" part.

Your first project with Visual SEO Studio

As you launch the program, you are asked a project name.
Visual SEO Studio needs a file name to store your crawling sessions. If this is your first time using the application, the only option you have is typing in a new one.

Optional: listing verified sites

This optional step normally takes just a few click. You might want to skip it for now, but if you want to get the most out of your SEO tool we suggest you doing it sooner than later:
it will permit you accessing advanced crawl options for your site like overriding robots.txt directives, change user-agent... To know more, check the page Managing the Verified Sites list

Let's crawl your site!

Next thing to do is launching the crawler to visit your favorite web site.
Click on the "Crawl a site..." entry on the main menu or the launch pad on the left.

A "Session name" is optional, it just serves you to distinguish it.
By clicking on "Show options" you'll be able to access all crawl options:

You can leave all other parameters with their default value for now.

Click on the "Crawl" button.

You are presented with a visual representation of the real time crawl process. You can pause and resume it. Let Pigafetta, the SEO audit tool integrated crawler, walk its way through your site.

Simulated G-time shows how long a search engine spider would take to visit the site

Learn more about Visual SEO Studio Visual Real-Time Crawl.

Viewing your crawl sessions

If you close the view, you can always access an equivalent Crawl View to load the saved values and visualize a tree view with the taken crawl paths; just click on the "Crawl View" entry from the main menu or the launch pad.

Other available views are Folder View with the directory structure, and Tabular View. If you want, you can collapse the launch pad on the left to see more horizontal content.

In the lower part of the program window you will note some panels dedicated to data shared among the whole site. Among them: "HTTP Issues", "Non-crawled items", "Search Results"

Clicking on any page item, you have a variety of "page tools" showing views of the visited pages. Among them: "Properties", "Content", "DOM", "Screenshot" on the right side, "Page links", "H1..H6 titles", "SERP snippet emulator" and "Validation" at the bottom of the window.

Export to Excel and CSV

On any table shown in the program you can export the grid contents to Excel and CSV formats.

Supported Excel data format is standard Office Open XML, also supported by the Open Office and Libre Office suites.

Picking the first low hanging fruits: fix broken links and redirections

With the session views you have a set of tools dedicated to the overall crawl session: "Session" detailing overall data and crawl options parameters, "HTTP issues", "Non crawled items" and "Search results".

HTTP Issues (click to enlarge)

If the spider encountered 404 (Not Found) and 301/30x (redirections) error codes, it means there are internal links to be fixed.
Visual SEO Studio lets you easily locate the referrer page where the broken URL has been found. From there you easily pinpoint the anchor tag A to fix.
Read the tutorial page Find broken links and link redirections for a complete guide.

Get HTML and URL Suggestions

It's now time to explore some of the powerful diagnostics tools offered by Visual SEO Studio.
Click on "HTML Suggestions" from the main menu or from the launch pad. About 20 insightful reports covering title and meta-description issues are awaiting to surprise you.

HTML Suggestions summary page (click to enlarge)

Learn more about Visual SEO Studio HTML Suggestions.

Want more?
Launch "URL Suggestions", and get another bunch of reports about the way your site URLs are formed!

Create customized XML Sitemaps

Visual SEO Studio makes creating targeted XML Sitemaps easy: with its visual XML Sitemap Editor you can select the branches you want to export, decide the listing order, and control the priority to give to the URLs.

Visual XML Sitemap Editing with Visual SEO Studio (click to enlarge)

A visual interface and pre-packed default values make a powerful tool easy and immediate to use.

Learn more about Visual SEO Studio XML Sitemaps tools.

That's Not all folks!

With this first-steps tutorial we just scratched the surface.
We are preparing other tutorial pages to help you getting the most out of your SEO tool.

For a full list of features to come, have a Product Tour.
To have a better view of the state of the product, see the Development Status page.

As new releases of Visual SEO Studio will be dropped, you will see it getting richer of feature and improving every time.

Visual SEO Studio is a powerful tool and we are always surprised by what it permits to achieve in the hands of a skilled SEO professional.
We are looking forward to have your feedback, so drop us a line if want to share it with us, or if you have any suggestion to improve the product.

Other tutorials

We are organizing a whole new section of help and how-to pages, see:
Visual SEO Studio Tutorials