Last week we introduced a significant update to our Webmaster Tools. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a deeper look at the features we now offer to help you understand what they do and how to use them. For this week, we’ll start off with a couple of the new favorites folks seem to like. Let’s dive in and explore the SEO Reports and the SEO Analyzer.

It’s important to note the order we cover these in, as there’s some logic behind that.

We’ll run a scan of all URLs found in each domain verified in your Webmaster account every other week. This scan is filtered through our SEO Best Practices and is what’s used to build the SEO Reports automatically for you. As you navigate through these SEO Reports, you’ll find a list of URLs which we’ve flagged as having a particular issue. When you click on one of the URLs noted, you’re brought to the SEO Analyzer, which scans the URL you clicked and builds a real-time report of the issues we’re seeing for that one page. You should expect to find yourself at the SEO Analyzer when you start digging deep into the SEO Reports.

If you like, you can also go direct to the SEO Analyzer, bypass your SEO Reports, and ask the Analyzer to simply scan and report on the URL you type in. The SEO Analyzer is an on-demand tool which works in real-time.

It’s worth keeping in mind that when you want to see bulk details around SEO compliance issues, head over to the SEO Reports. If you need to test something quickly, use the SEO Analyzer.

SEO Reports

These reports are based on a set of approximately 15 SEO Best Practices. The reports will be run automatically every other week and be available through a webmaster account. They run the same SEO best practices as our SEO Analyzer tool (more below), but for these reports we scan all domains listed in an account and build reports for each domain. Other than checking the reports for what should be looked at or worked on, there is nothing to do as this system does the scanning of all pages (that appear in our index) and reporting automatically.

Domains must be verified, though, as we can only provide data on the verified domains in a webmaster account. These reports provide aggregated counts of all the issues found, across the entire website scanned. Clicking on an item shown in the report takes you deeper into the SEO Analysis Detail, where we explain the issue and show the individual pages affected by this non-compliance with the SEO Best Practice.

SEO Analyzer

With approximately 15 SEO best practices in place, this tool will scan any URL you enter from one of your verified domains and build a report to let you know if the page scanned is in or out of compliance with each best practice. This tool is an on-demand tool which can scan a single page at a time making it great for checking new pages to understand where more work may be required. The user simply types in the URL they want scanned and clicks the Analyze button. The tool fetches the page, analyzes the page against our best practices and displays a compliance report in seconds.

· The left side of the page displays the SEO Suggestions based on items we found out of compliance with our Best Practices scan.

· Error Count tells the viewer how many items for that particular suggestion have been found on the scanned page.

· Clicking on any Description filters the view on the right side to showcase only warning “buttons” associated with the SEO Suggestion selected.

· The right side of the page displays a view of the site with the compliance items noted where they reside on the scanned page. They are noted by the colored “button” with the + in the middle. Hovering on any button will expand the button to explain the issue at that location. Clicking on Expand within the text box will expand the box to show the full explanation for the flag. Click the – symbol in the button to close the text box completely.

· Clicking Clear Selection clears the filters and displays the page view with all buttons present.

· Selecting Page Source across the top of the page viewing window on the right side will display the page code we found when scanning the page.

· Selecting Original simply shows the page we scanned as it would appear on the Internet.