4 ms·

Ask HN: Feedback on a friend's SEO tool

8 points by paulsingh 16y ago

I've been advising the guys at Pear Analytics and helped convince them to throw away the 1.0 product because it was simply too complicated. They've gone back to a simple SEO tool that gives you actionable items to resolve. Feedback? www.pearanalytics.com

carbocation 16y ago
1) I know they don't need my email in order to analyze my site, so I am immediately suspicious. There is no checkbox for agreement with a privacy policy, nor is there language stating I will never be spammed, etc. Thus, I did not try the demo. 2) If they really do demand my email address to try their service, they should let me see a screenshot, at least, so I can get a sense of whether or not I want to risk giving them my email address. I think that this errs on the side of giving too little information to make an informed choice about wanting to use their service. There are many sites that will, without requiring an email address, do some basic SEO analysis for me. Without knowing what their site does, I was not enthusiastic enough to actually try their product.
- zippykid 16y ago
  Hi Carbocation, Great feedback, I really appreciate it. We're using the email address so you can come back later and view reports you've run in the past. I've changed the copy a little to make that clear. I'm still new to layout/jquery etc so I'll have the screenshot up in a few hours based on the feedback of other posters.
  - carbocation 16y ago
    Great! Also, I didn't mean for my negativity to be personally directed, but I did want to give you the full 'benefit' of my as-negative-as-possible interpretation of uncertainty. It's great that you're iterating so quickly, by the way!
    - zippykid 16y ago
      I didn't take it personally :). We're small and don't have a proper QA / userbase to test against. I really appreciate it :)
jolan 16y ago
- Make it clear that an email address is optional for a report. I almost left the page right away before deciding to try it out with the email field blank. - Merge "Things you need to work on" and "full report". Put errors/suggestions on top. - Auto-expand the top most report field or make it more obvious that those are links. - Add re-analyze site button. Typing the URL in over and over again is tedious. - "You have too many meta keywords." It says I have more than 10 phrases but I only have 9. Off by 1 in the code? - Change "domain is too new" to yellow instead of red since there's nothing that can be done about it. - "Good! You your page has a meta description." has a broken img link in the report text. Ditto with "This page has a title tag." - "The CSS on this page isn't valid." The only invalid part is foo-border-radius. I think that's typical. Pretty useful. Caught that my HTML wasn't valid anymore due to some changes I made recently. It also convinced me to add a sitemap to my site even though it's only a 1 page weather webapp.
- zippykid 16y ago
  Thanks a ton for the feedback Jolan, I've deployed some of your suggestions. We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it. I've merged the work on and full reports together. We're looking into the too many meta keywords issue, I'll fix that soon it's not a off by one issue, but I'm calculating words, instead of phrases. We're working on display issues :). I'm a former sysadmin who's now doing UI :) I need to get the images to show up in the copy better. We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result. One of the things that's on the way is "importance", so that the list of things to fix is displayed in order of importance. This would mean the css errors would be fairly low on the list.
  - jolan 16y ago
    > We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it. I really wouldn't do that but it's not my choice to make :) > I've merged the work on and full reports together. I saw that. Makes it a ton better. > We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result. I figured as much. Not a big deal. It might be nice to include the link in the report. One thing you might want to consider is building the report in real time rather than doing the status bar and then asking the user to click for the report. You can do something like the following w/jQuery: $.ajax({ url: '/api/v1/', data: { cmd: "report_getdata", id: reportid }, timeout: 5000, success: function(data) { // remove everything but the table header $("#reportinfo").find("tr:gt(0)").remove(); var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(data); jQuery.each(obj, function(i, ddata) { $("#reportinfo").last().append("<tr><td colspan=7>JSON report data row</td></tr>"); }); } });
stoney 16y ago
Seems to come up with an error if you accidentally put white space in front of the URL. Otherwise looks like a useful tool.
- zippykid 16y ago
  Hey Stoney, Just fixed that bug :). Wasn't trimming properly :)
  - stoney 16y ago
    That was quick! Was it a deliberate design decision to make it easy to access other people's reports (by just changing the number in the URL)? Obviously anybody could run any website through the tool, so there's not really anything private about it, but it still feels kind of weird. I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what everyone else has been running through it, which I'm not sure they'd all be happy about. Possibly you could use a long random string instead?
    - jolan 16y ago
      > I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what everyone else has been running through it Ooh fun indeed :) Yeah use a random string or cookie auth.
    - zippykid 16y ago
      MVP FTW! :) But, seriously I did think about using some hash or form of uuid, but long term plan is to let people make accounts.. for trending, and alerts.. but first, we're working on accuracy, then speed, and then usability.
      - axe 16y ago
        Is it the final product? what's your revenue model? the new version is too simplistic to charge money for, I think. have u considered making an academic version of your tool and selling it to schools and universities (can be used in classes dealing with web design/programming, rest is up to your imagination) An online social network, revolving around your tool is also an option. And I am missing the overall page score; good that you did away with the rest.

8 points by paulsingh 16y ago

carbocation 16y ago

1) I know they don't need my email in order to analyze my site, so I am immediately suspicious. There is no checkbox for agreement with a privacy policy, nor is there language stating I will never be spammed, etc. Thus, I did not try the demo. 2) If they really do demand my email address to try their service, they should let me see a screenshot, at least, so I can get a sense of whether or not I want to risk giving them my email address. I think that this errs on the side of giving too little information to make an informed choice about wanting to use their service. There are many sites that will, without requiring an email address, do some basic SEO analysis for me. Without knowing what their site does, I was not enthusiastic enough to actually try their product.

zippykid 16y ago
Hi Carbocation, Great feedback, I really appreciate it. We're using the email address so you can come back later and view reports you've run in the past. I've changed the copy a little to make that clear. I'm still new to layout/jquery etc so I'll have the screenshot up in a few hours based on the feedback of other posters.
- carbocation 16y ago
  Great! Also, I didn't mean for my negativity to be personally directed, but I did want to give you the full 'benefit' of my as-negative-as-possible interpretation of uncertainty. It's great that you're iterating so quickly, by the way!
  - zippykid 16y ago
    I didn't take it personally :). We're small and don't have a proper QA / userbase to test against. I really appreciate it :)

jolan 16y ago

- Make it clear that an email address is optional for a report. I almost left the page right away before deciding to try it out with the email field blank. - Merge "Things you need to work on" and "full report". Put errors/suggestions on top. - Auto-expand the top most report field or make it more obvious that those are links. - Add re-analyze site button. Typing the URL in over and over again is tedious. - "You have too many meta keywords." It says I have more than 10 phrases but I only have 9. Off by 1 in the code? - Change "domain is too new" to yellow instead of red since there's nothing that can be done about it. - "Good! You your page has a meta description." has a broken img link in the report text. Ditto with "This page has a title tag." - "The CSS on this page isn't valid." The only invalid part is foo-border-radius. I think that's typical. Pretty useful. Caught that my HTML wasn't valid anymore due to some changes I made recently. It also convinced me to add a sitemap to my site even though it's only a 1 page weather webapp.

zippykid 16y ago
Thanks a ton for the feedback Jolan, I've deployed some of your suggestions. We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it. I've merged the work on and full reports together. We're looking into the too many meta keywords issue, I'll fix that soon it's not a off by one issue, but I'm calculating words, instead of phrases. We're working on display issues :). I'm a former sysadmin who's now doing UI :) I need to get the images to show up in the copy better. We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result. One of the things that's on the way is "importance", so that the list of things to fix is displayed in order of importance. This would mean the css errors would be fairly low on the list.
- jolan 16y ago
  > We've marked the reason why we need the email address, if it let you see the report without an email address, it's a bug :).. we'll fix it. I really wouldn't do that but it's not my choice to make :) > I've merged the work on and full reports together. I saw that. Makes it a ton better. > We're running your CSS against Jigsaw and just outputting the result. I figured as much. Not a big deal. It might be nice to include the link in the report. One thing you might want to consider is building the report in real time rather than doing the status bar and then asking the user to click for the report. You can do something like the following w/jQuery: $.ajax({ url: '/api/v1/', data: { cmd: "report_getdata", id: reportid }, timeout: 5000, success: function(data) { // remove everything but the table header $("#reportinfo").find("tr:gt(0)").remove(); var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(data); jQuery.each(obj, function(i, ddata) { $("#reportinfo").last().append("<tr><td colspan=7>JSON report data row</td></tr>"); }); } });

stoney 16y ago

Seems to come up with an error if you accidentally put white space in front of the URL. Otherwise looks like a useful tool.

zippykid 16y ago
Hey Stoney, Just fixed that bug :). Wasn't trimming properly :)
- stoney 16y ago
  That was quick! Was it a deliberate design decision to make it easy to access other people's reports (by just changing the number in the URL)? Obviously anybody could run any website through the tool, so there's not really anything private about it, but it still feels kind of weird. I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what everyone else has been running through it, which I'm not sure they'd all be happy about. Possibly you could use a long random string instead?
  - jolan 16y ago
    > I've just had a fun 5 minutes seeing what everyone else has been running through it Ooh fun indeed :) Yeah use a random string or cookie auth.
  - zippykid 16y ago
    MVP FTW! :) But, seriously I did think about using some hash or form of uuid, but long term plan is to let people make accounts.. for trending, and alerts.. but first, we're working on accuracy, then speed, and then usability.
    - axe 16y ago
      Is it the final product? what's your revenue model? the new version is too simplistic to charge money for, I think. have u considered making an academic version of your tool and selling it to schools and universities (can be used in classes dealing with web design/programming, rest is up to your imagination) An online social network, revolving around your tool is also an option. And I am missing the overall page score; good that you did away with the rest.