Outputting SEO title and description meta tags as a visual structure for each web page at a time
There have long been a bunch of tools from Ahrefs, Mooz, Semrush, etc. that show the main meta tags for each page separately, or at best as a list. But has anyone seen a tool that outputs all title and description information at once and shows it in a convenient hierarchical visual structure for the whole website?
For example Apple visual sitemap
But let’s start from the beginning…
What are title and description meta tags?
SEO Title
It has the same importance as a book or chapter title. It is a brief announcement of the content for Google and the user (60 characters). It is where the main keywords are placed and what appears in search engine results (SERPs).
The title tag is an HTML element.
SEO Description
More detailed than the title, but also short, is the description of the web page content (250 characters). It appears in search engine results and serves as the most important message to Google and the user about a particular web page. Typically, it’s also keyword-rich. The description tag is also an HTML element.
It is considered good form to write the title and description in the first place because it is the user who will decide whether or not to navigate to your web page from the SERPs. But if the title and description don’t include the keywords the search engine crawlers need, they simply may not understand what your resource is about and therefore may not display it where it is needed.
Now that you know, or probably already knew, about these most important SEO tags, it’s time to talk about a brand new and probably so far the only tool on the Internet that displays them all at once in a large hierarchical visual structure of the website.
Octopus.do, a free visual website structure generator, now with meta tags
Octopus is a fairly well-known service for web designers, developers, SEO specialists and project managers. It is used by around 30,000 users a month. One of its successful tools is a visual website structure generator, with a new feature to also display meta tags for each page.
Why is it both necessary and useful?
It will be useful to see the title and description of other sites in order to compose your own correctly. It is also very important to see the entire picture.
Or, for example, you are setting up your website and are already confused about the structure and the correct description of each page (so that it is unique and each keyword corresponds to the page). In that case, it would be useful for you to see all the connections between pages.
For each website (project) you generate, you can: save, edit, comment, collaborate with colleagues and share it with anyone on the Internet.
How does Octopus.do VSG work?
VSG — Visual Sitemap Generator
Octopus.do uses a powerful cloud server and a special algorithm code, which displays the visual structure of the website on user request, using sitemap.xml of the searched resource, parsing title, description and logo for each page. The process can take up to 60 seconds.
It is not uncommon for results not to be obtained because there are many reasons for this, for example:
- The website is too big
- No sitemap.xml file is available or its location is unknown
- Timeout exceeded (40 seconds, 1 minute with meta tags)
- Firewall blocks requests
The tool is experimental, so the developer writes that the product is in Beta.
If you still fail to get a visual structure together with tags, you can try without tags (faster and easier).
Or try to create your own structure from scratch — this is actually the main functionality of Octopus.do.
Conclusion
The importance of SEO and the fight for the top spots in Google search results is becoming more important than ever. Organic traffic is what everyone wants, it’s king.
The new VSG Octopus will help you better see and understand the most important meta description of website pages and handle this information better than it was before.
This is not to say that the tool is only needed for those who do SEO optimization.
It will also be useful for anyone who needs to get or create a visual structure, to understand how things work, what a page is about, and to see the gist to evaluate a project.
