GOOGLE ADDS SEO AUDIT CATEGORY TO ITS OPEN-SOURCE LIGHTHOUSE CHROME EXTENSION.
The Lighthouse Chrome Extension is an automated auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages, providing a well-lit path for improving the quality of sites by allowing developers to run audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps compatibility and more. Basically, it “keeps you from crashing into the rocks”, hence the name, Lighthouse.
The new SEO Audit category allows developers and webmasters to run a basic SEO health-check for any web page that identifies potential areas for improvement, such as:
- Titles and descriptions
- HTTP status code
- Descriptive anchor text
- Page crawl
- User Experience
- Valid hreflang and rel=canonical tags
Whilst the list isn’t exhaustive, it does not make any SEO guarantees for Google websearch or other search engines. The list was designed to validate and reflect the SEO basics that every site should get right.
The current Lighthouse Chrome extension contains an initial set of SEO audits, which, in the future, Google hopes to extend and enhance once it is confident of its functionality.
Using Lighthouse Chrome Extension:
- Install the Lighthouse Chrome Extension
- Click on the Lighthouse icon in the extension bar
- Select the Options menu, tick “SEO” and click OK, then Generate Report.
Check out our blog post on how to stay ahead of the curve and your competitors in 2018’s must-have SEO techniques.