I Built Novash — An Open-Source SEO Checker You Can Run From Your Terminal

When starting work on websites and web projects, the reporter noticed a common issue - websites could look fine in a browser but have numerous small SEO problems. These include missing titles, meta descriptions, alt text for images, broken links, irrelevant H1 headings, and other missing technical SEO elements. Checking these manually can be tedious, especially when dealing with multiple pages, which prompted the creation of Novash.

Novash is an open-source, command-line SEO checker written in Python. To use it, you install it via PyPI with `pip install novash` and then scan a website by running `novash scan https://example.com`. The tool examines a page's title, meta description, H1 headings, image alt text, links, canonical information, Open Graph metadata, Twitter metadata, robots.txt, sitemaps, favicons, and structured data.

The goal of Novash goes beyond simply identifying problems; it aims to make the issues easier to understand and fix by providing actionable suggestions. For example, instead of just pointing out an image without an alt attribute, the tool can suggest adding one. Novash also calculates an SEO score out of 100, deducting points for missing or problematic elements to provide a quick overview of a page's technical condition.

The reporter chose to build Novash as a CLI because it aligns with their daily development habits and allows for easy integration into workflows, such as CI/CD pipelines. JSON export functionality allows users to process results with other scripts or applications. Novash is built using Python and tools like Requests, BeautifulSoup, and Typer for CLI creation and Rich for terminal output formatting.

The current version is 0.1.0, available on PyPI. Future improvements may include better full-site crawling, additional technical SEO checks, more structured-data validation, and various report formats.