SEO Tools

Scraper is a pretty good Chrome extension I use on a regular basis to quickly extract links from a page. Unfortunately, there can be rare instances where it actually takes more effort to use. For example, if I wanted to retrieve all links from Hewlett-Packard’s HTML sitemap, I would need to create multiple Google spreadsheets to capture that data because of the way the page is structured. In this particular case, I’d have to scrape the page a total of 14 times to account for the different sections. ...

When I joined SEOgadget last year, my first blog post was about using webkit2png for site audits, stalking and more. What I didn’t mention was my 2013 new years resolution - to track the home page of three websites for the entire year with webkit2png. The following videos come from the home pages of Macy’s, Yahoo and Amazon with a years worth of images compiled together. It’s nothing too crazy but feel free to turn on your favorite jam, sit back, relax and view them for your pleasure. ...

This article is seriously outdated since I no longer use WordPress If you write a technical blog post about optimizing source code for SEO or programming scripts, I highly recommend the Crayon Syntax Highlighter for WordPress users - it gives your examples a nice, snazzy look to it. The plugin includes 25 default themes but I couldn’t find a good preview gallery for them anywhere so I decided to list them all out below. Enjoy! ...

I updated my aHrefs bulk link analysis script to improve its functionality by adding two features. The script now returns the results in a CSV file called ahrefs_results.csv Introduces the .map Ruby enumerable for a “cleaner” syntax The source code for this Ruby script can be found at my Github repository. My next task is defining individual functions to eliminate any code redundancy and ultimately speed up the API calls. Stay tuned! ...

One of my top blog posts this year is the bulk URL checker and has become my staple tool for HTTP checks en masse when I don’t want to fire up third party software. This accomplishment got me hooked (on coding) and to keep my momentum going I decided to write a Ruby script which interfaced with the aHrefs API and emulate their batch analysis tool. If you’re only interested in the bulk link analysis script then you can find it here. It may look simple but it took me a couple hours to complete and needs some cleaning up on my part. This file is a good start for anyone who needs a quick analysis about a list (big or small) of URLs and their links. Regardless, I’ll continue to build upon it so it resembles that of the aHrefs tool. ...

When I first started doing keyword research I found myself easily downloading 10+ CSV files from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This became a (painful) problem because I had to manually copy and paste all the data into a single Excel file. Fast forward a few months when I finally found the perfect solution: using the CAT function (short for CONCATENATE) within the command line. Mac users can get started immediately with their Terminal (located in the Utilities folder); Windows users will have to download Cygwin. ...

I discovered the Search Commander’s URL tool awhile back when I needed a scalable solution to check the HTTP status for a large list of URLs. It worked as intended but when I tried it with 1k+ URLs I pretty much broke the checker and took down the page along with it. Thus, in my pursuit to learn programming I said to myself, “how come I can’t build my own?” If you’re a Mac user you can use this right away since cURL is already built into your Terminal. For Windows users you’ll first need to download Cygwin with the cURL package. ...

Feb 2014 Edit: The calls, functions and worksheet used in this blog post may be outdated. If you know of a better guide please contact me and I’ll send a link your way. I want to share with everyone a very quick rank checking tool that I built using the ImportXML function from Google Documents. But first, a quick history lesson… Or you can just grab the G-Doc ImportXML Rank Checker here. Historical Context I used to love rank checking when I first started out as an SEO analyst. I thought it was the only thing that mattered and took great pride when the keyword rankings jumped to the top of the fold on page one. However, as I matured professionally and took on more important responsibilities at CafePress*, checking for keyword ranks fell to the wayside and lost its novelty as it became a time suck. ...