Understanding SEO:

In our digital-driven world, many businesses strive for revenue.

But without traffic, you won't reach that goal.

Everything begins with rankings and visibility.

The right people must see you at the right time and for the right reasons.

We're not advocating for mere traffic; it's all about converting clicks, not just getting them.

While many methods can achieve visibility, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) shines brightest.

However, during the race for high search rankings, many fixate on outcomes and overlook the process.

Let's emphasize the importance of the SEO journey over mere results.

Once you prioritize quality over quantity, you can then scale quantity without sacrificing quality.

SEO's Significance:

The digital world keeps growing, but organic search remains a top traffic driver.

53% of site traffic originates from organic searches - Source

For most sites, you can see how organic should be a big priority.

The reasoning is simple: people ask questions, and search engines answer them.

Google alone answers ~100,000 questions every second. That’s +3 Trillion searches every year.

A business that delivers authoritative answers gains trust from both; audiences and search engines.

Over time, this trust translates to increased visibility, traffic, and revenue.

The Nature of Search Engines:

The power of search engines, whether giants like Google or niche platforms, resides in their algorithms.

These algorithms crawl, parse, and index web pages.

They assess content quality, site architecture, authority, trustworthiness, and popularity, always updating their knowledge to present relevant answers to the user.

The Ever-evolving Landscape:

SEO doesn't stand still.

With search engines tweaking their algorithms thousands of times annually, keeping pace becomes crucial.

A dynamic SEO strategy adapts, recognizing that today's successful strategy might become obsolete tomorrow.

It’s a crucial balancing act, you can’t bend with the wind but you have to be open to change.

Knowing when to pivot is key.

The Pillars of SEO:

On-page SEO and Content:

In a content-driven world, quality takes the crown.

Businesses need to produce content that goes beyond keywords and grasps user intent.

This approach ensures alignment with user intent and will provide the most value to customers.

Technical SEO:

Your content needs a solid foundation to shine.

Technical SEO makes a site easily crawlable, indexable, and offers a flawless user experience regardless of device.

Backlink Acquisition:

Backlinks serve as digital endorsements.

They tell search engines about a site's value.

However, prioritizing quality backlinks over sheer numbers underscores the importance of ethical link-building.

It’s not about Domain Authority or Domain Rating, etc.. It’s more closely tied to the content of the web page and site you’re getting an endorsement from.

Is the backlink from a baby food company when you build race cars… doesn’t sounds relevant regardless of how highly respected the baby food brand is.

It’s Baby Food and Race Cars…

Local SEO:

For brick-and-mortar businesses, local SEO helps them make a local splash.

Optimizing Google Business Profiles or earning locally relevant backlinks lets businesses leave a mark in their communities.

Networking in your community can pay massive dividends for your digital presence. Prioritize physical connection for increased market share digitally.

The Landmark Approach to SEO:

Adopting a long-term, cooperative strategy ensures SEO remains a sustained effort rather than a one-time gimmick.

Staying agile, iterating based on insights, and aligning strategies with business goals is paramount.

SEO's Evergreen Promise: An Odyssey of Evolution

In SEO, focusing solely on outcomes like rankings and traffic can be shortsighted.

The real value of SEO revolves around understanding its nuances, staying updated, and cherishing the journey over instant results.

After all, in the rapidly changing digital marketing landscape, today's hard work lays the foundation for tomorrow's success.

Join me as I build - Beyond the Dashboard, and share what's on my mind.

Matt

P.S. As always, I'm here to help you on your SEO journey. So if you have any questions or need advice on your website, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Cool Cars:

Some interesting stuff:

I’m working on crawling a specific target (subfolder url set), and parsing out body links specific to 2 subfolders.

Crawling URLS in /a/ and seeing if and how they link to /b/ and /c/.

Ultimate goal, an exported excel file by each target URL.

Snippets not done but it will be soon. Probably going to be leveraging selenium to complete this.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd

def crawl_url_and_extract_subfolders(url, subfolders):
    response = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')

    results = {folder: {'count': 0, 'links': []} for folder in subfolders}
    
    for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
        print(f"Found link: {link['href']}")  # Debugging: print all links
        for folder in subfolders:
            if folder in link['href']:
                results[folder]['count'] += 1
                results[folder]['links'].append(link['href'])

    return results

def main():
    sites = ['https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/r/advice/cars-101/best-marine-battery']
    subfolders = ['/o/', '/c2/', '/c3/']

    output = []
    for site in sites:
        extracted_data = crawl_url_and_extract_subfolders(site, subfolders)

        data = {
            'URL Crawled': site,
            '/o/ Count': extracted_data['/o/']['count'],
            '/o/ Links': ', '.join(extracted_data['/o/']['links']),
            '/c2/ Count': extracted_data['/c2/']['count'],
            '/c2/ Links': ', '.join(extracted_data['/c2/']['links']),
            '/c3/ Count': extracted_data['/c3/']['count'],
            '/c3/ Links': ', '.join(extracted_data['/c3/']['links'])
        }

        output.append(data)

    df = pd.DataFrame(output)
    df.to_excel('output.xlsx', index=False)
    print("Data exported to output.xlsx")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

At this point, I’m still having trouble with the export, but I’m getting close.

And for someone that doesn’t have much experience with Python, it’s starting to feel easier and easier to build tools that solve highly manual problems.

More to come.

The below does work. Scrape any target URL and extract all links/ anchor text for each. Obviously, for a different problem.

import argparse
import pandas as pd
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import openpyxl

def scrape_links(url, output_file):
    response = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
    links = soup.find_all('a')
    data = []

    for link in links:
        href = link.get('href')
        text = link.string
        if href and text:
            data.append({"Anchor Text": text, "URL": href})

    df = pd.DataFrame(data)
    df.to_excel(output_file, engine='openpyxl')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Scrape links from a given URL and save them to Excel.')
    parser.add_argument('--url', type=str, required=True, help='URL to scrape links from')
    parser.add_argument('--output_file', type=str, required=True, help='Output Excel file name')
    args = parser.parse_args()

    scrape_links(args.url, args.output_file)