Octoparse
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping, sometimes called data scraping, data extraction, or web harvesting is merely the process of collecting data from websites and storing it on your local database or spreadsheets. Today, web scraping tools are necessary for the modern marketer.
For the uninitiated, web scraping may sound like one of these scary tech buzzwords, but it’s not that big a deal, technically speaking. To do any web scraping though, you need the right tools. Web scraping tools come in handy not only for recruitment purposes but also for marketing, finance, e-commerce and many other industries.
When it comes to SEO, everyone is dedicated to get ahead of their competitors, yet the fact is that there are always fore-runners ranking better under a list of keywords.
How to make your SEO perform better? Here are 3 web scraping hacks that can help you optimize your SEO.
Optimize Your Page with Web Scraping
XML Sitemaps Optimization
Web Page Optimization
Blog Content Curation
Sitemap optimization
l What is an XML sitemaps and why should we optimize it?
XML sitemaps is a file that helps Google spider to crawl and index the important URLs of a website. Thus, an excellent XML sitemaps should be “up to date, error free, and include indexable”.
Optimizing it is to help Google spider to know the website better, which would lead to a better ranking. It works significantly when you are running a middle size website. For example if you're running an eCommerce website on shopify.com, or working for your own blog on worldpress.com, it would help you rank better.
l How to optimize your XML sitemaps?
If you have used/heard a program like Screaming Frog, then you already know web scraping to some degree. The working mechanism of the programs is to scrape metadata, such as the title, the meta description, keywords and etc. from all the web pages that are under a domain.
To optimize your XML sitemaps, it's recommended to use the XML Sitemaps Generator of Screaming Frog. It’s a pre-built crawler that is functioned to scrape the whole HTML of the website and generate a perfect Excel file for people to optimize.
Also, you could try using a FREE web scraper to create an XML sitemaps yourself.
Web page optimization
Web page optimization is to help Google read and index the content of a website in an easier and faster way, or to cater to visitors’ preferences. Thus, it’s better if the HTML of a website conforms with Google’s ranking algorithms.
Apart from the content, the most important factor in the HTML could be H1 tag. Google spider takes it as the core of the page.
l H1 tag
According to Neilpatel, “80% of the first-page search results in Google use an h1.”(https://neilpatel.com/blog/h1-tag/)
Though the head tags are important for the ranking, we still need to pay great attention to the Meta tags which are the most straightforward conversion factors.
Thus, the handiest way to make a website ranking better is optimize the tags on a regular basis. A small-but-mighty action that everyone should take.
In Sept 2009, Google announced that Google’s ranking algorithms didn’t include both the meta description and keywords for web search. However, we cannot deny that it has a great impact on the click-through rate. Thus, we’d better do some optimization work on both meta description and title tags.
Tips: To learn more about why meta description and title tag are important, kindly refer to Meta Description and Title Tag.
How to use web scraping to optimize your web page?
To make it practice, simply follow the steps below and you will get tag and meta description information neatly organized for later examination.
Before getting started, download Octoparse 8.1 and install it on your computer. As you are equipped with this web scraping tool, I’ll show you how to get the needed tags across all Octoparse blogs as an example. You can do it for any other domains.
Step 1: Open Octoparse 8.1 and enter the target URL to the box. Click the “Start” button.
Enter URL
Step 2: As we can see, the web page is opened in Octoparse build-in Browser. On the left side, there is a workflow area where we can customize the action as needed.
User interface
Now ,we’d create a Pagination to go through all the blog pages and a Loop Item to visit every blog. Simply do some clicks as the following picture shows.
Step 3: Extract the needed information (Titles, Meta descriptions, title tags)
Loop and pagination
After setting the loop click and pagination, we can start extracting needed data.
Extract data
First, click the title to extract the text and you will see a new button “Extract Data” appear in the workflow. Hover on the “Extract Data” button, double click it or click the gear icon you will enter into the data setting section.
Click the “+” at the corner and point to “page-level data”, now you can add both meta description and meta keywords to your data list.
After adding the needed data fields, click “OK” to save.
Step 4: The final step is to scrape the data and extract them to Excel or other formats. Click “Run” at the top and you will get data scraped within minutes.
Run the task
Now, we have the data in Excel and can do further analysis to optimize the web pages.
Scraped data
Basically, we can effectively go through all the important factors in excel.
l Batch-check whether the length of meta tags performs best in the Google search result.
l Batch-Inspect the H1 tag, making sure that there is only one H1 tag for a single page and the length of the character is within an appropriate range.
Here is the standard we could refer to at School4Seo.
Apart from the above info, we can collect more information about your blogs, such as the category, share number, comment number and so on, to explore the problems of your website.
Blog Content Curation
Content curation is a way people select the most valuable pieces from web pages, and add values on top of collected information. SEO is a popular application of content curation. Curated content becomes trendy on Google, helping to rank websites in a better place for the search result.
How can Web Scraping help you curate the content?
A typical use case is RSS feed marketing. The advantage of RSS is pushing out the content to your users automatically, rather than forcing them to visit your website everyday. Now, the question is, how to get enough content for RSS feed?
Image that if you’re a blogger that focuses on law issues. Then your audiences are those who have great interest in the upcoming information about the law or some case study materials. In this case, web scraping can help you gather the information at a certain frequency for RSS purposes.
For example, with Octoparse 8.1, we’re able to gather the case information and get the information for your RSS Feed.
About Xpath
If you fail to get the data you need, you may need to amend the Xpath to precisely locate the element you want. That is because web pages are of different structure and a robot may not be applicable to all.
“XPath plays an important role when you use Octoparse to scrape data. Rewriting it can help you deal with missing pages, missing data or duplicates, etc. While XPath may look intimidating at first, it need not be. In this article, I will briefly introduce XPath and more importantly, show you how it can be used to fetch the data you need by building tasks that are accurate and precise.”
Check more detail information>>
Final thoughts
Web scraping is crazily helpful if you go explore and all you need is just a handy tool like Octoparse and some basic XPath knowledge. It’s possible to help scrape almost all information you need from every website within minutes.
The best way to obtain a new skill is to learn by practicing. Simply spend some time to explore and you will find it incredibly helpful one day.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/3-actionable-seo-hacks-through-content-scraping
Easily Extract Any Web Data
Octoparse is everything you need for automatic data extraction. Quickly scrape web data without coding and turn web pages into structured data within clicks!
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