Sr. SEO Specialist for Shopify. Nearly 20 years of experience in web design, web development, and web marketing. Education in Information Sciences from UW-Milwaukee. Managing the largest online US physics community. Enjoy learning about search engines, SEO, chrome tricks, Python, knowledge graphs, data science, and more!
Reddit is a rich source of user-generated content — people share opinions, ask questions, and discuss a wide range of topics. Analyzing subreddit posts reveals what users care about, emerging trends, and common pain points. Combined with OpenAI’s language models, you can quickly generate summaries, topic ideas, or keyword suggestions tailored to your goals. In […]
In this Python SEO tutorial, we’ll walk through a script that uses SpaCy to calculate similarity metrics between content keywords and an article’s body. This analysis helps SEOs and content creators assess content relevance and keyword alignment. Using natural language processing (NLP), we’ll compute similarity scores to gauge how well keywords match main content. The […]
This step-by-step SEO tutorial shows a Python script that retrieves and analyzes domain data using the Ahrefs API. It helps SEOs, webmasters, and data analysts monitor metrics such as broken backlinks, total backlinks, and domain rating. Note: The script requires an Ahrefs API key. For large-scale or high-speed requests, use a paid API plan; free […]
Entity SEO has been a hot topic since at least 2012–13, when Google released its Knowledge Graph and the Hummingbird algorithm. It’s a core concept for semantic SEO and NLU/NLP. The term “entity” appeared dozens of times in the leaked Google API modules. This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of entities and […]
The CWV panic days appear to be over, but keeping tabs on the data is still useful. CrUX data is useful for SEOs because it offers performance analysis opportunities for real-user Core Web Vitals metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which are minor ranking factors. By […]
In this tutorial, we explore a Python script that scrapes and analyzes YouTube video metadata for free. This framework provides a solid starting point for tools aimed at SEOs, content creators, and data analysts. Note that paid APIs such as SerpAPI can process requests faster and more reliably but are not free. If you prefer […]
Readability scores are not a verified SEO ranking factor. That said, you should still care: if your content doesn’t match your audience’s reading level, you may see higher bounce rates, lower engagement, and fewer conversions. Your audience expects content written appropriately for the subject matter; when your content meets those expectations, better results follow. […]
Any seasoned SEO knows that finding internal links at scale is difficult but important. This is especially true if your content isn’t well organized topically. If your blog is disorganized or full of seemingly random articles and you need to add internal links intelligently, this tutorial is for you. In this Python SEO tutorial, I’ll […]
In this tutorial, we will learn how to automate the collection of various domain-related technical information using Python. The script gathers data such as WHOIS details, DNS records, SSL certificates, reverse IP lookup, blacklist status, robots.txt, and more. Using the pandas library, we also show how to store the collected data in a CSV file. […]
GPT-3 and its forms have taken the world by storm and for good reason. It’s an exciting time full of possibilities. The limits are being pushed every day. Python as an SEO skill has always been a bit niche due to some learning curve. Today, we start blowing that learning curve out of the water! […]
Studying search engine results pages (SERPs) is one of SEO’s oldest and still best methods for understanding keywords and how Google treats them. When conducting keyword research, we often end up with a large list of candidates. Then we must validate and clean that list. Cleaning matters because items that appear to be unique opportunities […]
The importance of backlinks as a quality signal has changed little since the early 2000s. Algorithms have evolved, but backlinks remain a strong ranking factor. Looking up your backlink stats and comparing them to competitors is an SEO staple. What’s new is operationalizing this process and working smarter. Reduce one-off competitor checks — analyze in […]
Optimizing anchor text for internal links has long been a core SEO practice. Google documents anchor text in its SEO guidelines. Anchor text gives users and search engines contextual signals about the linked page’s topic. It’s an opportunity to tell both Google and users what the next page is about and why it is relevant. […]
Imagery in articles can be a wonderful communication device when used correctly. One issue that still plagues SEO content teams is how to properly handle text in images. Historically, text within an image is trapped and the contextual message is lost to search engines that didn’t have the processing power to decode (they still likely […]
PDF files are ubiquitous in various industries, but programmatically extracting data from them can be complex. PDFMiner, a powerful Python library, helps parse and extract content from PDFs in formats like plain text, HTML, XML, or tagged text. This tutorial explains how to use a comprehensive PDF extraction script. We’ll explore its structure and functionality […]
Link graphs are visual representations of relationships between hyperlink entities, aka URLs. The web is one giant network of links, a giant link graph. Luckily, link graphs scale down so not only the entire web is a link graph, but you can scale analysis down to your website or even a part of your website. […]
Sentiment analysis is about evaluating text for positive or negative views and feelings. many times sentiment is expressed using verbs like sad, mad, happy, and excited, but we can expand that sentiment understanding to a vast host of other parts of speech using machine learning. I’m not going to try and pull one over on […]
It’s no mystery that interlinking is important for SEO. A big part of the interlinking strategy is knowing what should link to what. A quick first pass should be to look at what is high-level topically related and then you can get more granular after that. One such strategy for this is to simply look […]
In this Python SEO tutorial, I’ll show you a programmatic method to start analyzing your internal anchor text for topical relevance. Internal anchor text remains one of the most powerful topical endorsements you can provide. Anchor texts are explicit contextual signals Google can use to help understand and calculate the linked page’s topical authority. Let’s […]
In semantics, ambiguity is partially defined as a word having multiple “senses”. A sense is a meaning or definition. Effective content in SEO should be as free of ambiguity as possible. When you have ambiguity in your content you risk machines (that evaluate your content via natural language understanding), not being able to understand your […]
Last week SEO Clarity came out with a new SERP CTR study. The numbers were lower than I expected even as an average for all queries. It got me thinking. What is MY average CTR by position? Turns out, it’s much higher. This is likely due to good SEO by optimizing the title, meta, and […]
Google Search Console already gives SEO’s amazing historical data for how the queries you rank for are performing. Google Trends also is a useful platform that can give insights into a query’s relative popularity within Google’s system (by Geo) historically and a little forecasting for the future. What if we could begin to marry these […]
The topic of machine learning has never been so hot and for good reason. With machine learning (ML), you’re able to take SEO automation, forecasting, classification, etc to the next level. The problem previously was that machine learning was reserved for only the most advanced data scientists and engineers due to its inherent sophistication. Not […]
Back in early August of 2021 word began to travel through the industry that titles were being rewritten in the Google SERPs in a frequency and manner not seen before. Plenty of SERP analysis has been done to understand the why, how, and what to do about it, but it starts with an analysis of […]
Google Search Console is likely the most important source of data for an SEO. However, like most GUI platforms, it suffers from the same large downside. You’re stuck in a GUI that only gives you 16 months of data. You can manually export data to a Google Sheet. Exporting to a Google Sheet is fine, […]
Most SEO’s hearts skip a beat when they hear a Google algorithm update is unfolding and for a few days relentlessly check analytics. Then, there is a natural lull, the panic or excitement fades and you get back to your work. Google algorithms don’t always result in a dramatic spike one way or another. It […]
The days where content SEO was simply copywriting are over. Modern content SEO now employs massive resources for technical analysis for the words you write/manage. Actually, this has been the case for nearly 10 years now with the introduction of machine learning in search engines. The tools are now widely available to SEOs to achieve […]
Not every Python script needs to be complex, long, and work of art. Sometimes it can help with quick mundane tasks. One such opportunity presented itself a couple of weeks ago where a client asked for 50+ IPs to be filtered from a Google Analytics view. We could have taken 20 minutes and manually added […]
There are countless ways to understand trends which are important in understanding the past, present, and future. I’m sure everyone is familiar with Google Trends. No doubt it’s very powerful, but there are options as well. One being Wikipedia. Wikipedia currently is the 4th most visit website in the US. If only there were a […]
Causal Impact is a Bayesian-like statistical algorithm pioneered by Kay Brodersen working at Google that aims to predict the counterfactual after an event. Take for example you make a large SEO change to a website. Sometimes it’s not obvious whether or not the change was beneficial. You can compare against the past, but the past […]
Match your URLs to your competitor’s URLs, find title keyword and ranking keyword count differences with this step-by-step Python SEO tutorial. SEO is not an island. You are not simply improving your site/pages in a vacuum. You need to consider your competition as you all are jockeying for positions in the same SERPs. Some URLs […]
Query analysis is a large topic, but I wanted to focus on intent and entity recognition. Intent and entity recognition are very important concepts to understand in SEO. Google’s use of machine learning has rapidly increased since 2013 when they introduced their Knowledge Graph. For intent, what is important is how Google’s understanding of the […]
We’ve all had a client where we pop in their Google Search Console or ahrefs account and see they have hundreds or thousands of reported 404s. Perhaps from a migration or perhaps a decade of regular pruning. This tutorial won’t cover evaluating whether they are worth redirecting or not, but rather simply the case if […]
I had a great time joining this webinar on content audits for SEO. Thanks for the opportunity Authoritas! Was great to see and hear from Laura Monckton and Daniel Heredia Mejias! Sadly no Python in this webinar, but great advice nonetheless! See the outline and video below… When Evaluating Content for SEO, Consider These 7 Core Concepts: Accessibility […]
Ask any SEO writer, the words you choose for your copy matter. Sometimes we think we know the attributes, relationships, and the word universe words live in, but often we don’t. It can be a challenge to generate ideas and inspiration from singular words. Understanding words can help you explore possibilities for your content that […]
I had a project this week that tasked my team with optimizing YouTube tags for a couple hundred videos. We could do it manually but thought this was a nice chance to use Python. Our idea was we could scrape YouTube video page information, put it into a spreadsheet for easier organization and identification of […]
This past week I needed to create a few custom sitemaps for a client. It needed to consist of nearly 200 URLs. I could have manually accomplished this in an hour, but I thought this was a good opportunity to create a quick script to help. The script to create the sitemap was less than […]
Interlinking has been a core SEO task since the very beginning. The ability to funnel users and PageRank to relevant pages can prove to be a powerful strategy. However, even for a blog with just 100 posts, this can often be a cumbersome task to manage manually. It’s easy to find interlinking opportunities if you […]
Data is everything for an SEO and it’s all too often scattered across proprietary platforms that do a good job of visualizing and analyzing that data according to how they think you want. Even when these platforms give you export methods you still need to load it into Excel and Google Sheets and perform some […]
The Python SEO movement is not new, but in recent years has been taken to a whole new level due to influencers like the late Hamlet Batista and the progression of data science tools. The hype is at an all-time high and for good reason, but this can lead to anxiety for SEOs wondering if […]
Last month I released a tutorial for automating new image optimization over FTP. This time we’re going to crawl an entire website and locally optimize the images we come across, organized by URL. Note this short but intermediate level script is not for massive sites as it is. For one thing, all images are dumped […]
Image compression isn’t new to the tech SEO world, but with site performance and Core Web Vitals now influencing rankings, it’s time to take action. I’ve done dozens of site audits and find that roughly 80% of performance issues fall into two buckets: images or JavaScript. When images are a major issue, I cheer — […]
If you’re tired of running and scheduling all your scripts locally or in Google Colab and are interested in what the Cloud can offer, then this tutorial is for you! I’m going to show you step-by-step how to migrate and automate your Python script using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP offers two services called Google […]
If you want to export your keyword position data from Semrush using their (paid) API and send it to a Google Sheet with Python, this tutorial is for you. I’ll also show two ways to automate the process. It’s surprisingly simple and requires very little code. I use the Semrush API here, but the script […]
Do you follow hundreds or thousands of Twitter accounts and miss important announcements from Google Search? Were you late to learn about the latest core update? In this tutorial I’ll show you how to build a simple Twitter alert system using Python. We’ll use the advertools module, created by Elias Dabbas, to connect to the […]
In this tutorial I’ll show how to use Python to generate broad keyword categories from current ranking keyword data and automatically label keywords with those categories. This helps you get an overview of the topics you rank for and the potential search-volume ceilings for each category. The largest opportunities often appear in categories with the […]
Google has indexed PDFs for many years and treats them like web pages, so it’s logical to analyze your PDFs for optimization opportunities just as you would a web page. This can be more challenging because of file constraints, but we can begin the process using Python. I’ll show how easy it is to convert […]
BrightLocal is a common tool for local SEO, citations, and ranking tracking. It offers an extensive API that lets you retrieve data and automate many tasks. In this tutorial I show how to fetch ranking data from the BrightLocal API using Python. The BrightLocal API is paid, but it includes 1,000 free calls for testing. […]
Google’s web page scanner Lighthouse has been a fixture among the most important tools for evaluating web pages. At a high level, this scanner measures a page’s performance, SEO, accessibility, and best practices. At a deeper level, it provides granular metrics for each category and displays recommendations. Most SEOs are familiar with running Lighthouse within […]
For SEO audits, one area you may want to detect and store is the different technologies a website uses. Sure, you can spot-check and run a few console commands, but what if an API could do it all for you? The service BuiltWith provides that capability. BuiltWith offers several useful APIs, but this tutorial focuses […]
This is part 2 of a two-part series. Please see Getting Started with Google NLP API Using Python first. For search engines and SEO, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been a revolution. NLP is the methodology by which machines understand human language. This matters because machines perform the bulk of page evaluation. While some knowledge […]
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been a revolution for search engines and SEO. NLP is the set of methods that lets machines understand human language. This matters because machines now perform the bulk of page evaluation, not humans. Although understanding some of the science behind NLP is useful, today’s tools let you apply NLP without […]
SEOs wear many hats. During a technical audit or troubleshooting, it’s useful to have a domain’s public technical information on hand. Below are some Python tools you can use to fetch that domain information. You can easily loop this over your client list—using a Python list or a database—and automate it to run every morning […]
Earlier in the tutorial, SEO Guide to Creating a Website Uptime Monitor Using Python I showed you how to create a simple uptime monitor and store that information in MySQL. This next phase is a direct extension of the previous tutorial and assumes you have that all set up. The code in the tutorial will […]
It’s Sunday night. You’re lying in bed. Do you know if your website is up? In this intermediate tutorial, I’ll show you how to create and automate a simple uptime monitor with email notifications using Python. We’ll store historical data in MySQL for later analysis. In addition to detecting whether a site is up or […]
Robots.txt is a useful tool for SEOs to control crawling by spiders. However, it is sensitive: a simple mistake can cause significant damage. When collaborating with an SEO team or a client’s developers, someone might tinker where they shouldn’t, or accidentally make a change. Damage is easier to mitigate if caught early. Use the Python […]
Viewing cached links in Google is a common troubleshooting and information-recovery method used by SEOs. Google caches some pages it crawls and creates a snapshot of the page at the time of the crawl. You will often notice missing resources or images, so the cache is rarely a perfect copy, but it is useful for […]
One of the main tenets of SEO is understanding the search climate for the keywords you are targeting: the trends, what people are searching for, and the relative search volume. Those insights help generate targeted keyword ideas. An often-overlooked source is the Google Suggestions API — it taps Google’s search autocomplete feature. You can call […]
Google Trends has long been a powerful tool for SEOs. Understanding past, present, and emerging trends helps reveal seasonality and major events such as the coronavirus pandemic. Who back in 2019 would have thought that toilet paper would hit 100 on Google Trends in March 2020? The Google Trends web interface is user-friendly and reveals […]
Gravity Forms is a popular WordPress form plugin. If you run a leads-based business, you need to know your form is working and that prospects can contact you. We’ve all looked at the entry log and noticed an unusual gap between the last entry and the present — maybe there was a glitch. How would […]
In 2017 Chrome, Google released a headless (no GUI) mode that can capture a screenshot of a web page from a specified viewport. This is useful for archiving pages for version comparison, monitoring, and client deliverables. Because it runs without a GUI, it is well suited for automation with Python. In just a few lines […]
Archive.org’s Wayback Machine is a staple in the SEO industry for examining cached historical web pages. Each cached page is called a snapshot. It’s useful for tracking progress, troubleshooting issues, or—if you’re lucky—recovering data. The Wayback Machine GUI can be slow or frustrating. The steps below show how to use Python to call the free […]