Of course, advances in technology have also made it easier for the pros to build awesome applications. Just look at SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer which relies on Amazon Web Services.

So as SEOs we have a huge arsenal of tools that we can call upon for various different functions. A lot of these tools, services and platforms however either require learning a large amount of code or take a long time to build something bespoke. So in this post I’m going to talk about using Google Spreadsheets to build small, agile tools which can be built to match your exact needs.

Agile vs Scaleable

Before I dive into the technical details, a quick word on what I use Google Docs for. In my SEO-ninja toolset Google Docs are used for quick, agile tools. That means that if there’s a specific problem I need to overcome or some weird thing I’m testing I always turn to Google Docs first. That’s because I can build things quickly. They aren’t always robust, but if I’m only building a tool to solve a unique problem (as opposed to a problem I encounter all the time) then speed is of the essence. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time building a tool I’m only going to use once. Or running a test that turns out to not give me the expected results. If you want to build scaleable tools then I suggest you leave it to the pros (though Appengine is a great place to start with building “real” tools).

Let’s start with the complete beginner

Ok, so you might be scared. I’m going to talk about writing functions and building tools. You’re going to get your hands dirty. But literally anyone can do this. You need no prior knowledge. None. This post should take the complete beginner to ninja in 5 easy steps. The steps I’m going to cover:

1. Simple Web Scraping
2. Advanced Web Scraping
3. Google Docs Scripts – The Secret Sauce
4. Script Triggers
5. Putting It All Together

Lesson 1 – Simple Web Scraping

Ok, so the bedrock of using Google Spreadsheets for fun and profit is their nifty little function called ImportXML. Richard Baxter wrote a great intro post on ImportXML which you can check out. The basic premise is that using a function like this:

=importxml("http://www.distilled.net/blog/","//h2[@class='entry-title']")

Try it for yourself! Copy and paste that code into a blank Google Spreadsheet and see what happens 

Don’t get scared! There’s lots of things you probably don’t understand so let’s walk through them for you.

A standard function looks like this =importxml(“url”, “query”). So the URL can be explicit (like I typed above) or a reference file like this =importxml(A1, “query”) just like you would with a regular spreadsheet function. The query is an XPATH query. For a tutorial reference on XPATH here’s a good guide.

If you can’t be bothered reading that then here’s a few quick definitions (warning! hand-wavey!)

• // – this means select all elements of the type
• //h3 – this means select all h3 elements
• [@class=''] – this means only select those elements that meet the criteria given
• //h3[@class='storytitle'] – this means only select elements that look like: <h3 class=”storytitle”>Title</h3>

Walkthrough Example for Simple Web Scraping

So, now we’re getting to grips with the code let’s step through a practical example. A common SEO task is “how can I find as many blogs on niche X as possible”. So I google around and find a list of 100 blogs like this: http://www.onlineschools.org/2009/10/27/100-best-book-blogs-for-kids-tweens-and-teens/. It’s manual and time consuming having to click on each one to copy the link. I want to get the list of URLs into a spreadsheet as quick as possible.

2) We load up a Google Docs and fire up the importxml function. We can see that all the blogs are a separate li element so let’s try something like

=importxml(A1,"//li")

(where A1 is the cell with the URL of the page). We get this back:

3) As you can see, it contains the blog names so we’re getting there. But our query is also getting a whole load of other stuff we don’t want. So let’s look in the code and see if we can isolate the list of blog items. I find the “inspect element” control in Google Chrome excellent for visualising this. As you hover over the code, it highlights the section of the page that applies to it.

4) We refine our guess to limit ourselves to the div with class ‘intro-box-wide’ using a query like

=importxml(A1,"//div[@class='intro-box-wide']//li")

Which loosely translated says “fetch the div with that class and then select all li ele

5) We’re nearly there! We now have a list of all the blog elements. The next step is to pull the URL. So we modify our function to be:

=importxml(A1,"//div[@class='intro-box-wide']//li/a/@href")

Which says, from the li elements select the href contents from the a element. This /a/@href is a very common thing to tag on the end of importxml functions so I suggest you memorise it.

And we’re done! If you want to look at the spreadsheet within Google Docs go here and make a copythen you can play around to your heart’s content 

You can read Lesson 3 soon on my blog!

(Note: this importxml function has been modified from the original to handle the move from distilled.co.uk to distilled.net)

Gets us a list of blog post titles into a Google Spreadsheet like this:

1) Right now the only way to get your site ranked is to get links and everything else serves that.
Branko Rihtman

2) If you have trust and brand loyalty, you’ll get links.
Rand Fishkin

3) Opportunities are everywhere if you look at your obstacles differently.
Jane Copland

4) Watch out – 700,000 sites have received unnatural links orders (mostly in the US)
Rand Fishkin

5) Link building campaigns – if your campaigns are mediocre, fill the gaps. If they’re quite successful, make sure your spikes (the things you’re doing well at) are spiky enough.
Will Critchlow

6) For agencies – pitch big visions but small next steps.
Will Critchlow

7) Is the next big Google algorithm change going to be a link evaluation one? Very possible, says …
Tom Anthony

Use the rel=author tag – the rich snippet with a picture of the author helps improve clickthrough rate. It’s also becoming more important in Google’s eyes because they see it as an indication of trustworthiness. It now appears as a metric on Webmaster Tools.
Tom Anthony

9) Read The Lean Startup- it recommends launching the smallest thing that will test the biggest risk factor eg to see if people will actually like your product.
Will Critchlow

10) New sites: avoid bad links by avoiding nefarious schemes. Build up your good links gradually so that if you do attract a bad link it won’t make any difference to your ranking.
Martin MacDonald

11) Dropbox were incentivizing US students to link back to them from university sites – offering free space in exchange for a link. Is there anything you can offer?
Martin MacDonald

Content

1

2) Analyze which content gets shared with Topsy, Facebook graphs, Twitter API and Google+ API
Branko Rihtman

13) Having great content will bring you brand visibility, build a social following, loyalty, get you links automatically.
Rand Fishkin

14) Content doesn’t have to be restricted to what we usually think of as content. Build a community, use your product or present data – that’s all content.
Rand Fishkin

15) Don’t limit yourself to your own subject – find out what your customers enjoy hearing about. Have a look at the content Fuskars (scissor manufacturers) puts up on their blog, Fiskateers
Rand Fishkin

16) Don’t be shy about your great content – get it out there and make sure it links back to your site.
Rand Fishkin

17) Can you find 10 target websites for your content in 10 minutes? If not, forget it.
Will Critchlow

18) Building simple widgets isn’t as difficult as you’d think – and you’ll get lots of backlinks from sites such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal if it’s useful. The book
Professional WordPress Plugin Developmentwill get you started, and it’s easy even for non-developers.

19) Check out Arena Flowers for ideas on original content.
Will Critchlow

20) Cheat sheets are a good idea - SEOMoz’s web developers’ cheatsheet gets an inordinate number of links.
Will Critchlow

Social media and links

2

1) Retweets are better than Facebook shares for getting links.
Branko Rihtman

22) Visit your social connections page on Google for primary and secondary connections details.
Rand Fishkin

23) See who your primary and secondary social connections are on the Google social connections page
Rand Fishkin:

24) Content v link building? Create the great content, engage, build your social following, links will follow.
Rand Fishkin

25) Ask people to link to your pages – a simple “Please link to this page” will do (along with the link, of course).
Rand Fishkin

26) Make your tagline give you great anchor text, eg Feefighters used “Save 40% on your credit card processing”
Rand Fishkin

27) Try choosing a linkbaity sort of style, like the Economist’s blog all about graphics
Rand Fishkin

28) Try content curation, and pay attention to the style of your design, eg Twitter Stories
Rand Fishkin

29) Slate’s partnership with Q&A site Quora shows that content providers and people who need content should work together.
Rand Fishkin

30) If you’re an affiliate site, target your customers properly. See Jane Work is a great example of this.
Rand Fishkin

31) Check Facebook to find out who you and they are connected to and use your connections.
Wil Reynolds

32) Export Twitter followers and friends with this spreadsheet in order to research them.
Wil Reynolds

33) Don’t follow people on Twitter just because of a high follower to following ratio. Look to see if they’ll provide value first. (NB some people buy followers.)
Wil Reynolds

Tools

34) Use Zemanta which puts your content in front of 800,000+ bloggers while they’re actually writing their blogs.
Rand Fishkin

35) Use every weapon you can to get your posts to get out there: Google News, video, rich snippets, rel=author, schema etc.
Rand Fishkin

36) Use Followerwonk to find out who’s writing about your subject.
Wil Reynolds

37) Download this RSS extension to find out which sites have their own blogs and subscribe to them to find out what they’re talking about.
Wil Reynolds

38) Use iGoogle to set goals and to dos
Wil Reynolds

39) Add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to iGoogle to keep track of everything in the one place.
Wil Reynolds

40) Use Quora to track questions by people you’d like to follow you and link to you, and answer their questions …
Wil Reynolds …

41)… or use Inboxq to find out what people are asking …
Wil Reynolds

42) … and if you can’t answer their questions, retweet them.
Wil Reynolds

43) Try Kickoff Labs - take one element and launch an experiment (piece of content, for example) as soon as possible.
Will Critchlow

44) Builtwith allows you to check out which technologies the bigger sites are using.
Rand Fishkin

45) Use Mozenda to gather data from other websites, eg authors.
Wil Reynolds

Outreach

56) You have a product, but it doesn’t always sell itself. There is nothing dirty about outreach.
Jane Copland

47) Create a pool of domains that you can use for future outreach campaigns.
Branko Rihtman

48) Use ‘pridebait’ – give mentions to and link to people with HUGE followings eg The Time 100 poll
Rand Fishkin

49) Find out who these people are following, and be more like their followers (but don’t change your whole personality).
Wil Reynolds

50) Prune out selfish users, identify power users and relevant users to make your link building outreach campaign focused.
Branko Rihtman

51) You don’t get much benefit from targeting people who tweet lots of links, neither do you from people who tweet few – find the middle group.
Branko Rihtman

52) Find journalists by typing “columnist for …” into the search engines, or “writes for …”
Wil Reynolds

53) Put good karma out there and good things will happen. Try to understand and help people, and make friends. Friendship=links
Wil Reynolds

54) Try sending outreach emails at the we – try sending outreach emails at the weekend or in the middle of the night. at night, contact by tweet before you send, have a linked logo in your emails
Mike King

54) Contact by tweet before you send out outreach emails.
Mike King

55) Have a linked logo in your emails.
Mike King

Source: http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/tips-linklove

The “NOODP” applications meta tag is absolutely tough by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

If the the the search engines look for (in this scenario, Yahoo!) shows information about your website taken from the Yahoo! Listing instead of your information meta tag, you can energy it to ignore the list information by with a applications meta tag like this:.

It should also be absolutely cost-effective to specify suggestions for each individual going automated automatic robot, such as indicated below.
• If you only have the concern with Google, you can use this: .
• If you only have the concern with Yahoo!, you can use this: .
• If you only have the concern with MSN, you can use this: .
One of the most beneficial methods is to use just one applications meta tag with several characteristics separated by commas like this:.

Currently, only Yahoo!’s analyze, Slurp, uses the Yahoo! Listing.

If the the the search engines look for (in this scenario, Yahoo!) shows information about your website taken from the Yahoo! Listing instead of your information meta tag, you can energy it to ignore the list information by with a applications meta tag like this: .
Be aware that, once you add any of the above meta information to your sites, it may take a while for changes to your ideas to appear.
It is predicted that these designs explain to you several of the methods at your convenience that will help you to change the way the the search engines collection a given website.

Original source: Using NOODP & NOYDIR – SEO Workers http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/using-noodp-and-noydir.html#ixzz1mf4lOsRq
Under Modern Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives