Professional Web Scraper

As a professional website scraper, I am ready to provide you the best quality of scraping services: Screen Scraping/Contacts/Email/Phone numbers/product list, pricing list scraping & price comparison and categorizing, events, deals etc. AND crawling, data mining, data extraction, spidering / harvesting, parsing etc

I’ve scraped different yellow-pages for contacts info and merchant websites like newegg, buy,ebay,amazon, etc – yelp.com, iTune and also many more for various purposes as per client’s needs.

My scripts can read,crawl+parse complex & restricted website pages and output to Spreadsheet/ CSV / XML / PDF /WEB/ MySQL database.

I am using php for core programming, different parsers (regex, xpath, dom, lxml, etc), preferred mysql,also highly maintained anti-blocking strategies(proxies, etc)

Contact Details:

Email / GTalk: engrfazam@gmail.com

Skype: php.lead

SEO and Software Don’t Mix

I understand in today’s marketplace the need for automation grows and grows as companies seek to cut costs across the board. Streamlining a process down to a science and eliminating as much human interaction seems to be a growing trend but does it work for marketing a website and for SEO? Manufacturing yes, internet marketing to humans? No.

There is not a SEO software program on the planet that can successfully step into the shoes of your audience and try to anticipate what their online behavior or patterns might be at that given moment. There is something that will always require a human touch, search engine optimization and internet marketing equally requires the human marketing touch. When optimizing a website you need to stop and think about each page and really determine what kind of user you want to drive to that specific page. Which keyword you chose to target on that page will deliver a certain type of end user. This thought process is something a computer program is not going to be able to nail down correctly. What if you are torn between two keywords or phrases and both deliver a slightly different end user, do you think a software program would pick that up and pick the right keyword? Most likely not. Software can be used to do many research tasks like keyword research or design but software cannot write a custom crafted meta tag and description like a human could. The human element will always be a factor when communicating with other humans. It would be like asking a program to come up with an award winning design campaign for your brand. What if a software program puts in a keyword that is completely wrong for your business and you don’t catch it. Then you could be wasting the opportunity to build more targeted visitors.

Search engine optimization also requires a certain element of experience. An SEO software product can not by substituted for experience, but experience can play a role to help utilize an SEO software product. The experience of doing certain online efforts and analyzing the results only to tweak and refine to streamline even more. This is only acquired over time. This type of experience is invaluable and SEO software just doesn’t have the capabilities to analyze what works and what doesn’t. If your website generates only a small number of visitors but your conversion margins are very high does the software understand this? Who is to say something works over something that doesn’t? Every business will have their own tools and benchmarks for measuring their own success. If you are thinking about trying to use software to market your business think again, if you have a good amount of SEO and/or internet marketing experience as a business owner, marketer or web master, then there are software products out there that can help automate certain tasks to make you life easier, but it will not do the work for you! For instance, I use several excellent products to do my job, (Keyword Discovery, Compete, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc.) I don’t only rely on these tools alone to make important mission critical SEO and internet marketing decisions for my clients. When you are evaluating SEO software products out there, just think of this: If it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Reaching out to humans and developing and executing a comprehensive strategy requires a human touch and always will.

How to Put Together a Link Building Strategy

Most of you understand that marketing a business or website is important and with that comes the need for some sort of plan to get the job done. Don’t just try to store the plan in your head. Write it down and visualize it so you can better understand what it is that you are up against. Pull up a fresh excel worksheet and let’s get started.

Start by creating a 12 month outline for your link building plan. This way you can visualize what is coming up ahead and make changes whenever necessary. You will most likely make some sort of changes at some point throughout the year. Ask yourself what type of press release marketing you want to do for the year. List all the distribution sources and which one you prefer to take. Check off which months you want to launch that effort in and also if possible topics you might want to announce if you don’t have any real newsworthy items happening at that specific time. Below that do the same for any article marketing you are planning to do. Remember that when you scroll down each month you want to have a variety of items you are doing that particular month so don’t just focus on one effort and beat it into the ground. You want to make sure your approach is highly diverse with a strong emphasis on really branding your business online. It is important that each month you find some sort of niche industry site you can become a part of. The niche sites will be important for your link building and also for generating highly targeted website traffic over to your website.Soldier of Love

After you have finalized these three areas in your link building strategy you will want to concentrate on a handful of profiles you can list your business in that could potentially bring in a new possible client or even just a visitor to your website who might be curious. You can see that we are diversifying the approach which is exactly what you want to do at all times when marketing your business on the internet. If you find an area online that brings over more than usual traffic and exposure it is important to hang out there but don’t neglect other possible locations that could bring in just as many new clients or customers. Write out your strategy like this and it will create a much clearer picture for you to visualize what it is going to be going on with your website.The Help

Do Not Worry About PageRank

For years people have always made an effort to really focus on increasing their Google pagerank as much as possible. I always ask people, what is it about Google pagerank that makes you want to increase it so badly? Many times they really didn’t know how to answer the question or at least answer it correctly.

For many years Google pagerank was the sought out factor for many people diving into search engine optimization. Over the years it has been severely abused as people seek out science project like marketing campaigns only to increase page rank. News flash, rankings alone don’t grow a business and the search engines are really starting to evolve and change the way that they rank websites. They are tweaking and modifying search engines to only reward those who take a natural approach to building their business. An approach that builds over time with heavy branding and marketing elements rather than pouncing on loop holes to achieve rankings in search engines. Internet marketing company HubSpot based out of Boston MA had this to say about Google page rank: “Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings or results. I know of websites that have a Page Rank of 0, and yet they still get organic rankings and search traffic for competitive search terms.”

Basically what HubSpot is saying is that businesses and websites should be focusing on building their brand and their business and not worrying about what the Google pagerank of their website is. At the end of the day page rank does not offer any value. You can’t track where your page rank comes from or why it is even there. It has almost become a distraction for website owners that have lost focus on what it really means to market your business online. Even Google has removed any mention of pagerank from their guidelines.

A recent Q&A session on one of Google’s forums had this to say:
“Q: My site’s PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.”

When Google comes out and says it than you better believe that it is true in every possible way. You can read more about Google’s view point on page rank on the Google webmaster forum. I given touched on the subject of Google PageRank sculpting as a waste of time a few months ago as well.

Are There Any Great Link Building Activities Left?

A friend and fellow search engine optimization expert asked if I knew of any good link building tactics. I thought he must know the same thing that I know. That is, that relevant link building is getting harder and harder…it has been over the last 3 to 4 years. We both agreed that the best way to get links is to simply write great content and over time, people will then link to your great content. But what about beyond that? Directories? Articles? Blog comments? Online Publicity?
The search engines always seem to be playing this never ending game of cat and mouse with links and search engine optimziation folks trying to build them. Truth is, link building is not for the faint of heart. A good link today may turn sour next week or next year. Then what? Reality is if you develop a blended white hat (by the book or following each search engine webmaster guidelines), then you should not have any issues in the future. Meaning, if you know a link source is not the best, for instance, not relevant, link exchange or paid link, then stay away from it. Also, never abuse any type of link building activity. If a particular source of a relevant link is generating visitors to your website then continue, but don’t overdo anything. The reality is the search engines always change things because SEO folks (or black/grey hat ones) tend to abuse a certain link building activity. I remember 6 years ago, link building consisted of some of the same things as it does today, but you could have a site with good content and good site optimziation and then exchange links and do very well. This is NOT the case today!

But that doesn’t mean link building is a fruitless activity. I still believe in the power of good links even if they’re getting more and more difficult to find. But what makes for a good link?
Based on my experience and various industry sources that I have seen in recent times, the criteria still come to:

• Relevance
• Authority
• Anchor Text
• Age

Not necessarily in that order, but those are the important factors to locating a good quality link. So now that we know what kind of links to go for – relevant links from authoritative sites with strong anchor text that have aged – how do you get them? First, what you should NOT do is run out and start spamming directories and social bookmarking websites. That will get you nowhere. What will get you places is to write great content and market that content to your target audience in the places where your target audience likes to hang out. If you’ll do that on a consistent basis you’ll see the links. But a moderate submission strategy to top-notch authoritative websites within your niche is a nice augment. And don’t sweat the small stuff. The most important advice that I can give you is do your research and plan out your link building activities in advance, not only does this make it manageable, but keeps your link building program on track.

Top Ten Google SEO Ranking Factors

People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results. Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back.

Over the past years by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google SEO Starter Guide, many other industry blogs and by actually doing professional SEO and internet marketing since the late 1990’s, I have gathered data and come to a boiled down short list of the most important Google search engine ranking factors.

Here is the list of my top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:
1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.
2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true.
3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.
4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.
5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.
6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.
7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.
8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.
9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.
10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.
11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!

**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors.
There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.

Does the Format of Your Title Tag Matter in SEO?

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if the format of a title tag matter much in terms of SEO?
Excluding your the keywords you are placing in the title tag, just thinking about the format of the keyword you put in that title tag, does it matter?
Examples:

• Red Widgets–Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget – Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget ¦ Red Widget Supplier
• Red Widget : Red Widget Supplier

Now, everyone in the thread is in agreement that Google will ignore all those characters. So you can technically go with any version you like. It should not make a difference in terms of how well your page ranks in the search engine if you choose a : over a -. Note, this is not the URL formatting of the page, it is the title tag.
Now, the rest is a matter of personal preference and what you think may lead to a higher click through rate from the search results.