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The modern SEO's toolkit

The modern SEO's toolkit

I evangelise that every online marketer should be thinking about going beyond "software" and into hacking together your own basic tools. Illustrated with examples and details.

Will Critchlow

October 24, 2011
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  1. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Our ability to use APIs, scrapers,

    multiple tools is going to be super critical. Avinash Kaushik, interview on SEOmoz
  2. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I could talk about all the

    big tools, but you know about them (and if you don’t, they’re easy to find)
  3. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow This talk is about the toolbox,

    not all-powerful tools [though I love that the picture on the right is entitled “really big lathe”] http://www.flickr.com/photos/dottiemae/5187337181/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/endless__mike/2757408845/
  4. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Expect the output of every program

    to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program Doug McIlroy, Basics of the Unix Philosophy
  5. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow They refer to “pipes” (|) because

    you connect programs like this: `cat $file | grep 404` http://www.flickr.com/photos/danndalf/3534506071/
  6. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I run a company whose product

    is written in code, and I don’t yet speak the language. I sometimes feel like a newspaper publisher who has to take his editor’s word for it that the articles are good. Roy Bahat, President at IGN Entertainment
  7. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I am not trying to turn

    you into a developer (that would make Bill concerned). Not being an author isn’t an excuse for not learning English
  8. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to find all the

    googlebot visits in a certain time-period in a 22Gb log file
  9. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I’d be turning to bash, grep

    and sed Does getting started with this sound too hard?
  10. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Too hard? Really? I call BS

    – here’s how to get up and running from scratch in 45 minutes
  11. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I cut it down to 15

    minutes – some sequences may be shortened
  12. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Pro-tips: man <command> / <command> --help

    More information about grep and sed. I also use curl -I, whois, host
  13. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to explain to a

    client or a dev team the changes you want to make to a site
  14. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Get comfortable with a prototyping /

    screenshot annotation tool. This is Balsamiq
  15. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I’m currently really liking Skitch (mac

    only currently, but recently acquired by Evernote and apparently coming to Windows)
  16. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Sometimes screencasts or quick videos are

    the easiest way to get the point across. It’s never been easier. I like screenr for screencasts (warning: public).
  17. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Start using a ticket tracking tool

    / kanban board / project management tool. My current favourite is Trello
  18. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to get persuasive information

    for your boss on how people perceive your site
  19. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to classify a bunch

    of URLs. But you need to discover the classifications as you go along
  20. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I’d be turning to Excel for

    this. Pro-tip: F9 to evaluate a part of a formula on the fly. Don’t forget to ESC out afterwards F9
  21. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to check a site

    to find pages with the old GA code on them
  22. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I had to do this just

    the other day, and I used Screaming Frog (you’ll need the paid version to search the HTML of the pages)
  23. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Chrome has an extension for turning

    on ga_debug.js. SEER did a great video explaining how to use it
  24. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow The most common question I’m asked:

    Why (TF) doesn’t it work? 1. reproduce 2. simplify 3. isolate 4. document (++verbosity) 5. hack 6. sleep, shower
  25. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to gather data about

    the proportions of people tweeting different phrases
  26. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow JSON looks like this (this is

    the Hunch API). Tom would access this with Google Docs
  27. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow This is the entire python code

    we used to access the Hunch API on our recent hack day. If you’re following along at home you will need to pip install simplejson
  28. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to whip up a

    quick website to display the contents of your database to others in your team
  29. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Look how easy it is to

    get Python and Django up and running
  30. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Once you are up and running

    to this point, articles like this one and tutorials like this one become useful.
  31. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to grab all the

    email addresses of the commenters on a WordPress site
  32. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to make a bunch

    of circles in sizes proportional to input data
  33. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Sometimes you need specialised tools. We

    find data visualisation tools useful for briefing designers
  34. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You want to make a page

    scroll sideways when someone scrolls their mouse wheel
  35. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow But if you did... This is

    the entire jQuery code you’d need to make a page scroll sideways. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants
  36. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Speaking of the shoulders of giants.

    If you want to make a button wobble... Part of a larger trend of great CSS and JavaScript frameworks
  37. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow HTML5 almost never manifests itself visibly

    on the page. The main things you need to know: semantic markup and native multimedia (oh, and canvas).
  38. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow You need to grab a screenshot

    of your site (or your competitor’s?) every day to correlate against analytics data
  39. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Possibly the most powerful tool I

    have learnt recently is git. Github has amazing hidden depths and tools for everything you can imagine
  40. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I recommend reading @holman’s stuff on

    how github uses github. While you’re at it, check out speaker deck.
  41. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow General stuff 1. Set yourself up

    with upstream = DistilledLtd, origin = your branch and any other colleagues’ remotes as you need them 2. Regularly pull upstream master into your local master branch Developing something 1. git checkout master 2. git pull upstream master 3. git checkout -b featurebranch 4. [do your doing] 5. commit regularly, but as close to one commit per ticket as you can (you can rebase commits for extra special bonus points) add “re #ticketnum” into your commit message 6. git push origin featurebranch [do this regularly - it’s your best backup] When you’re ready for something to be tested / deployed: 1. Go to github.com/username/projectname//tree/featurebranch and create a pull request to upstream master 2. Add the URL of the pull request to the ticket, mark it to test and assign to the tester The Distilled git(hub) process (advanced) To test a featurebranch: 1. git checkout master 2. git pull upstream master 3. git checkout -b testing 4. git pull personfork featurebranch 1. if there are merge issues, fix ‘em (outside the scope of this checklist) and instead of pushing the big green button below, you’d have to push into upstream master 5. do your testing 1. if rejecting, update ticket as appropriate, git checkout master, git branch -d testing and start again with the next feature 2. if accepting, merge changes on github pull request using the big green button, git checkout master, git pull upstream master git branch -d testing and continue, update ticket to deploy and assign to the deployer Rebase (squash commits) 1. You can squash multiple commits into a single commit. This only works if the commits haven’t been pushed to a remote repository. git log (to see how many commits you need to squash) 2. git rebase -i HEAD~4 (where 4 is the number of commits you want to squash) 3. In the editor, pick commit message to keep, squash other messages http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with- rebase.html
  42. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow wow, we're going 800 people per

    hour, or 1500 people per hour. it was a real mind shift. maybe i'll do a post. @dannysullivan 29 Sep
  43. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Do you think there’s any chance

    that blekko will roll out webgrep to run any query you like?
  44. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Did you know you can now

    drop images onto Google Search (via Dave Naylor: http://dis.tl/oMMmzi)
  45. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I came across Chandoo via Todd

    Malicoat. It’s packed with Excel resources and downloads
  46. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Topsy is one of the few

    real-time search engines left – now with added G+
  47. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Uptime monitors (disclosure: we invested in

    Server Density). I’d love to see an SEO uptime monitor monitoring 404s, accidental noindex etc and alerting.
  48. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow A handy post on integrating the

    GA API into WordPress (for top posts etc). Via @smashingmag
  49. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow I haven’t come up with a

    use for the face.com API apart from putting moustaches on photos, but I’m sure you can do something ingenious
  50. WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow Another geeky tool to install on

    your new Ubuntu virtual machine. Built from buzzwords (MongoDB, node, etc.). From Square
  51. Will Critchlow If you’re enjoying yourself, please tweet when NYC

    is awake – there is still time for them to buy tickets for next week: http://www.distilled.net/events/ Founder – Distilled [email protected] @willcritchlow WILL CRITCHLOW - @willcritchlow