Why and How to Use Python for SEO?
As an SEO specialist, you have to analyze website KPIs, identify weak and strong points of your business, and develop SEO strategies. It requires tedious, monotonous, and unbearably boring tasks that sometimes steal a heavy chunk of your time. As a result, you have little energy for strategy and actual business growth.
But there is good news – you can automate most of these analytical tasks. Thus, many SEO specialists and marketers use Python for SEO to index their websites on Google better and grow their businesses.
It is a powerful programming language and an indispensable automation tool that saves dozens of hours for successful SEO specialists. With little coding knowledge, you can write or download useful Python scripts to boost your SEO. So, keep reading and learn how to use Python scripts to free up 12-15 hours per week.
How to Install Python for SEO?
If you haven’t used Python before, it’s high time to install this programming language from Python.org. You may also come across Python 2 and Python 3. Which one is better for SEO?
The third version of Python 3 is a common standard, and developers no longer support the second iteration. However, you can install both versions since plenty of helpful scripts are written using Python 2.
Check Understanding JavaScript Rendering
What Libraries Do You Need to Run Python Scripts?
Once you install Python, you may need several libraries to run the scripts on your websites. Check some of the most popular ones:
- Beautiful Soup – a tool to extract data from web pages.
- Pandas – a data management library.
- Requests – a library to send HTML requests and export request results.
- Advert tool – essential functionality to run SEO-related Python scripts.
Also, particular scripts may need more libraries. So, you can check the requirements for each SEO script you find on the web.
How to Run Python for SEO Online?
If you simply upload Python files to your server, your scripts won’t work. Instead, you have to use additional software to make Python compatible with web servers. For this, you can check the official Python instructions.
Where Do You Get Python SEO Scripts?
While it takes some time to install Python, you don’t have to be an experienced programmer to use Python scripts. Otherwise, SEO programming would take too much hustle and time to see measurable SEO improvements. The good news is that you can download plenty of Python scripts from online programming repositories like GitHub.
Check App Development in Healthcare
4 Best Ways of Using Python for SEO to Boost Your Website Performance
Now, let’s check popular applications of Python SEO scripts.
Checking Broken Links
As an SEO specialist, you should pay close attention to links on your website. There are many ways for link building but only a few for tracking them. However, checking your websites for broken links at least once a month is as crucial as getting new hyperlinks.
A few dead links won’t cause your site to fall to the tenth SERP. However, plenty of 404 links may compromise user experience and slow down traffic growth in the long run.
But what if you have an online shop with thousands of product pages? Checking them all by hand is nonsense. That is why you can learn Python for SEO to detect dead links in a few clicks.
Check Flutter App Cost
Once you run a web crawler script, it starts sending requests to your website and displaying broken hyperlinks. After finishing the script, you can download the list of inactive links in the CSV format.
Scraping Websites
Let’s assume you have to identify the most shared articles in your affiliate blog or compare custom T-shirt prices. Instead of manually checking web pages, you can use Python web crawlers to extract this data in a digestible format.
You can also gather data for your marketing campaigns. For instance, you can run scripts to collect the most convertible email titles or HTML email templates. Look here to learn more about professional SEO-optimized HTML templates.
Building Links
The more reputable backlinks you have, the higher Google and other search engines will rank your website. While experienced SEO specialists often buy backlink packages, sometimes you have to dive into time-honored outreach. With Python, you can gather relevant publications, collect editorial emails, and send pitches faster than your coffee cup cools off.
Optimizing Images
Beautiful high-quality images can skyrocket bounce rates and kill the traffic by increasing page load times. Compressing images will help you keep page load times within acceptable ranges and improve customer experience.
But what about dozens of pictures? You can compress images in bulk using Python scripts without compromising their quality.
Check Best Automation Testing Tools
The Bottom Line
Python is a powerful tool to make your SEO tasks easier and free up time for your strategies. With Python, you can automatically scrape web pages, optimize images in bulk, detect broken links, and so on.
The best thing about using Python for SEO is that you don’t have to be a programming guru to do so. All you need to do is download and execute relevant SEO scripts.