An Introduction to regular expressions in SEO

What are regular expressions? Regular expressions, also known as regex or rational expression, are a sequence of characters that create a search pattern, and as such provide us with an efficient and flexible method of searching and recognizing text strings. Regular expressions allow:

• Quickly analyze large amounts of text for specific character patterns
• Extract, edit, replace or delete substrings of text.
• Add extracted strings to a collection in order to generate a report.

In many cases they become an indispensable tool. Regular expressions in SEO In SEO, regular expressions can be very useful. With its use we can define a pattern and find it quickly in one or several documents.  There is a set of SEO tools on the market that allow the use of Regex, among which we can highlight:

• Crawlers or tracking tools: Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl among others.
• Google Analytics: we can create custom filters to extract traffic from certain pages.
• Google Sheets:  Google’s own spreadsheets we can use the syntax = REGEXTRACT to extract data from URL strings among other uses.

Some basic regular expressions Diving in a bit deeper in this section, we show you a set of regular expressions very useful in SEO, which are quite effective and save us a lot of work especially when: we have to extract specific information in several documents of a site, or when a certain website is big, and doing a full crawl is a nightmare; we can choose to track a specific path or exclude some paths. To do so, here are some examples of the use of regular expressions (regex) in crawler tools such as Screaming Frog:

• If from our blogWhat are regular expressions?Regular expressions, also known as regex or rational expression, are a sequence of characters that create a search pattern, and as such provide us with an efficient and flexible method of searching and recognizing text strings.Regular expressions allow:Quickly analyze large amounts of text for specific character patterns Extract, edit, replace or delete substrings of text. Add extracted strings to a collection in order to generate a report. In many cases they become an indispensable tool.Regular expressions in SEOIn SEO, regular expressions can be very useful. With its use we can define a pattern and find it quickly in one or several documents.There is a set of SEO tools on the market that allow the use of Regex, among which we can highlight:Crawlers or tracking tools: Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl among others. Google Analytics: we can create custom filters to extract traffic from certain pages. Google Sheet: in Google’s own spreadsheets we can use the syntax = REGEXTRACT to extract data from URL strings among other uses. Some basic regular expressions Deepening a little in this section, we show you a set of regular expressions very useful in SEO, which are quite effective and save us a lot of work especially when: we have to extract a specific information in several documents of a site, or when a certain site web is so big, that doing a full crawl is a nightmare, and we choose to track a specific path or exclude some. To do so, here are some examples of the use of regular expressions (regex) in crawl tools such as Screaming Frog: If from our blog https://www.makingscience.com/, we want to track pages containing only the path ‘/ en /’ in the path of the URL, with Screaming we can go to the top menu and select “Configuration” – “Include “And we include within the function” Include “, the following regular expression:. * / En /.* As a result, only the URLs containing that path will be tracked, as can be seen in the following images:

Therefore, we already know that all those characters that appear between the signs “. *” Will be the ones that are indicating that they appear in the path of URLs that are intended to be tracked.

Another way to specify this expression, especially when the path we want to crawl appears right after the domain, is to include it in the following way: https://www.makingscience.com/:*

If we want to select only URLs that contain a certain parameter, we can use the following expressions:

If instead, we want to discard a set of URLs in the crawl, from the Screaming menu we go to “Configuration” – “Exclude”, and as in the previous case, we specify with regex which path we do not want to appear. And those URLs that match the indicated exclusion will not appear in the trace directly. Some use cases can be found below: To exclude the subdirectory or path “/ en /” from our blog: https://www.makingscience.com/, we must include the following syntax in the “Exclude” function: https://www.makingscience.com /in/.*

To exclude a folder or path, which appears interspersed between previous folders, we use the following expression: https://www.domain.com/.*/example-path.* For example, in the following image we show how we could exclude from the scan all the URLs that are part of the folder “/ seo-social-media /”

If we want to exclude from the scan all the images that appear in our site, the regular expression would be similar to:. Jpg $

And in the following image it can be seen that when discarding the images, none has been tracked in Screaming:

• If we want to exclude pages that contain a specific term in the URL such as “developer”, the expression regex would be:. * Developer. *

• • If we are interested in excluding URLs that contain the security protocol (HTTPS), the regular expression would be:. * Https. *

And if we want to exclude all pages with HTTP, the regex would be: http://www.dominio.com/.*

• To give an example of the use of a more complex regular expression, imagine we have grouped in Google Sheet a list of URLs belonging to different domains, and we want to extract only the domains from it, we can make use of the following syntax:

=REGEXEXTRACT(A2;”^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n]+)”) Next, we specify an example with the use of this syntax in Google Sheets, but with URLs from our own blog, so you can see the result of the process:

Regular expressions cheat sheet Regular expressions can be more complex, depending on the patterns that we are interested in extracting. Therefore, in the following table you can find a cheat sheet, which will serve as learning to become familiar with the metacharacters that are most used in regex, and that will allow us to create useful expressions that save us time:

Sources:

• https://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/regular-expressions/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/dotnet/standard/base-types/regular-expressions
• https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/configuration/
• https://support.google.com/a/answer/1371415?hl=es
• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

How to create a creative and optimized company blog for SEO

For Google, content is king, and have an area dedicated to content within your website, be it a Blog or a news section, events, etc. It’s basic for a business. Creating a Blog on your website is useful tool that helps give significant perceived value to our website and drives  more visibility, because with this we get:

• Reach those informational searches that the user does, which are called terms How to: ‘How to do …?’, ‘Where is …?’, ‘What is …?’
• Get our user to come to us to find information and earn loyalty through this channel.
• Make the brand an online reference in the sector.
• Be updated on the latest trends and keep the user active with fresh and cutting-edge themes.

In many occasions, it is also a good tool for online marketing and engagement, since it is a channel through which the user enters, which helps us to become acquainted and able to become a future customer. That is why many companies use a BLOG as an important leg within their website as one more step within the sales conversion funnel. Tips to have a structured and optimized Blog Of course, you must take into account that to create a blog you have to have some business commitment, since it must be published on a regular basis, being aware of the number of articles that can be assumed monthly, to constantly offer new content to users, and also make Google enter our website more and more frequently, since we are creating new URLs and offering fresh, unique and original content. For this, we must take into account the following to build it from scratch with a good base:

1. Take into account which territories you want to cover. Offer themes that correspond to our business, and above all with the products / services that we have on our website. Once we have this clear, create a menu within the Blog adapted to the needs of users and the guidelines of how to create a perfect SEO web architecture.
2. Create unique and original content. Not many articles that are written on the same subject will be better positioned, but it is more advisable to create an optimized, original and complete information.
3. Adapt to new information needs. The world is spinning faster and faster, and you have to keep pace. That is why, when we search for something in Google, we want the information more and more concrete and specific, be direct.
4. Offer quick information. Your website must comply with Google’s best practices, and get it to load in less than 3 seconds, since the longer it takes to load, the more users will leave, the world is for smartphones! This is what the new Mobile First Index update says.
5. That content is optimized for SEO. It is necessary to make a study of key words that the user searches around the chosen topic, in order to include those terms in our article following the appropriate OnPage optimizations.
6. Be up to date Not only the content rewards, but also the format: videos, images, infographics … All these elements help the user to better read, since there are searches that the user, depending on how he does them, are to find the information in form of video, image or infographic.
7. Be constant. The Blog is a tool that helps us to better position the website, if this condition is met. It is not necessary to create an article a day, but be aware that it must be regular,  to stop publishing suddenly can have an adverse affect the website visits.

With all this and a little love, we will have a great and very cool blog that will help the website grow!

How to create an SEO web architecture

The information architecture is an aspect that is gaining more relevance on the web every day as it directly addresses a user’s need to easily find the information or products they are looking for without having to use anything other than their intuition. This web architecture of information must be taken into account when structuring a website, whether it is a new website or a redesign. But … Why is it so important to consider SEO in our architecture? At the SEO level, a good structure of the information assumes the success in the capture of traffic, generating a satisfactory user experience and having the search engines on our side. It is fundamental to find the balance between the SEO and the user’s experience since an over-optimization of the site can be detrimental to the organic positioning. Process to create a SEO Friendly architecture:

• Business priorities Before starting to consider the web architecture itself, we must make sure to know the core products or information towards which the bulk of the business is really directed. Prioritizing these URLs, we will focus our efforts on the most important ones to place them in the most accessible categories of the architecture, thus optimizing resources and obtaining more traffic in the URLs that support the weight of the business.
• Keyword Research With the Keyword research or the study of keywords we will get to know how the user searches for the type of products or information that we want to provide.  This point will be key in the process as it will allow us to know how and how much the user is looking for the products or information that we offer and will allow us to prioritize the URLs with the highest volume of search in the architecture. Likewise, we will assign a main keyword to each URL to optimize all the SEO elements of the page once we get fully involved with the On Page optimization of the site.
• Type of architecture: Horizontal or vertical The objective of a good web architecture is to get the user to find the information / products that he / she looks for in the least number of clicks possible (recommended maximum 3-4 clicks of depth).  Taking this into account, the most advisable thing is to build the site with a horizontal structure, with around 3 levels of depth at most. In this way the crawler budget or the time spent by Google tracking our site will be more effective, accessing a greater number of pages per crawl.  In addition, with the horizontal structures, lacking as many levels as in a vertical structure, we will be able to build shorter URLs, in short, more SEO Friendly for the google robot and for the user.
• Prioritize important content and eliminate unnecessary content We will place the most important pages as close as possible to the homepage. Following this model, we will avoid burying the priority content (that which we have also identified by reviewing the business priorities), making it more accessible to the user and the Google robot.  In this restructuring, we can also eliminate all unnecessary content for SEO or for business, reserving these priority categories to products / information that really attract volume of relevant traffic and avoiding to include very similar or duplicate content.
• Architecture in keywords silos With an architecture in keywords silos, we will organize the content around all the semantic research we have done in keyword research. Making sure to include all the terms or keywords in the architecture and giving relevance to our website in the eyes of the search engines.  In addition, we can link through interlinking or linked internal pages to other related sites to give more weight SEO to priority pages, to establish a logical hierarchy in the eyes of Google and to improve the user experience on our website.

 

What is HTTP / 2: advantages and correct implementation for SEO

In recent years security and speed have been very important when transferring data on the Internet. With the aim of creating a much more efficient and secure communication, the HTTP / 2 protocol was published in 2015, an update of the HTTP protocol that existed up to now, which promised numerous advantages when transferring data through the Internet. Although many browsers and servers already support this latest version of the HTTP protocol, there are still very few sites that have implemented it. Taking into account the advantages that can be expected both for SEO and for the user, below we will show advantages and possible disadvantages when implementing it. HTTP / 2 arrives with the aim of replacing HTTP 1.1. It does not modify its semantics, that is, that all headers, status codes etc are maintained. The change is in the way of transferring information, as we will see later.

What to take into account when making SEO recommendations with HTTP / 2

When recommending SEO improvements for a site, some of them change with respect to HTTP 1.1:

• Unify JS and CSS files. Taking into account that with this new version several requests are processed at the same time, now it is convenient that the static files occupy as little as possible so that the loading time  is reduced. It is more advisable to have more files, but with less size.
• Inline JS and CSS. Being inline, the files can not be cached correctly. As with HTTP / 2 a request for a file that is not very large does not cause a load problem on the page, this recommendation does not make sense.

Advantages of HTTP / 2 implementation for SEO

The main advantages in terms of SEO are mainly related to the loading speed of the site, both on the server side and the client side. The main advantages with respect to HTTP 1.1 are the following:

• It is a binary protocol instead of textual, as was the case with HTTP 1.1. With this change the processes are simplified: the step of translating from textual to binary is saved and also possible errors during the transfer of data are avoided.
• Multiplexing in HTTP 1.1 the client sent a request to the server and had to wait for the response of the server to send the next request. HTTP 2  thanks to the multiplexing it is possible to send several files in the same connection (normally, the current browsers support between 6 and 8 simultaneous connections).
• Compression of headers by HPACK. By sending compressed headers, efficiency and reception speed are improved and thanks to HPACK compression, header fields that may be duplicated are eliminated.
• Server push. Thanks to this service, the server can send several answers without the user having requested them yet, provided that the URLs are sent from the same host and protocol.
• ALPN extension, which allows the client and server to decide which protocol to use during the initial connection, always in a secure manner. Also, if a browser does not support HTTP / 2, all resources will be served in HTTP 1.1.

All these characteristics mean that load times are significantly reduced, since the communication between server and client is much more efficient.