Automate keyword extraction from competition.
One of the most important steps in SEO is to get relevant keywords. There is many ways to start a list of relevant keywords, one of them is to “steal” the keywords from competition. You know, most people still think that filling meta-keyword tags with relevant keywords will make them rank better. That’s not the case, but it’s great for us that know better. Using a list of keywords, someone thought will be great for their website, is a very good way to start.
Instead of copying each group of keywords from the competition websites by hand, I’ve created a simple script that automates the process. The script was made with PHP, and uses CURL.
This script was tested in Windows and in Linux Ubuntu (I developed it in Ubuntu). Below you can find instructions on installing it on Windows.
1 – Download and install PHP
I recommend you download PHP executable from http://www.anindya.com/. You could use Xampp, Wamp, Zend Server but I don’t recommend it. It’s a pain to get CURL working on Windows with those LAMP distributions. It’s simpler to just download PHP and install it.
After downloading it, unzip it to an folder, find the file php.ini-production and rename it to php.ini. After, open php.ini and uncomment the line ;extension=php_curl.dll (remove ;). This will activate PHP CURL.
2 – Check if PHP is running
To check if PHP is running, launch a terminal session, go to the php folder and issue the php –v command. You should get something like the screen below:
3 – Put PHP executable in the system path
Go to System Properties and change the path like the example below. You probably need to restart to make the changes effective.
After this step you can run PHP everywhere you like.
4 – Create a folder anywhere you like
Create a folder anywhere you like, and unzip the script files inside that folder. That’s where you will run the script.
5 – Add the desired keywords
In the folder root you have one file named seed.txt. That’s where you will put the keywords you want to research in Google. When you run the script, it will find the first 100 results and extract the keywords from each website.
This is an example of the scrip running:
6 - Check the results
Open the csv file on excel to get all the keywords
You can download the files on https://www.seofreelancer.pt/files/meta-keywords-sniper.zip
Note: If you get an error message like "Could not resolve host", that could be dns problems. I found out that you need to get reliable dns resolution in order to make the script work nicely. If you get this kind of errors try to configure opendns dns servers (http://www.opendns.com/) on your system.
Feel free to contact me at luis.osorio[at]seofreelancer.pt, if you need any help. I will probably make a more advanced version in the future, so ideas or suggestions are welcome. if you find the script to be useful, please distribute it by linking to this blog post.
