Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. The value of having sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results is widely known as they are the principle drivers of traffic to any website. The visibility of a site on search engine could very well be the difference in success or failure of a business.  Although an old concept, but one by which SEO practitioners still swear by is one of the most widely used SEO technique. It requires webmasters to insert relevant meta-tags of keywords and description apart from having the right page title. With numerous sites in same genre trying to outdo each other and algorithms of search engines changing by the day, it is extremely important to monitor your competitors content, keywords and title tags. Doing the task manually everyday is time consuming & tedious. A much faster and simpler way would be to automate this process using a technique of web scraping.

Web scraping or web data mining is a technique used to extract data from HTML web pages in documents. Web scraping can help a lot in  monitoring of the titles, keywords, content, meta-tags of the competitors websites. One can quickly get an idea of which keywords are driving traffic to the competitors’ website, which content categories are attracting links and user engagement, and what resources will it take to rank your site higher than competition? This would allow you or your SEO practitioner to take undertake necessary steps in making changes to site before its too late, and ensure that your site is always at the top of search engines and get traffic to keep your business on the growth trajectory.

For more information, please visit our dedicated site on web scraping.