"Let's start at the very beginning…a very good place to start"

It was following those simple words that the Von Trapp family soon found the sweet sounds of music drifting through their family home. And now, I am going to bring a similar form of music to your webmarketing ears. An altogether modern piece of technology that will catapult your link-building and online research techniques to new heights.

Serpscraper is one of a number of tools I twist to gain a competitive edge. Trust me, if you don't do solid research before you begin, you might as well give up now because, there are only a few of us that know what we're doing!

In fact, if you don't this amazing tool, your story might read something like this: you'll spend hours developing amazing strategies, but you'll only be able to rationalize their success in terms of the time you spent developing them. The pleasure you should be feeling is that solid satisfaction of watching your business grow online. Your brain will help you deal with the failure. This is your chance to change that.

What's a Scraper?

A scraper is a piece of software that goes out hunting the web for pages that have very specific characteristics. A scraper generally collects information from webpages and stores this in a file. This can range from a simple list of URLs, as with Serpscraper, all  the way up to complex information, such as pricing information and product descriptions. Scraping has actually been around for a long time, and you'll have seen it's fruits in used in most of the results pages of price comparison websites.

Get a footprint:

To begin scraping you'll need what's called a footprint, which is simply a way of identifying, as uniquely as possible, something on the web. In the Serpscraper context, a footprint is set of keywords that you use to find websites with specific characteristics. It's easy, just like using a search engine!
 

Serpscraper User Interface

Advanced post-processing filters:

• Filter text file for unique hosts.
• Filter text file files for unique urls.
• Trim URLS back to root (so www.domain.com/mypage.html, becomes www.domain.com).
• Sort list alphabetically.
• Lookup Google Page Rank on scraped urls.
• Remove 404 – removes redirects and 404's from text file.
• Verify footprint – will check to see that the specified text string is present on the scraped url (good where a search engine is still reporting domains that are no longer active).

Key features of Serpscraper:

The following features are available to you when you purchase this advanced research tool.

• Comes bundled with Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Cuil and Google BlogSearch engines.
• Advanced users can write their own plugins to scrape any search engine of their choice.
• Option to scrape using proxies, with automatic cycling per query.
• Uses word lists to ensure that the number of results returned exceeds the default values of the search engines.
• Option to add personalized user agents as referes, for use during scraping.

Because these filters can be applied individually, and because a new text file is created at every passage, there's no chance of loosing data.

So what? Well, if your Internet connection goes down while you're performing a 404 check, it would remove all the URLs in the text file. But with Serpscraper you can go back to the previous version. Very cool indeed!

This is the ultimate URL research and web scraping tool, so go get it and start making a difference to your webmarketing efforts.

Need further spoonfeeding?

Here are two quick tips if you're using scraping programs, I think Serpscraper is superb at this job and can enhance your web marketing efforts.

Enhance link building:

If you wanted to find a list of all the websites that were interested in exchanging links, you might goto Google and use the search term "add your link".  But you'd then need to manually take down each URL that appeared in the results. With Serpscraper you can create a footprint "link to us" and let it run. It will then scrape all the relevant URLs and store them in a text file. You can then remove all the duplicate URLS/Hosts, Trim the URLS back to their root, and check the Page Rank of each. You now have a list of high Page Rank websites sites which you can approach for link exchanges. .

Expedite your participation in Web 2.00:

There are millions of community forums, but which one should you join? A good indicator of their importance and success is it's Page Rank value given by Google . "Yes, but Page Rank can be faked" actually, Google's not stupid and in-bound links are just one of a number of different mechanisms that is used for ranking sites, it just happens to be the easiest one to exploit. Nowadays, there are many types of forums online, Vbulletin is one of them. So, you could could run a footprint "powered by Vbulletin" to find all the forum websites on that host. If you add in your keyword to that search query, you should now be starting to understand why this tool is so powerful. After the scrape has finished you can put those URLS through the Page Rank checker and you'll have a list of the most important community forums to join and participate in.

Enough already, don't look at the screen, just buy it!