The numbers
- Registered for the talk: 55 people.
- Assistants: 31 people.
- It was held on March 9, 2020 in the space provided by ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.
Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/
Create WordPress Auto-Directories: The Chat
After the bases about automation that we got in the last talk, from WPAlicante we took advantage of the pull to give another turn to the topic of automation but in this case of directories. To do this, this month we have in the space ULab with Alvaro RocaSEO specialist in very cool "black box" automations. It will teach us to create a directory with much imagination and a little scraping.
Of course, at the end of the talk we always have the classic round of questions, as well as the traditional networking accompanied by refreshments in one of the surrounding pubs, which the weather doesn't allow to be outdoors, always thanks to our sponsors: WeglotThe WordPress Plugin to translate your website into the language of your choice. You can try it out without any obligation, as it is free to use for translating up to 2000 words into a language, and it takes up very little space on the server. We also have in this meetingup as a sponsor a very cool SEO agency from Alicante: SEO Force Agency. And as if this wasn't enough, we are also sponsored by the great gamification plugin for your WordPress GamiPressThe WordPress.com website, which simplifies the whole gamification world for you to include in your WordPress in a simple and cool way.
We leave you the link to the shared presentation during the talk and here are some points that we found interesting. although we include at the end of this entry The full video of the presentationthanks to the professionalism and good work of Marco ProductionsThe film is a documentary, which not only records the talk but also edits it so that we do not miss any details of what happened.
Fundamentals: Scraping as a basis for automating directories
The technique of scaling consists of obtaining data from a website in an AUTOMATIC and MASSIVE way. This means that when setting up a book directory, for example, we do not have to depend on the people in charge of the publishers to give us their book census, but we would directly obtain it from the websites or from Amazon itself, from where we could directly obtain not only the title and price but also the author, the publisher, number of pages... all the data they have put on the product file.
In order to do this we will have to pull proxies or virtual VPNs. Google does the same with our pages to show interesting information or position them.
There are programs that come ready to scrape. Some of them are:
- ScrapeboxThe video platform: Not only does it allow you to scan from Google, but also from any kind of search engine and news index, as well as from Youtube or any other video platform. The problem with this program is that it requires a medium/advanced level of knowledge, in addition to having a proxy. The good thing is that it is economical and with a single lifetime payment.
- Screaming FrogThe first one is more basic than the last one. It is for web auditing, keeping for example all H1 tags. This gives us a database (in CSV format) that we can then categorize and exploit. The good thing is that it has a free version with quite basic functionality.
- Importance: It has a very good support. The paid version is the one that is really worth it.
- BotsolMy Business: This is used for My Business and works very well, as well as being very clear. It fails in some specific cases but solutions are appearing.
- JarveeThe first one is that it's not only scrawled inside Google and web pages, but also inside social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... although Facebook is catching on today and making it more difficult than the rest of social networks. In the end the goal is the same: to obtain information from social networks, from users, from those who follow or who follow him, from likes... to be able to mount then a directory with that information.
- Google Maps ScraperTeamPlatino: Program developed by TeamPlatino based on what Botsol was doing and improving it. Much more information can be obtained from the My Business tabs. The good thing about this program is that you can play with the list of keywords to find the information you need. And this information is not only useful when creating a web directory but also for specialized commercial actions, about specific areas or sectors; all the information provided by the companies in My Business would be available to you to locate them automatically and offer them your services. We can export the information in Excel, to keep the data we are interested in exploiting.
Spin a text, as a second step to create the directory
Once we have the base information for our directory thanks to the scraping, it is time to mount the web containing that information. To do this, it is good that we are able to create similar texts, based on a template and for this we use the texts spineados. What WordPress will do is create a page with each of the results of the spine text. For this we need to use several plugins to create an initial version of our website with the data obtained:
- Page Generator: To generate the pages with the spine texts
- Cache PluginThis plugin is mainly for a second part. We can use the style to Lite Speed or autoptimize
- SEO PluginFrom style to Yoast SEO or Rank Math
Once the website is created, it is a matter of shaping it, making it attractive and so on. One possibility is to launch a lot of directory URLs and finally keep the ones that have the best position.
Depending on the template used to enhance the look of the website, you can also add interesting functionality to the directory. For example, the topic Listing ProThe Directory, offers a back panel through which business owners can self-manage their business information in the directory or even ask to be added, if they find the directory interesting enough to appear in it. It is also possible to add gamification later thanks to plugins such as Gamipress.
If we see that the directory works, we can also invest in a programmer that include the score of each business in tripadvisor, booking or any other social platform, making our directory more interesting to the public. This information can also be obtained by scraping these websites.
Of course, it will be very important to include our directory in both Search Console how to create a card in Google My Business.
How do we get them to listen to us
Once we have managed to get all the information and put it on an attractive website, we have several ways to publicize our directory, in addition to the well-known trade to trade:
- Email MarketingLaunching an email campaign. They can be done in two ways:
- Massivewith companies such as Mailrelay that allow with your free account to send up to 75,000 emails per month to 15,000 subscribers, if in addition to creating your free account you follow them on the major social networks. We must try not to make it seem massive, personalizing the emails as much as possible thanks to the information we have. Moreover, you must take into account that all the data we have obtained is public on the Internet by the companies themselves, so we would not be violating any data protection law because on top of that it is business information to establish a business relationship.
- Emotionalwith companies such as GetResponseThe company has a team of professionals who carry out a more detailed study of the needs and potential customers in order to create specific and effective campaigns. responsive emailsthat they get to the right customer at the right time. This also implies that they do not have free service, all their plans are paid for.
- BotsThere are bots as the Milanuncios with which we can launch traffic to our own site, both the directory in general and each of the pages created with the text spine. This way we achieve that the web has more incoming traffic.
- Social NetworksToday it is important that we are visible in the various existing social networks, so increasing the presence of our directory in them is important to increase our visibility, as well as give more strength and generate confidence.
Final networking questions and issues
QUESTIONOnce you have your CSV with the data you want to save in your directory, how do you import it into WordPress so that the pages are generated?
RESPONSEIn Page Generator, there is a KeyWords section. Each KeyWord corresponds to one of the variables used in the spine texts. Unfortunately, these Keywords have to be created by hand and filled with content manually. At the moment there is no CSV import in PageGenerator that generates KeyWords automatically. For example, we could create a Keyword called [Hamburger Stores] where we save all the names of the hamburger stores we have stored in our CSV. This implies making a copy&paste of the NAME column for those rows that correspond to hamburger shops (we could have made a filter in the CSV to obtain only the companies catalogued as hamburger shops). This manual must be done with each data we want to export from the CSV to exploit it in our directory.
QUESTIONDo you always have to work with the CSV format in Excel to make the filters or do you know some other tool to eliminate duplicates, filter...?
RESPONSEThere is a website of TPMechanic with a lot of resources to work with a text file. As the CSV format is after all a text file with separators it can be used with the tools on this website. You can not only remove duplicates, but also delete empty lines, change capital letters to lower case, search and replace text, extract a specific column...
Glossary
- EscrapeoThe method of obtaining information from existing websites on the Internet automatically.
- Spin (SPIN text)Template: It is a text template that has a fixed part and a variable part. The latter is in square brackets and with all possible options within them. A program creates as many different texts as combinations can be made with the options we have included in each of the brackets. An example of spin text could be:
{Let's see what it is and what it is for and what we can use it for and where we can use it in a {Text Spin|Spin|Spin a text|Spin a text|Spined text}.
- Email ResponsiveEmail: This is a feature in email design (just like in web pages) that allows the email content to automatically adapt to the screen it is being displayed on, whether it is a computer, tablet or mobile phone.
- BotThe software allows you to perform repetitive tasks automatically over the Internet.
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