Search Engine Optimization: Initial Analysis Script

A suggestion was made some months ago by one of our colleagues who is in the search engine optimization business that we ought to see if eValid could help her out. We asked her, "What is the most common question you want to have answered?"

After several go-arounds, her response was, basically, that it would be great to have an simple, fully-automated way to find out if a particular search string produced a valid clickable link in the first page of search results, and do this across multiple search engines. That second part of the request was the sticky one: just showing a text item was there on the results page was not enough. You really had to know there was a real live link that someone could click that would take you to a specific URL. Making one script for multiple search engines was going to be tricky, too.

The resulting SEO Demonstration Script is a parametric script, expressed in terms of the name of the search engine, the locations of the search-string entry field, the location and properties of the "go get it" action field, and of course the input search string and required URL fragment. To make the script 100% reliable -- we don't want to have to rewrite this script if the search engine pages change -- we worked out the Search Engine Parameters for a number of different search engines.

We ran the parametric script using one of eValid's methods for multiple-script playbacks (e.g. DataSynthesis mode among several options) with very interesting results. Natural enough we searched for "eValid" and discovered lots of references in places we didn't think we'd be referenced. Interesting indeed, the differences we found.