Jul 3

Using Hpricot for SEO

Hpricot is a funky Ruby library for parsing and manipulating website HTML. Because of its ease of use it makes quick prototyping and testing of websites a breeze.

We use a number of tools for managing our customers SEO in partnership with Essential Marketer.

Here I’m going to show you how you can make use of Hpricot to check your site for a range of common SEO-related points.

First Off: Get the Document

Before you can check the HTML you need to get the document. Here’s how in Hpricot:

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri' #Make opening your webpages nice and easy
doc = Hpricot(open('http://www.example.com'))
# We're going to define a function here that will come in useful throughout this example
# It simply splits a string into its component words and returns the count
def word_count(str)
return str.split(/ /).length
end

To check your meta description you’d simply change the above code to:

# First you need to check there are keywords
if doc.at('meta[@name="description"]')
description = doc.at('meta[@name="description"]')['content']
description_count = word_count(description)
if keyword_count < 4 || keyword_count > 10
puts '[PROBLEM] Description Count'
end
else
puts '[PROBLEM] No Description'
end

Checking Image Alt Tags

if doc.search('img')
images = doc.search('img') #Get all the page images
image_alts = doc.search('img[@alt]') # Get only those images that have alt tags
image_count = images.length
image_alt_count = image_alts.length
# After getting the counts you get the difference.
# Then you'll know whether you're missing alt tags
if image_count - image_alt_count > 0
puts '[PROBLEM] Mising Some Image Alt Attributes'
end
end

Checking Title

title = doc.at('title').inner_html
title_count = word_count(title)
if title_count < 3 || title_count > 6
puts '[PROBLEM] Title Length'
end

In Conclusion

As you can see all the tests follow a similar pattern:

Get the doc
Get the tag and its contents.
Get the count.
Check.

There’s much more that can be done than whats shown here and we plan on releasing a tool for our partner site soon so you can get a thorough grading of your own site. Possible areas you could check in acse you’re wanting to experiement are:

Keyword checking of attributes and text.
Inbound links - Scraping Google, Yahoo, etc.
Server responses - Checking for nice 404, 500 responses and ensuring you have correct 302 redirects on your subdomains.

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