I’ve just had a bit of fun writing a couple of small scripts that will search Google for a set of key phrases and find the position of a specified URL for those key phrases in the results. I have built two versions of this script. One with a simple dialog where you can enter a URL and key phrase to search for, and another which takes a set of key phrases in an input file and produces a CSV file with the results and date. This second script can be scheduled to take place every night. The CSV file will grow with the new results and can be opened in Excel and a chart produced showing the trend over time of your website position for those key phrases.

As well as being extremely useful as an automated way to monitor the performance of your keywords in Google, these scripts also demonstrate what can be done with some simple Macro Scheduler scripting and WebRecorder. The scripts are not long and give a glimpse at the sort of things WebRecorder and Macro Scheduler can do to automate web sites and parse the resultant HTML.

Download the scripts here:
http://www.mjtnet.com/usergroup/viewtopic.php?t=2983

Note that these scripts automate IE and therefore operate at the user level just as if you were using Google yourself.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 10:43 am and is filed under Automation, Scripting, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.