SEO Automation: Streamlining Workload With Templates, Tools & Modules

Spending lots of time redoing and recreating the same tasks can be draining. You don’t want to have to type out hundreds, if not thousands of title tags, it’s just not sensible. But along those same lines, there are a lot of other things that can be automated or “modularized” (yup, I just made that up!) to streamline your day to day work.

Creating templates and guidelines

Creating a set of guidelines for the entire site is a good tasks to take on and set in stone. Once you have a mapping of sorts for the Meta Data, URLs, etc. you have a set of guidelines that the engineering team can use going forward. And, I don’t mean that you map a title/description to every URL, but more so to create a list based on sets of variables. For example if I was creating a Title tag for every artist on MySpace, I would do the following:

Template: Music, Albums, Songs, Pictures on MySpace Music
Example: Eminem Music, Albums, Songs, Pictures on MySpace Music

This would help me cover the title tag for thousands of pages across the site. Find out what is important keyword wise for other pages and “templatize” those very similarly. URL wise, it is a very similar process:

Template URL: https://www.myspace.com/artistname
Example: https://www.myspace.com/eminem

Modularized site sections

Creating modules across the site that are easily edited via a CMS without having to involve Product or Engineering teams can make your life a whole lot easier. Changes can take place almost immediately and you can impact things much faster. Some examples of these types of modules are:

• Latest News
• What’s Trending? or What’s Hot?
• Top 10 All Time or Top Artists
• Featured Products
• Featured Photos
• Featured Videos

You can use modules like these to insert internal links throughout your site to important content. Especially when topics are rising in search trends, being able to pass link juice quickly from sections of your site are important to apply that link equity.

Automation tools

For those of you that manage sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs, it’s impossible to do checks on the whole site or sections of the site. To start with, you can use SEOMoz Pro Toolset to find interesting pieces of info about your site. I’ve used it to find pages that have tons of link equity (or PageRank value) to find internal linking opportunities. Also, I’ve run things like crawl tests, to ensure sections of the site are crawlable and won’t run into any crawl issues.

But, doing hand checks to see if title tags, on-page SEO elements, etc. are in tact are always a good idea as well. The Site Audit tool from BrightEdge lets you create requirements and have it crawl the site to perform an automated audit and report on it. Here is an example of what a report might look like:

Creating semantic site links

One of my favorite things to do lately is automating the Link Architecture on a site, which saves you time, rather than having to remind editors to link to celebs, artists, or to sections of the site with the right keywords. Create a tool that has a mapping of keywords to URLs and have it sniff out those keywords on the page and creates links. This will help you automatically increase the number of relevant internal links on the site and removes the “guess work” and human errors that could occur.

Why automating SEO helps with daily tasks

The main point to automating SEO tasks is not to be “black hat” or create a tool to spam results in anyway, that’s not my style. Automation should be used in a way that allows you to remove repetitive tasks from your day to day role and allow you think more strategically about things as a marketer.

I want to know about your thoughts about SEO Automation and how you’ve used it to streamline your workload, leave a comment and keep the conversation going.