Regular expressions from the jump appear to be difficult and complex. Although, learning the basics is a lot simpler than you may think. Knowing the basics will enhance your audits, analyses, and tasks so you can provide better data-driven recommendations.

Learning the ins and outs of being a web developer are valuable for any digital marketer due to the overlap of concepts and environment. But expanding on those skills aren’t the easiest and quickest thing to do. A skill that digital marketers and SEOs in particular can benefit from that web developers and programmers use are regular expressions.

Regular expressions will take your analysis to the next level because they are usable in tools like Google Analytics and Screaming Frog. They will also be usable in Google Search Console once they roll out the regular expression filter for their performance reports.

Today we’ll cover the basics of regex to get you up to speed and even walk through a few use case examples that will take your analyses to the next level.

What Is Regex (Regular Expressions)?

A regular expression is a string of characters that are used for matching or managing text.

Regex Basics

Characters

Escaping Special Characters

\

The backslash in regex escapes special characters. Escaping characters is important because the metacharacters used denote character classes, so if you are searching for one of them, you’ll need to escape it. Metacharacters that need to be escaped include:

.[{()\^$*+

Matching Any Character

.

The period is a wildcard character for matching any character except for the newline character.

Matching Digits (0-9)

\d

Matches one digit from 0 to 9.

Matching Non-Digits

\D

Matches one character that is NOT a digit.

Matching Word Characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _)

\w

Matches one word character or underscore.

Matching Non-Word Characters

\W

Matches one character that is NOT a word character or underscore.

Matching Whitespace (newline, space, tab)

\s

Matches a whitespace character: space, tab, newline, carriage return, and vertical tab.

Matching Non-Whitespace

\S

Matches one character that is NOT a whitespace character.

Anchors

Word Boundary

\b

A word boundary is a position that has a word character on one side and no character on the other.

Non-Word Boundary

\B

Matches all positions where a word boundary does NOT match.

Start of a String

^

Specifies that the following pattern must begin at the first positioned character of the string.

End of a String

$

Specifies that the preceding pattern must match the end character of the string.

Character Sets and Logic

Matching Characters within Brackets

[]

The straight brackets match one of the characters within.

Matching Characters NOT within Brackets

[^ ]

The carat in the brackets match one of the characters NOT within.

Either Or

|

The vertical bar or pipe symbol is a logical character for “OR”.

Group

()

The parenthesis create a group.

Quantifiers

Zero or More (0+)

*

The asterisk looks for the specified character/group zero or more times.

One or More (1+)

+

The plus symbol looks for the specified character/group one or more times.

Zero or One (0 | 1)

?

The plus symbol looks for the specified character/group zero or one time.

Exact Number

{}

The curly brackets look for the specified character/group in the number of times specified.

Range of Numbers (Min, Max)

{,}

The comma within the curly brackets look for the specified character/group in a range of numbers specified.

Printable Regex Cheat Sheet

To help you quickly remember each of the basic regular expressions above, we’ve created a free printable regex cheat sheet:

Download Regex Cheat Sheet

SEO Use Cases for Regular Expressions

Using regex can be daunting and knowing where to start can seem muddled when you’re starting off. To help you find ways to use regex in your day to day, we’ve lined out some of the most popular and practical uses cases.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a powerful SEO tool that allows you to crawl websites. Data like URLs, site structure, file types, scripts, and everything that compiles a site can be collected then analyzed. Sometimes there is specific data you want extracted or certain pages you want to pay attention to during your crawl. This is where custom extraction and the include/exclude features come in.

Custom Extraction

The custom extraction function in Screaming Frog is primarily used for data extraction. You have the option to select regex as a method for scraping data.

An example of using this feature with regex is to extract the dates of your articles. Sometimes your date isn’t shown on the page and can’t be extracted using a CSS class. In a CMS like WordPress, the date of publishing is usually set with the DateTime object, so we can reference that when extracting dates.

In Screaming Frog, navigate to “Configuration” > “Custom” > “Extraction”, then add a new extractor method and set it to “Regex”. From there, you would enter the following regular expression:

datetime="(\d{4}\-\d{2}\-\d{2})

What this regular expression is looking for is the DateTime object, and the date in iso format within it. Notice how the group (wrapped in parenthesis), starts by looking for four digits followed by a hyphen, then another two digits, another hyphen, and the last two digits. Screaming Frog pulls the group as the custom extraction, leaving you with a clean URL that you can reformat when you export and open in a spreadsheet software.

Include/Exclude

Depending on the site you are crawling, using Screaming Frog can take a long time or may need more computer processing resources than you currently have. Fortunately, they have the include/exclude feature to limit and specify your crawl. You can choose which subdomains or subdirectories to include or exclude from your crawl.

An example for using regular expressions in this feature would be to selectively crawl the blog and category pages of a site. You have the ability to set different URL matching regular expressions in different lines, but we’ll utilize logic in place of that today.

For this site, let’s say we are looking to pay attention to just the /category/ pages and /learn/ pages so we can audit our knowledge center. The regular expression would look like:

If you were to set it up on different lines (without the logic) it would look like this:

The period following the URL is trying to match any character, and the asterisk quantifies the matching of any character zero or more times. The pipe or vertical line in between “learn” and “category” looks for any subfolder that matches one OR the other.

Google Analytics

As a powerful tool to show you various metrics and valuable information, using regular expressions with Google Analytics is a must.

Table Filters

You can use regular expressions to set table filters to view the data you want to focus on.

An example for using table filters is when looking at the source of traffic. Maybe you want to include or exclude certain sources when looking at how your traffic was acquired.

google|bing

The regex above looks for any sources in Google Analytics that are from Google OR Bing.

Custom Segments

Custom segments are a great way to look at different sets of your data. Regular expressions are usable within the conditions that you can set and are a quicker way to do so. A common regular expression, similar to the table filters above will be using the pipe or vertical line.

An example of using regex for a custom segment would be to match specific countries to see how many users, sessions, or any other GA metric came from those specified countries.

Australia|Canada|United States

The regular expression above is matching any sessions that came from Australia, Canada, or the United States.

Goals

We have the ability to leverage regular expressions when setting up goals in Google Analytics. You would specify this under the “Goal Details” and select “Regular expression”.

For this example, we’ll setup a goal to track the total amount of website actions. Let’s say we have a site that has options for users to download, donate, and purchase items. The URLs for this would be as follows:

• example.com/thank-you-download.html
• example.com/thank-you-purchase.html
• example.com/thank-you-donate.html

To set the goal to track each of these, we would enter the following regular expression under “Goal details”:

/thank-you-(download|purchase|donate)\.html

The regex above is looking to match any visit to the URL with “thank-you-“. Then followed by matching “download” OR “purchase” OR “donate”, with “.html” at the end.

Google Search Console

It would be great if we could use regular expressions in Google Search Console since we could better strip branded queries from our analysis. Luckily, regular expressions in Google Search Console is coming soon! We’ll update this with examples when it rolls out.

Technical SEO Tasks

Regular expressions are also a great way to accomplish a number of technical SEO tasks. Some tasks that you can accomplish with regex are:

• Optimize Long URLs
• Correct Redirects
• Resolve Canonical URL Issues

You would need to have existing knowledge of the Apache mod_rewrite module and .htaccess files. For the sake of this guide, we’ll skip over those details as they are rather complex. Stay tuned for another post on this!

Regex Resources

To help you further your knowledge on regular expressions, we’ve put together the following regex resources.

Regular-Expressions.info

Learn more about regular expressions with this online resource focused on regex.

Regular Expressions 101

Test and debug your regular expressions with this tool.

Key Takeaways

Regular expressions are a surefire way to take your SEO skills to the next level. Even the basics are worthwhile to remember as they’ll be useful in your day to day.

• Regex is used for matching and managing text.
• There are characters, anchors, character sets, logic, and quantifiers in regex.
• Tools like Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, and one day Google Search console can be used with regular expressions.

The post Regular Expressions (Regex) for SEO appeared first on Jon Eric Dela Cruz.

Understanding the different parts of the anatomy of a URL is an important part of digital marketing and technical SEO. Learn about the basics of HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTP/2 and how they can help to enhance your online search presence below.

The World Wide Web and most of its resources are accessed via HTTP or HTTPS, something you are aware of that shows up in the beginning of any URL. Just as our world is advancing in technology, so is the internet and the protocols that come with it. HTTP was a standard across the web, now transitioning into HTTPS for its security. The revisions of the protocols from HTTP 0.9 up into HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 upcoming are an important part of the ongoing improvements as well. In this guide we will cover the basics of HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, and their relation to SEO.

What is HTTP?

HTTP is an acronym for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is a protocol or system of rules for transferring files across the World Wide Web (www) between web clients and web servers. Web clients, the most common being a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc), send HTTP requests for files (webpages like www.example.com/blog-post/) from a web server. A web server (or internet server) is a computer where web content is stored, that responds to requests from web clients then sends web content and services.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. This is the secure version of HTTP, encrypting communications between web clients and web servers through either Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS). Both of these encryption protocols utilize public keys and private keys. Private keys are stored on the web server and public keys, as the name suggests, are available to everyone publicly. Web clients and web servers perform an SSL handshake when HTTPS sessions are initiated, to exchange information and establish a secure connection.

HTTPS was commonly used for websites that transmit sensitive data like ecommerce websites, banking websites, etc; but is now becoming the norm for any website.

Benefits of HTTPS in Regards to SEO

Security is an important aspect of digital marketing and plays a key role in SEO. Google has even stated that HTTPS is a ranking signal, to help keep everyone surfing the web, safe. Outside of the official announcement on their webmaster blog, Google Chrome makes it apparent when a site being visited is not secured with HTTPS. For users that don’t see the secure padlock icon, they may be wary of entering their personal information, and rightfully so.

With the ranking benefit that comes alongside HTTPS sites, it is apparent that changing from HTTP to HTTPS is the right choice. Keep in mind that the ranking benefit is low impact, compared to quality content and backlinks.

How to Setup HTTPS for Your Website

Setting up HTTPS is simple nowadays, and won’t even cost you a dime if you opt in for a service like Let’s Encrypt. To install Let’s Encrypt with cPanel, follow these steps:

1. Access your cPanel dashboard.
2. Under “Security”, locate the “Let’s Encrypt SSL” icon.
3. Select your domain you would like to install HTTPS on and press “Issue”.
4. The SSL certificate should install and if there is an error, it will inform you.

If you run into any issues on the above, or don’t see the option to install an SSL via Let’s Encrypt, speak with your hosting provider.

Please note that upgrading to HTTPS should be planned based on the amount of content your website has. If you are ranking well in a few areas, mapping out your content and making sure you have the right redirects in place will ensure a smooth migration. Additionally, you should run a find/replace sitewide afterwards to remove any internal link instances of HTTP to HTTPS and cut down on the total amount of redirects.

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is the second major version of the application protocol. It was made to speed up the transferring of files between web servers and web clients. Prior to HTTP/2, HTTP 1.1 had to send files down a single line, one at a time, closing and opening. HTTP/2 drastically sped this up by keeping the line open and allowing the transfer of multiple files at one time.

Benefits of HTTP/2 in Regards to SEO

Another important ranking factor announced by Google in respect to the mobile-first world we live in is page speed. Page speed as a ranking factor is a priority because of the slower connections associated with mobile devices. Also, websites are growing in size because of the addition of multiple assets like images, JavaScript, CSS, and more.

How to Implement HTTP/2 for Your Website

Luckily, most big name hosting providers will have HTTP/2 enabled on their servers. To test if your server is using it, check out this HTTP/2 testing tool. If you don’t have it enabled, ask your hosting provider of your options. Also, it is required you have an HTTPS connection.

Key Takeaways

HyperText Transfer Protocol and its many variations or revisions are an important part of the modern web. Implement the most stable and latest version of any technology and you are sure to be closer to the top, especially with SEO.

• HTTP is the protocol used for transferring files across the web.
• HTTPS is the secure protocol, encrypting information that is transferred.
• HTTPS is recommended by Google for positive SEO and is a minor ranking factor.
• HTTP/2 is the latest major revision of HTTP and allows for multiple files sent down a single line.
• HTTP/2 improves page speed, and in return, helps SEO.

The post HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTP/2 – The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Jon Eric Dela Cruz.