The Dirty Frenchman

So once in a while I like to release some free code for people to play around with, so here goes. It could be cleaned up a bit to be more efficient, but it gets the job done.  This is a class I wrote in php to scrape images from Google images. It returns an array with the URL to the thumbnail of the image, the URL to the full-size image, and the ALT text of the image as listed in Google Image search. If you can’t figure out what you can do with this, find a new job. This version will scrape the first page of listings - if you’d like you can modify it to scrape multiple pages… but I need to make this atleast a little fun, right?

-Frenchie

Note: A few people have remarked on using file_get_contents() instead of cURL, as well as a few PHP warnings for undefined constant links. My reasoning behind this: The current version that I have fixes all warnings, and uses cURL. I’m not giving that out for free. What you see here is an old version I had that was written at like 3am one night. I see it in the same light as people releasing security exploits to the public and purposely leaving in code errors: don’t give guns to children, give them super-soakers and leave it up to them to make an M-16 out of it.

Link for downloading:
The Dirty Frenchman’s Google Image Scraper

Putting together an effective SEO campaign is a great way to bring traffic to your site - how else would Bob in Milwaukee find out about your great page on Viagra? Here’s a list of five things that will cause your SEO campaign to suck at life.

1. Not realizing SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

If I had a quarter for every time I had to explain to a client that they’re not going to rank for their first-tier terms after the first week of their campaign…well… I’d be playing a lot of skiball.  Listen, optimizing a site for organic search is not a one time thing. It’s a project that takes care, forethought, and a bit of work if you want to rank for anything other than “best little clown shoe store in Boston”.  Adjustments will have to be made, strategy may change. In short - don’t get discouraged and throw in the towel too early…. actually, do throw in the towel; it’s just more money for me.

2. Choosing the wrong keywords

This sounds too simple to be true, right? Well the majority of people on the interwebz are retards, including many ‘online marketers’. Please don’t be one of those people; I can only handle so many people on ICQ bugging me about how to improve their keyword lists at once. Your site is most likely new - this means that you don’t have too many pages or inbound links. Going for the most competitive keywords in your niche probly isn’t the smartest thing to do. Make sure that your targetted keyword list has plenty of long tail keywords that are less competitive and throw in some of the higher value ones in there. You’ve got to start somewhere.

3. Neglecting (proper) link building

Listen, building links sucks. It’s a menial and tiresome task but it has to be done. By putting your link building on the back burner you’re just setting yourself up for failure.  Any successful SEO campaign will have a good link building strategy that includes content that will attract those links.  And remember, linking to your site from your inter-linked network of 200+ PR1 spam blogs isn’t going to help as much as a few good targeted PR4-PR6 links from authoritative sites in your niche.

4. Your content is crap

Shouldn’t this be a no-brainer? Obviously not. If you can’t write above the level of a third grader then hire someone else to write your content. You can find decent writers on boards like WickedFire or even Digital Point for some pretty cheap rates (1-3 cents per word). So stop being a stingy bastard and get some quality content that will not only show search engines that you’re at least attempting to make something that’s not a piece of crap arbitrage site. Stop whining that you don’t think it’s good for usability - there’s plenty of places to include quality content without sacrificing usability.

5. Looking at rankings through beer goggles

This is somewhere that a lot of people just getting into SEO make mistakes.  So you pulled a few good rankings on Yahoo!.  Did you actually target those terms? Is your ranking for that term going to the best possible page on your site? Are you tracking how much traffic those terms are bringing in and how they’re actually converting. A ranking for any term doesn’t mean anything if it’s not contributing to your bottom line.