If you’ve been doing SEO for a long time like I have, you come up with little time-saving shortcuts that you use often. Here are five of mine; maybe they’ll help you, maybe not. Note: this is an advanced SEO post; it contains many terms that the layperson will not understand.

1. Show ALL data in analytics:

You’re probably aware that Google Analytics maxes out at 5000 rows of data that you can export. Here’s a little trick to get it all at once.

• Once you have your report queued up, change the number of rows to anything – let’s say 5000.
• Then go to the URL and look for this parameter: table.rowCount%3D5000
• Edit it to the max number of rows that GA shows are available – say 11000: table.rowCount%3D11000

Now your report will display all data and you can export all the rows at once.

2. Get a list of all indexed pages in Google (or any search engine):

First, install a plugin called SEOquake. It’s totally outdated and breaks most of the time, but that’s ok, you only need it for one purpose for which it still works perfectly.

• Do your search for site: in Google (or wherever) and set the number of results to 100.
• Now, go to the last page and if the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link is there, click on it.
• Now turn on SEOquake and refresh the page. A box will pop up at the top with the option “show CSV”.
• Click on that, and you’ll have a clean CSV file of all the URLs on the page – the real ones, not the Google masked ones.
• Repeat for each page until you have all your listings, then paste to excel and delimit the columns by the semicolon.

Be sure to turn SEOQuake off when you’re done; because it makes calls to Google for things like PR, you’ll get banned quickly.

3. Check to see if analytics is installed on every page of a site:

This is a super easy one with ScreamingFrog.

• Set up a site crawl for your URL like you normally would
• Under Configuration in Custom, add the analytics code you’re looking for and select “Does Not Contain”.
• Now, to see all pages, you need to make a couple of changes to the default config, so go to Configuration and then “Spider”.
• On the first tab, check “Follow Internal nofollow” and “ignore robots.txt”.
• On the “Advanced” tab, click “Always Follow Redirects” and make sure “Respect NoIndex” and “Respect Canonical” are UNchecked.
• Also make sure under the “URL rewriting” option, “Options” tab, you have “Lowercase discovered URLs” UNchecked.

Now run the crawl and you’ll get a list of all pages that don’t have analytics tracking code on them.

4. Simple concatenate:

Let’s say you wanted to search a lot of sites to see if a particular keyword was in text on that site… maybe you’re doing a link clean up project and you need to see if your client’s domain name appears on a site. You could (theoretically) concatenate a simple list of commands that you could then run in screaming frog to see if there are any results. So hypothetically speaking, you would do this:

• Take the command you need to add and put it into a row in excel. Let’s say the site is hooli.com, and you’re looking for the word “Hooli” on www.cnn.com.
• Put the site you are searching on in A1. You’ll use this command in excel: ="https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A"&A1&"%20hooli"
• If each row in column A has a new value in it, then in theory, you could have a full set of Google commands to put in list mode in Screaming Frog.
• Using the Custom configuration, you could look for any results that had “No results found for” in the code.

Of course this is all theoretical, since scraping Google is a violation of their terms of service, but I’m sure you could find many other uses for this concept. 😉

5. Making PowerPoint searchable:

Ok, this one is totally stolen from Angie Schottmuller, because it’s brilliant. If you are presenting a power point (PPT), and you plan to upload that PPT to slideshare, it can be difficult to get your point across without using too much text. Powerpoints by definition should be visual. So something is lost when you upload it to slideshare. Here’s Angie’s tip:

• Use a text box behind each slide that contains text explaining the slide. It might be your notes on what you’re going to say, or just a few bullet points that explain the slide.
• If you “hide” it behind the image or other text on the slide, it doesn’t clutter up the visual presentation.
• When you upload the PPT to slideshare, they pull all that text off your slides and put it in the presentation transcript.

Voila! Searchable and helpful for users.

I hope these tips help you. If you have more to add, please do so in the comments! As I’ve been known to say, SEO is all about collaboration.