Regex For SEO!

Regex For SEO! Regex is the abbreviation for Regular Expression, it is a sequence of characters defining a search pattern in any string. A string can consist of characters, wildcards, space, numbers among others. Regex will be able to capture the pattern and return the full or part of the string result. Regex searches for patterns and not a specific piece of text. This is the reason why you may find that the results are not connected with one another, but when you notice closely, you will realize that it has connection with the string entered giving you a highly filtered response.

For those who haven’t heard of Regex, it is an in-line programming language for text searches where you can enter complex search text, wildcards, partial matches, case insensitive searches among other advanced commands. With Regex you can search for a pattern instead of a bunch of words. This search method is sophisticated delivering a whole lot of search results at the first click.

Regex is a versatile SEO tool as it can be used across Python, JavaScript, etc. Wildcards are used to achieve a pattern match instead of text. Regex can include wildcard character, match for zero or more characters, match for one or more characters, optional characters, nested sub-expressions in parentheses and OR functions. A complex expression can be created using the above operations and this can throw up specific results.

JavaScript allows ‘flags’ after the Regular Expression pattern to improve the outcome of the search. So, what are these flags:

• Get all the matches instead of one using ‘g’
• For case insensitive results use ‘i’
• To activate multimode use ‘m’
• To activate ‘dotall’ mode use ‘s’
• To activate full Unicode support use ‘u’
• To activate sticky mode use ‘y’

The advantage of using these operators and flags is to get specific results across unsystematic data.

Use of Regex for SEO

It helps to explore queries from various users; queries that are common to a particular content location and queries that bring traffic to a particular landing page on your website.

Regex on Google Analytics

With Regex you can setup a filter to view what you want. This way the unwanted results are excluded and only inclusive results are fetched. Regex can filter specific IP addresses on your LAN.

Though, Regex is not foolproof, for instance an inaccurate expression can filter the most wanted data or include unwanted data by added unrestricted wildcard match. Thankfully, this is not the end of the road, since Regex is applied only in the reporting stage, you can edit or remove it to revert back to the original data. Moreover, there are testing tools to check for the required outcome, where you can sandbox the expression before it runs across the entire set of data.

Regex and SEO

Data analysts have found that filtering parts of data can improve SEO. It could be filtering a part of your website or a particular page or traffic from a medium or your very own LAN, all this can help achieve results for your search, avoiding data duplication. To achieve specific results you can use ‘include or exclude’ filters or code long expressions like a programming code.

Regex can help improve business ROI by maximizing SEO efforts filtering unwanted results to provide accurate and appropriate outcomes.