The Importance of Required Home Page Keywords

Everyone wants their results as fast possible. Luckily, there are a few techniques to really speed up udu’s processing. This article will focus on using Required home page keywords.

Required home page keywords are terms and phrases that must be present on a company’s home page in order for udu to consider the company to be a potential good match. For instance, if we are interested in finding software companies that focus on machine learning and natural language processing, we might use a search term of “machine learning software”. For the simple fact that we have the word “software” in our search term, we are going to get plenty of results that are just software companies and don’t really do anything with machine learning.

So, as a human, we could go look at the websites for those companies and typically determine pretty quickly if they are in the field we are interested in by looking for a few keywords. Do they mention: machine learning, artificial intelligence or AI, natural language processing or neural networks. With Required home page keywords, we can tell udu to do the same thing. By providing a list of all the relevant terms and phrases, we can save processing time by not wasting time analyzing companies that don’t mention any of the important terms on their home page. We aren’t really going to miss any companies this way because in all honesty, if they don’t mention it on their home page, more than likely they aren’t in the field at all, or if they are in the field, it’s not a big focus for them so they wouldn’t really be a target company.

Example

The following example was run to illustrate the difference in using vs not using Required home page keywords. The parameters are as follows:

Search term	machine learning software
Pages to analyze	10
Social search search term	✔
Default website exclusions	✔
Geography	MSA: San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA

The following table shows the side-by-side comparison of with and without Required home page keywords.

	With	Without
Time	3.25 hrs	4.75 hrs
Total results	430	856

The home page keywords used are: machine learning, artificial intelligence, /\bai\b/(regex to detect AI), natural language processing, and neural network.

Conclusions

It is apparent that using Required home page keywords does two things: significantly speeds up the run time and decreases the amount of noisy results that need to be filtered. The example saved 1.5 hours for a large MSA. Extrapolating that out to the entire US would result in saving around 4 days worth of processing time. This number is a bit exaggerated since not everywhere in the US has the high concentration of software companies as silicon valley, but the time savings will still be significant.

Required home page keywords do have to be used with caution to make sure that you don’t exclude anything that you would actually care about. It’s important to provide a thorough list of all keywords that could trigger a good match. For instance, in the example, we did not use NLP which is a very common abbreviation for natural language processing. So if a company only referred to their software as NLP and never mentioned any of the other keywords on their home page, that company would be excluded. You can always have a look at the companies that were filtered out of the results based on required home page keywords by going to View results and clicking Filtered companies.