Tutorial: initiation and discover of R programming
R is a programming language mostly used by the scientific and academic community. However, for some years, its use is more and more developed for SEO.
The main use of R programming is data set processing, statistics processing, data visualization and analysis.
Its main asset is the ability to process large amount of data.
So, the processing of a large table of hundreds of thousands of lines can be done easily with a simple personal computer. Moreover, R is available for free, under GPL license, that improve its popularity for scientist community.
Tutorial: R basics
As many programming languages, R is based on an algorithmic structure, with variables, functions, conditions… nothing surprising. Here are some examples explained on this tutorial:
- Logical and arithmetic operators in R
- Conditions in R: if/else
- Loops in R: for, while…
- Write a function in R
To go further, R has a lot of libraries with functions dedicated to specific uses. If some are dedicated to data processing (DPLYR for data frame processing in R or StringR for character string processing), other are dedicated for more varied uses.
For example, you can explore Spotify or Twitter API thanks to spotifyr or twittR, process geographic data with dismo or create your own webapps with Shiny.
Use R for SEO
Once you'll overcome the R basics, feel free to deploy your own scripts for your SEO projects. Lots of libraries exists to use R for SEO. googleAuthR for example allow you to connect your scripts to Google API. Feel free to develop your own scripts.
Thanks to its computing capabilities for large amount of data, an internal pagerank processing become possible with some instructions, like the visualization of your internal linking.
