If your new to the search engine optimisation industry, then you may be reading up on how to advertise your website, but wondering what most of the jargon that is written actually mean. Below we have turned that jargon into plain English for you to understand.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a strategic implementation of script, and code, and other onpage manipulation that is made to a website to ensure that a search engine ranks it highly in their index.
Search Terms are keywords that you would use in a search engine to search for a product, service or website.
Link Popularity refers to the amount of links that are pointing to a website from other pages on the internet.
Sitemap is a page on your website that is linked to every page of that website. This is done for two reasons. First of all so the end user is able to find what they may be looking for on that website. The other reason is so that the search engines are able to easily navigate around the site.
Spiders are snippets of softare that are sent out by Google to find new information on websites including updates. They then take this information back to Googles datacentres where the site is then ranked in the listings accordingly with their updates/
PPC is short for Pay Per Click. You would use pay per click if you wanted to advertise in the sponsored results part of a major search engine.
Keep checking back for further SEO Jargon Explained posts.
In a day of such competition on the internet, it hardly seems fair that your site is marked with a “sandbox” label as soon as it is registered by Google, and it may take up to 12 months for your domain to show up on the search engines for any reasonable key terms at all.
The Google sandbox effect is a factor that Google has added into their algorhythms to stop webmasters starting up a new site, and spamming th internet for high quality links to ensure it ranks highly very quickly. If this was allowed, then the competition would be alot harder than it is today, so, although I have had to site in the sandbox at one point, I am glad it is in effect.
It is said to usually take 3 – 12 months for your website to come out of the sandbox into the clear listings. Then you may commence your SEO on the site for your relevant keywords. Some believe the sandbox effect is just a myth, other believe that it is fact! My thoughts on the Google sandbox effect? Well I have many sites, and they were all bought from new, apart from one (I picked that up 3 years ago, and it was 7 years old then, so highly trusted in the search engines), not of my sites seem to have been held back for a long time, the longest it has takem me to get any of the sites that I own highly ranked for a competative key term is about 3 months, which is the usual no matter how old your site is.
If you registar a new site, the best thing to do, is not to submit it to Google, but to build a few old, and powerful links to the site, not too many, but around 20 per month for the first 2 months, then start to double the amount of links you build every 3 months. Once you gain top positions in the search engines for your desired key terms, then just maintain your link building stratergy as an ongoing process, dont ever stop building links or your competition will overtake you.
If you are looking for a new website or domain name, and you want to have the site promoted in Google quickly, then speak to an SEO company who can help you find the best way to get it up without spamming, or getting penalised. I may be biased, but I think SEO Positive Ltd are the best at SEO. Then again we are a TOP 10 SEO Company, so I can afford to be a little biased towards our own services.
The term “black hat” means an unethical approach to search engine optimisation. Now that Google is getting more intelligent, and being able to find out “black hat” techniques and disqualify any site using them, there are less SEO companies now using the techniques. However that said, there are still many site owners selling links on their site as hidden links as a form of advertising without their site looking like an advertising billboard.
The main reasons anyone will use hidden text on their site would be firstly to hide any links that they have pointing to other sites that are either non related, or they do not want their visitors to follow the link as it would mean them leaving the site that they were originally visiting.
Another reason, and probably the most popular reason anyone would use hidden links would be to stuff keywords into their website for relevant content purposes. Although having relevant content is a key factor to ranking highly on the search engines, stuffing your website with keywords will not help your rankings, especially if your using hidden text so that your visitors will not see the keywords.
A word of warning if you do use hidden text, Google will find it, and you will be penalised. Black hat techniques are being used less, and less in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) for a reason, don’t get your site penalised.
Are you promoting your website by using Googles Adwords (pay per click) system? If so you might be finding it expensive, and even worse, not getting any business from it either. My personal advice is use search engine optimisation (SEO) it is far more cost effective in the long run. However if you do want to carry on using Google Adwords, then take some advice, make note of these tips, or save them in your favourites, they may save you alot of money.
1. Invest time in researching keywords propoerly.
2. Set up the conversion tracking at the start.
3. Use Adwords Editor, it will make things so much easier for you.
4. Ensure you have a landing page that is going to convert your visitors to business.
5. Create many seperate campaigns if advertising on the content network.
If you have a limited budget and want to advertise your websites products and/or services using PPC, then ensure that you take your time in setting up the campaign and make your money last you. I have seen too many people who put a few hundred pounds in to pay per click marketing and they never get anything out of it, just because they haven’t done the research before setting up their campaign.
Yes, content is a more important factor than design, Period!
Yes I agree it is nice to have a website which looks good, and looks like a magasine on the shelf of a newsagents, however content is what gets you business. Hows that? Let me tell you.
Search engine optimisation is a process that is performed to enable your site to be seen on the first page of the search engines. Google will read your site, and updates its data centres with your content, but it wont do the same for your images on the site, soo although your site may look good, the search engines dont see it that way, they just see a blank page with not much text at all, so why should they rank it highly for any keyphrases? Well they shouldnt, and they dont.
However, if you have a website that you have built for content, Google and the other major search engines will be able to see a page that has lots of relevant text for your search phrases, and if it sees that your website is suitable, it will index your site, and rank you higher than any site with fewer text and more images.
Obviously you have to satify the search engines other requirements to rank highly in the search engines, for example, have you done any link building to your website? How old is the domain? Is the onpage optimisation completed correctly? How many code errors do you have on the site? The best way to ensure that all the right factors are met is to employ an SEO Company to help you get it right first time, and optimise your site for the major search engines. Remember, if you ever change the look of your site, or start up a new site, “content is king” and the website design comes next!
Over the last few years more and more people are looking to SEO their sites to ensure that they are on the first page of the major search engines for their keyphrases so that they are able to draw in more business from their website. It can be very hard for most people to make their website show ahead of the competition, even with an SEO company helping them out.
More and more people are adding blogs to their site to help them with search engine optimisation. But how will a blog help you with your search engine optimisation? One of the factors that the major search engines look for when deciding where to rank it in their listings is content, the other is links. A blog that is integrated into your site can help with both of these points.
Adding Content
When writing a blog post on your website, you need to ensure that you keep the content relevant to your websites them, and most importantly keeping it as informative and useful for your visitors as you can, to ensure that your visitors come back for more. Google will look for relevant content that is fresh and up to date when crawling your site. If you are adding content to your blog on a regular basis, then this will tell the search engines that your site is being updated reguarly and is offering relevant information to its visitors, this will in turn help the rankings over a period of time.
How Often Will I Have To Post?
The simple answer for this is, how competative is your industry or the keywords that you are targeting? The more competative your industry is the more you need to post. For example, if you were targeting “mens black shoes” there is not much competition for that key phrase, so you will be able to rank highly with only one or two posts per week. However we are in a competative industry, so we will need to make an average of one to two posts per day to keep our content fresh, and encourage the “bot crawlers” to visit our site more often.
Adding Links
How can blogging help you build links to your website? First of all if your blog is intersting, and helpful to people, then you will naturally gain links to your blog or even other pages on your website from other website owners who think that their visitors will find what you have to offer interesting. Another way that you would gain links from having a blog on your website is by linking each post that you write to a page on your website that the post is relevant to for example this post is related to an SEO Blog, and SEO so there are links to them pages from this post. This will increase your internal links which is also a factor of search engine optimisation.
When speaking to potential clients, many people seem to think that search engine optimisation is all about magic, or a unique on-page sequence that can be changed to ensure that their site features on the first page of Google within a matter of hours or days. I wish it was that easy, and if it were I would be out of a job. Search engine optimisation is an ongoing tiresome process that needs much time, care, attention and knowledge. Its not easy, but its not magic either. Its getting the right mix of many different factors onpage and offpage that makes a site rank on the first page of the search engines. But it does take time.
Once we have gone through the process of adding new unique content, changing the header tags, and the meta description, we then need to clean up the coding and remove the unnecessary script etc… Then we need to upload the site back to the search engines for the new pages to be indexed and updated.
The ongoing process is building links to the site, but not just any old links, we dont just go and find links from any old site and get them to point the the site that we are optimising. The websites that we gain links from are chosen carfully, and need to be relevant to the subject of our customer. Furthermore we then need to ensure that the selected site will pass strength through for the selected keyterms that have been chosen. Once a site is chosen, we then need to place the link with the keyword as the Anchor Text (anchor text is the word that is in the link (your keyword). This process will need to be repeated hundreds if not thousands of times to ensure that you gain a page 1 position on the search engines.
Although link building is a major factor in search engine optimisation, you won’t hit the top pages of the search engines without correct implementation of onpage work too. Get the right mix, and you should see yourself ahead of your competition.
I thought I would write this post as I spoke to someone today who told me that Meta data is no longer used by the search engine to help rank your website. Well I say this “Why do all the sites on page one of Google have optimised meta details?”
The truth is I think and about 95% of other SEO‘s believe that meta details are still a major factor when talking about search engine optimisation. Let just make it clear at this point, by meta details I am talking about the following on-page factors:
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Tags
Now I may be wrong, (although not often) but I though the Page Title was one of the major factors to take into consideration when performing on-page optimisation. The reason for this? Well when searching on a major search engine like Google for “Post it Notes” what always shows up on the Page Title for every site that is on the first page of Google? “Post it Notes”. Surely this example is enough to put a stop to this argument right away.
Then again, also look at the meta description, 99/100 times the meta description in the well written and optimised description that is put on the site when optimising it.
This tells me that the Meta details are still a major factor to take into account when optimising a website for the first page of the major search engines. Granted, not the only factor, search engine optimisation is a complete process and needs all the ingredients to be worked on for best results.
There are hundreds of SEO tools that can be found on the web that will help any webmaster maintain, troubleshoot, and optimise his website. One of these tools is called “Spider Simulator Tool” which will allow you to see what the search engine spiders will see when collectiong data from your website.
With this tool you will be able to see the content of your website without all the fancy design work that is in the way of the real crux of the build. The parts that you will be able to see with this tool will be vital to the optimisation of your website. This features are as follows:
Page Title: This is a very important part of optimisation, and should have your keywords within it.
Description: This is what shows up on the search engines when performing a search, and gives a breif outline to the content of your site. Again you should try to add some keywords within this part, but be careful not to stuff it with your keywords as you could get penalised by Google.
Keywords: This is the list of keywords that you wish to target. Some say it is not important to list them here anymore, but I say “it doesn’t hurt”.
Body Text: This is the main content of your site. Google will be looking at the keyword density of the page text to help them determin how relevant your page is for its selected keywords. You can use the Keyword Density Tool for more information on Keyword Density.
By using this tool, and some of the other tools that we have available you should be able to see what needs to be done on-page, and off-page to make your search engine optimisation campaign a success.
Internal Links are links from one page on your website to another page on your website, so they are links from within your website to another page on your site. Internal links play a very important part in any search engine optimisation campaign. This is because Google and the other search engines will treat every page as a single page that is seperate to the rest of the site. This is a very important factor to take into consideration when you are first building your website. If your site is already built then the process of changing internal links does become a little more complicated, however can still be easily changed by an experienced SEO company.
This will also tie in with the amount of pages your site has (including blog pages / posts). The more pages that you have on your website that link to other pages on your website will help you in search engine optimisation in two ways:
First of all you are adding content to your site, thus updating your site all the time for search engine spiders to index, update, and refresh through Googles datacenters.
Secondly, and most importantly, even though a page on your site is receiving links from other pages of your site, they are still links from a seperate page, this will help build your link popularity of the pages that the links are pointing to, and with a good external link building campaign will help increase link popularity, and positions in the search engines.
An important thing to remember is the anchor text of you internal links. You need to ensure that you use your keywords as the link text, but be sure that the text of the link is still relevant to the page that the link is comming from, otherwise it will be a wasted effort.
Dont forget that ultimatly your website is meant to be build for humans rather than the search engines, so please remember that when you are building links not to over optimise your website, and just as important, dont compromise your website design when building internal links, you dont want every few words to be a link off to another page. Try to keep one link to every hundred words at the very most.
