SEO Crash Course Part 3-Essential SEO Terminology

anchor text The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

black hat Search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

bot (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

bounce rate The percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.

CMS Content Management System – Programs such as WordPress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.

Conversion - Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.Here are a few common example desired goals

• a product sale
• completing a lead form
• a phone call
• capturing an email
• filling out a survey
• getting a person to pay attention to you
• getting feedback
• having a site visitor share your website with a friend
• having a site visitor link at your site

Deep Link - A link which points to an internal page within a website.When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.Direct Traffic - The number of visitors who directly accessed your site. Direct visits can be the result of bookmarks, browser home page, or manually typing in your domain URL. In other words, these visitors did not click on a search engine result, PPC ad, or link to access your site.

Flash - Vector graphics-based animation software which makes it easier to make websites look rich and interactive in nature.Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content. If you use flash ensure:

• you embed flash files within HTML pages
• you use a noembed element to describe what is in the flash
• you publish your flash content in multiple separate files such that you can embed appropriate flash files in relevant pages

FTP - File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transferring data between computers.Many content management systems (such as blogging platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP.very important tool!!!>>>Google Keyword ToolKeyword research tool provided by Google which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site.See also:

• Google Keyword Tool - tool offering all the above mentioned feature

 

Headings - The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces.Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:<h1>Your Topic</h1>Heading elements may be styled using CSS. Many content management systems place the same content in the main page heading and the page title, although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

Inbound Link - Link pointing to one website from another website.Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.IndexCollection of data used as bank to search through to find a match to a user fed query. The larger search engines have billions of documents in their catalogs.When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.Internal LinkLink from one page on a site to another page on the same site.It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website.

keyword research The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

Keyword Research Tools - Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites.Short list of the most popular keyword research tools:

• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool - free, driven by Overture, this tool cross references all of my favorite keyword research tools. In addition to linking to traditional keyword research tools, it also links to tools such as Google Suggest, Buzz related tools, vertical databases, social bookmarking and tagging sites, and latent semantic indexing related tools.
• Overture - free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point.
• Google - free, powered from Google search data.
• Wordtracker - paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.

Please note that most keyword research tools used alone are going to be highly inaccurate at giving exact quantitative search volumes. The tools are better for qualitative measurements. To test the exact volume for a keyword it may make sense to set up a test Google AdWords campaign.

landing page the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP

link bait A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.

link building actively cultivating incoming links to a site.

Link Building - The process of building high quality linkage data that search engines will evaluate to trust your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy.A few general link building tips:

• build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
• create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
• mix your anchor text
• get deep links
• try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
• register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
• when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
• create link bait
• try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
• It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position

See also:

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 - 101 ways you should and should not build links
• Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing

long tail longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches/

META tags Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.

Meta Tags - People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.

• The page title is highly important.
• The meta description tag is somewhat important.
• The meta keywords tag is not that important.

Meta Description - The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.A good meta description tag should:

• be relevant and unique to the page;
• reinforce the page title; and
• focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.

Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page title.

The code for a meta description tag looks like this

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your meta description here. ” / >

See also:

• Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

Nofollow - Attribute used to prevent a link from passing link authority. Commonly used on sites with user generated content, like in blog comments.The code to use nofollow on a link appears like<a href=”http://wwwseobook.com.com“ rel=”nofollow”>anchor text </a>Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code would look like this<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>Google‘s Matt Cutts also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links, but since Google is the world’s largest link broker, their advice on how other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt. Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding as that may look quite unnatural. Outbound links may also boost your relevancy scores in some search engines.

Organic Search ResultsMost major search engines have results that consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. The unpaid / algorithmic listings are called the organic search results. Organic search results are organized by relevancy, which is largely determined based on linkage data, page content, usage data, and historical domain and trust related data.Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the organic search results.

pagerank (PR) a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. Often confused with Toolbar Pagerank. – Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez

PPC (Pay Per Click) a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Quality Link - Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link:

• Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
• Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
• Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
• Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks for co-citation from expert sources.
• Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
• In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.

While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches.

SEO Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.

 

SEO Copywriting - Writing and formatting copy in a way that will help make the documents appear relevant to a wide array of relevant search queries.There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

See also:

• Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?
• Copyblogger: Magnetic Headlines

 

SERP Search Engine Results Page

social media marketing (SMM) Website or brand promotion through social media

spider (bot, crawler) A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

 

Viral Marketing - Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.Many social news sites and social bookmarking sites also lead to secondary citations.

See also:

• Unleashing the Ideavirus - free Seth Godin ebook about spreading ideas.

 

 

white hat SEO techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.

widget 1) (gadget, gizmo) small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait. 2) a term borrowed from economics which means “any product or commodity.”