Search engine optimization: Ten SEO terms you need to know!

Hello 2.0′ers,

I’ve been recently getting some requests to blog a little more SEO-based articles – and because I’m such a nice guy (wink, wink) I’ll happily oblige! We’ve looked at SEO techniques to help you get the most out of your own blog, as well as trends in the SEO pipeline and even Wordpress plugins to help you achieve higher PageRank and search rankings in Google – but we haven’t got down to the nitty gritty of what makes up SEO and key concepts within SEO.

In this article, we will divulge some well-hidden terms used in Search engine optimization (or optimisation, for our Aussie readers ) – including examples, where appropriate. So let’s get going with the term itself!

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short is the practice of making a website or blog, and more importantly, its content – highly relevant and fresh for search engines, and searchers alike – who could become readers, subscribers or even customers as an outcome of the optimization. This form of online marketing, also referred to as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, revolves around the concept of increasing your web presence’s potential to connect to your target audience – by increasing your web site’s findability.

The importance of Search engine optimization (optimisation) is that by increasing your ranking on a search engine result page (SERP), also known as visibility, you can drive a lot more targeted traffic to your web site.

Just as Google’s AdSense become so popular in online advertising for its ability to present relevant, contextual advertising to a user-base; getting SEO right means that people searching for something they particularly want to find; an Introduction to Web 2.0, for example, can be directed to your website if you have chosen that phrase, or those words as something you want to optimize your website for; which, as you can see by clicking on the link, we have.

Another great benefit of Search optimization is that you can not only target particular keywords and benefit from keyword analysis, but it also means you can target particular regions, such as ‘Australian visitors only’ or people searching from a particular market.

Finally, SEO isn’t just about keyword research! It’s a growing, and more importantly changing form of online marketing. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo! are continuously and meticulously changing their search algorithms in the hope of providing a more accurate search result; which in tern means that keyword research is no longer enough to get it right. You need to also focus on backlinking strategies, killer content that people want to read, and more importantly, a solid, consistent writing strategy.

2. Backlink

A backlink, which is sometimes a little self-explanatory, is a link from another site linking to your own site. Also known as an inbound or incoming link; backlinks are one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website or blog. The number of backlinks your site has accumelated over the course of its existance, is a very important measure of the popularity of the website.

Reading through the PageRank patent, it is evident that Google, as well as other big search engines, use backlinks as a form of determining placement (among other things, of course) on a search engine results page, or SERP.

Every time someone links your website, Google, as an example, records that link in a database table in your record. The more backlinks you have, Google assumes, the more current, contextual, and more importantly; relevent your information must be – and believe me, they have perfected their craft so much so that they are smart enough to know when you are trying to spam them into it!

Obviously, the more backlinks you can get from prominent, already-popular websites (who have become popular themselves through backlinks, PageRank, and other methods) such as Yahoo!, or an educational facility (which Google loves, by the way!) – the better it is – not only for your PageRank, but for the viability of your website – so get linking!

3. White hat Search engine optimization

One of my favourite SEO terms, White hat, is not normally a popular, or often-used term. In a nutshell, White hat SEO revolves around ‘ethical’ means which a company, or a search engine optimizer use to perform search engine optimisation.

These tried, and long-used techniques such as setting up a robots.txt, making use of a sitemap, getting your pages indexed and keyword analysis, etc, may take longer to reap rewards (as apposed to Black hat techniques, described below – but most SEO experts believe their rewards last longer.

4. Black hat Search engine optimization

The opposite of White hate SEO, Black hat search engine optimization labeling classifies ‘unethical’ or unorthodox techniques such as spamming or spamdexing (also described below) to aid in the optimization of content and boost search engine rankings. Although Black hat optimizers ultimately know their websites have a very high change of getting banned from search engines such as Google – or falling into the dreaded sand trap of supplemental results – most of them have considered this somewhat in their SEO strategy.

Altough it’s hard to distinguish whether Black hat SEO techniques is ‘bad’ or White hat techniques are more ‘ethical’, one thing remains for sure: both techniques have thier pros and cons, and many SE optimizers are happy to be labelled either – as long as the people and company’s which they represent are succeeding in thier online marketing endeavours.

Definitely some gray area there

5. Spamdexing

Have you ever come across a page on the World wide web that just seems to be either; a) hiding a hundred words/terms down the bottom of the page by having the words the same colour as the background, (so that they are hidden to you – their loyal viewer?), or b) just seem to make no sense because every third word is a catch-phrase they are trying to ‘optimize’ for – such as the ever popular “Viagra is good for you because Viagra is blah blah and Viagra is also ladi dah di da…” ?

Not only is this a good example of Black hat SEO techniques, but this a key example of what the web and search marketing industry’s refer to as spamdexing.

In short, spamdexing is spamming search engines to affect search engine rankings and placement. A very popular method of spamdexing is to build a website in way where it is designed to rank well for a particular keyword when that keyword has nothing to do with the sites content.

Blog comment spam is another prominent type of spamdexing. At the time of writing this blog post, akismet (Wordpress’ default anti-spam plugin) has blocked a substantial 136 spam comments from landing on the blog pages of Cheb 2.0. More information on spamdexing can be found in its Wikipedia entry.

5. Key phrase

In short, a key phrase is a search phrase, generally made up of two-or-more words, such as ‘Web 2.0 Web Design’ which a user would type into a search engine in order to find information. Key phrases are important to search optimizers are thier job is to optimize for those key phrases which thier client wishes to be found for.

6. META tags

META tags are important in SEO because nearly all search engines use them in a search results page. It is important to make sure at least teo meta tags, description and keywords are used. Making sure a title is always present for every page is also equally important. In the example below, the purple text, ‘Web design, Web 2.0, Technology…’ is the title of the page, whilst ‘Australian web designer Cheb D’s blog…’ is the meta description of the page. I have included the HTML source of the page so you can see how this was achieved.

Search engine result listing

Relevant HTML source of the index page at www.cheb.com.au

<title>Web design, Web 2.0, Technology, Gadgets, CSS/XHTML | Cheb 2.0 Web Design blog</title>
<meta name="description" content="Australian web designer Cheb D's blog. Topics range from Web Design, Web 2.0 and Social Media, Technology as well as SEO/SEM, gadgets and more." />

7. Indexability

Indexability, also referred to as spiderability is the term used to denote whether a website can be indexed, or found by a search engine spider. Not being able to be spidered can, and most of the time does affect search engine listing placement in some shape or another. There are many ways a website can fall victim to problems with not being able to be crawled by a search bot (another word for search spider). These can include whether .htaccess does not allow the bot to access a certain section of your website, or whether you or whoever built the website has purposefully not allowed a particular section to be crawled (by means of the all-important robots.txt file.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics online tool provided by none other than Google! It is a feature-packed solution detailing critical shortcomings, and successes on any website it tracks. It not only shows you what people searched for to get to your site, but also which browser they were using as well as where, geographically, they came from. Of course, it is much more extensive than that, allowing you to set ‘goals’ to track how many people sign up to a particular form, etc.

Users of the tool can add up-to fifty websites, as well as have thier statistics update within hours – and of course, the integration with Google Adwords is a worthy mention too!

9. Link rot

Link rot measures the percentage of a websites broken links. There are many reasons why link rot could occur – but the most common reasons include a website going offline (either hardware failure, or page taken offline completely), linking to content which is no longer there (or you need a certain level of access to get to it), changing a website’s content management system (for example, some CMS’s use human ir friendly-URL’s such as ‘/about-me/’ whilst others use general linking like ‘pageid=3′).

Most of the time however, link rot happens due to moving a page’s location. Sometimes, we tend to forget that we move documents around on our servers, and links not pointing to where they are supposed to go not only leads to a negative user experience, but can easily lower our rankings in search engines (because that particular content cannot be found).

Ideally, if for whatever reason you have to move content around on your server (which if by any chance was accessible somehow to anyone browsing your website) or not, for that matter – you should have a permanent 301 redirect, which is arguably the most search-engine friendly and trusted form of re-direction online.

Setting up a 301 redirect does not effect your ranking for that page and is above all, very easy to achieve.

PHP 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

<?
header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-url-goes-here.com" );
?>

ASP 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url-goes-here.com"
%>

Ruby on rails 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url-goes-here.com"
end

10. Organic search results

Google, as well as Yahoo! and other search engines have results which consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. In essence, those listings which are not paid for, and are algorithmically calculated, through PageRank and other means, are called the organic search results.

Generally speaking, relevency scoring is the means by which the organic search results are organised – but as mentioned previously, there are a lot more calculations involved with a page’s ranking; including, but not limited to: age of the domain, page content, backlinks, backlink quality as well as PageRank (Google, for example).

Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results – and not only is that the better alternative, considering it is free, but it means that you have taken the time to make sure you got your search engine optimisation strategy right to have got that far into the organic listing.

So there you have it people – ten SEO terms you might have known, or not – but nonetheless, very important terms when dealing with SEO. It is important to understand the ins and outs as to what SEO really means for your business or online endeavour. Hopefully the above ten terms, alongside some examples, will help get you closer to your goals and have enlightened you in some way or another as to what SEO is really all about.

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