Link Text/Anchor Text
Link Text/Anchor text refers to the text around which the hyperlink is placed. For example:
[a href="http://www.seosuperstars.blogspot.com/"]Link Text/Anchor Text[/a]
Bot/Spider
Bot is short for robot. Refers to a program created by the owners of a search engine that crawls the web. Spiders/bots differ in function, from producing e-mail addresses for spammers to cataloguing web pages for search engines.
Cloaking
Cloaking refers to the practice of showing a different page to a human visitor and a different page to a search engine spider. This practice is misused by spammers to stuff keywords. Cloaking violates the Terms of Service for the majority of search engines and may even get your site banned.
Conversion
Conversion relates to traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as purchases made on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to moderate the efficiency and return on investment (and ROI) of pay per click (PPC) and other marketing operations.
Back Link
A link on another webpage which points to the to another webpage, also known as an inbound link.
CPC
Means Cost Per Click. Used to measure the amount agreed to by the PPC campaigner and search engine when bidding for keywords.
CTA
Stands for Content Targeted Advertising. It refers to the placement of PPC ads relevant to the landing pages of a link.
CTR
Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.
Doorway Page
Same as67 a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific key-phrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
FFA
Abbreviation for Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.
Gateway Page
Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
IBL
Abbreviation for In Bound Link. Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called a back link.
Keyword/Keyphrase
Keywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.
Link Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Mirror
In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
PFI
Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all) for a given search term. It just offers webmasters the opportunity to quickly incorporate changes to a site into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the resultant effects on the rankings.
Portal
Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.
PPC
Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.
PR
Abbreviation for PageRank - Google's trademark for their proprietary measure of link popularity for web pages. Google offers a PR viewer on their Toolbar.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
SEM
Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)
SEO
Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO covers the process of
making web pages spider friendly (so search engines can read them)
making web pages relevant to desired keyphrases
SERP
Abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. This refers to the organic (excluding paid listings) search results for a given query.
Spam
In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning.
Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Spider
Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
Spider Trap
A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.
White hat
An ethical SEO method that follows search engine TOS.
Grey hat
An SEO using both methods.
Link building
A method of creating back-links to your own website.
Stop Word
Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the".
Black hat
This is Unethical SEO. Search Engine Optimization techniques that defy search engine TOS.
I hope you found these helpful. There was no body there to help me understand the meaning of the majority of these words, I had to learn what they meant the hard way.
Showing posts with label seo superstars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seo superstars. Show all posts
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Tips on How to Select the Right Keywords
Has your site been indexed by the search engines? I know it’s not easy to get your site indexed, so I’m going to give you a few little tips which will help the search engines give your site some relevance.
An important element of getting your site indexed by the search engines is to have the right keywords, and many people have no idea of how to select the right keywords, so here’s a tip on how t choose the right keywords.
To start with, log onto www.overture.com. What you’ll see is a tool in which you type in a keyword, and it will give you the figure of how many searches were made for that word.
Select “Advertiser Center” at the top of the page on the right hand side.
Then, near the top of the page, select “Tools”.
Next, in the new page that pops up, select “Term Selection Tool”
Now, in the search box that appears, enter a Keyword or Key-phrase that you think that your target audience might use when searching for your product/service, and click on “Enter”.
You will now see a list related search terms, with the number of searches made in a 1 month time frame.
It might just be that you’ve chose a good keyword, or it may be that there are a better choice of keywords that you’ve come across.
Select the Keywords you wish to target, and now analyze the web-page which is offering the service or product. Ensure that your chosen keywords are present in the various Headings tags, and in the main content. This will ensure that the Google Spiders index your web-pages and show them on the search results pages when someone makes a relevant search query.
An important element of getting your site indexed by the search engines is to have the right keywords, and many people have no idea of how to select the right keywords, so here’s a tip on how t choose the right keywords.
To start with, log onto www.overture.com. What you’ll see is a tool in which you type in a keyword, and it will give you the figure of how many searches were made for that word.
Select “Advertiser Center” at the top of the page on the right hand side.
Then, near the top of the page, select “Tools”.
Next, in the new page that pops up, select “Term Selection Tool”
Now, in the search box that appears, enter a Keyword or Key-phrase that you think that your target audience might use when searching for your product/service, and click on “Enter”.
You will now see a list related search terms, with the number of searches made in a 1 month time frame.
It might just be that you’ve chose a good keyword, or it may be that there are a better choice of keywords that you’ve come across.
Select the Keywords you wish to target, and now analyze the web-page which is offering the service or product. Ensure that your chosen keywords are present in the various Headings tags, and in the main content. This will ensure that the Google Spiders index your web-pages and show them on the search results pages when someone makes a relevant search query.
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
5 Things to remember about back-links
Back-links are one of the most important factors when trying to attain a higher ranking for your selected keywords in the search engines. My experience teaches me that if we don’t have a specific amount of in-bound links to our site, then it very complicated to get high rankings for selected keywords.
You don’t simply need back-links; you need quality back-links. 10 in-bound from relevant and high page rank websites are far better than 200 back-links from irrelevant and poorly ranked websites
Read on below to see what sets high quality and poor quality back-links apart from one another.
1. Selected keyword/key-phrase in the link text
Say we want to rank higher for a search query such as "cheap properties" then the links pointing back to our site ought to draw on precisely them words. The words that are used to link to our site influence the way search engines rank our sites.
Ensure that the words used to link back to your site are the words that you want to attain a higher position in the search engines for.
2. Links from relevant pages are best
In-bound links from a high page-ranked and relevant website are far superior to in-bound links from low page-ranked and irrelevant websites. Incoming links from low page-ranked and irrelevant websites do not actually harm your website and do actually carry a little weight; however Google prefers back-links related to your site more.
3. The link should go to a relevant page on your site
Although it's not bad to receive inbound-links to the home page it’s far more beneficial to have the in-bound links pointing to the page that is most applicable to the selected link text. If "cheap properties" is to be the link text, then you ensure that the back-link points to a page that has the words “cheap shoes” on it.
If the keywords in the back-link correspond with the content of the page they are pointing back to then it's more probable that you will rank higher for those keywords.
4. Authority site links are best
Websites with high Page-Ranks have a much more valuable link than one from a website with nil page-rank positive effect on the rankings of your own site.
The affect of these links is so positive that it even helps your sites page-rank improve as well as push your selected keywords up the organic search rankings.
Sadly, no one other than Google themselves know what page-rank they actually use, the Google Page-Rank indicator that we see in the Google toolbar just provides us with a guesstimate of how highly Google ranks your site.
There are many who would say that the page-rank indicator is nothing but a gimmick, however in my humble opinion it’s nice to get a small idea of what Google thinks of my site.
The simple fact here is that even just to have a page rank of 1 or 2 is difficult, and you can forget about seeing a page rank of 8 or 9 unless you’re Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or a Government Organization. So don’t pay no attention to those people who say that page rank is irrelevant.
5. No-follow attributes are a hindrance
The no-follow element in html tags tells search engines that they should not follow a link. Back-links with that feature attached to them are not in the least bit helpful to your search engine positioning.
Adversely, to find out if your link partners are using a no-follow attribute you need to check the HTML code of the page from where you should partners they use a no-follow attribute to link to your site.
You don’t simply need back-links; you need quality back-links. 10 in-bound from relevant and high page rank websites are far better than 200 back-links from irrelevant and poorly ranked websites
Read on below to see what sets high quality and poor quality back-links apart from one another.
1. Selected keyword/key-phrase in the link text
Say we want to rank higher for a search query such as "cheap properties" then the links pointing back to our site ought to draw on precisely them words. The words that are used to link to our site influence the way search engines rank our sites.
Ensure that the words used to link back to your site are the words that you want to attain a higher position in the search engines for.
2. Links from relevant pages are best
In-bound links from a high page-ranked and relevant website are far superior to in-bound links from low page-ranked and irrelevant websites. Incoming links from low page-ranked and irrelevant websites do not actually harm your website and do actually carry a little weight; however Google prefers back-links related to your site more.
3. The link should go to a relevant page on your site
Although it's not bad to receive inbound-links to the home page it’s far more beneficial to have the in-bound links pointing to the page that is most applicable to the selected link text. If "cheap properties" is to be the link text, then you ensure that the back-link points to a page that has the words “cheap shoes” on it.
If the keywords in the back-link correspond with the content of the page they are pointing back to then it's more probable that you will rank higher for those keywords.
4. Authority site links are best
Websites with high Page-Ranks have a much more valuable link than one from a website with nil page-rank positive effect on the rankings of your own site.
The affect of these links is so positive that it even helps your sites page-rank improve as well as push your selected keywords up the organic search rankings.
Sadly, no one other than Google themselves know what page-rank they actually use, the Google Page-Rank indicator that we see in the Google toolbar just provides us with a guesstimate of how highly Google ranks your site.
There are many who would say that the page-rank indicator is nothing but a gimmick, however in my humble opinion it’s nice to get a small idea of what Google thinks of my site.
The simple fact here is that even just to have a page rank of 1 or 2 is difficult, and you can forget about seeing a page rank of 8 or 9 unless you’re Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or a Government Organization. So don’t pay no attention to those people who say that page rank is irrelevant.
5. No-follow attributes are a hindrance
The no-follow element in html tags tells search engines that they should not follow a link. Back-links with that feature attached to them are not in the least bit helpful to your search engine positioning.
Adversely, to find out if your link partners are using a no-follow attribute you need to check the HTML code of the page from where you should partners they use a no-follow attribute to link to your site.
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
Best SEO Practices, Techniques and Guidance from SEO Superstars
Best SEO Practices, Techniques and Guidance from SEO Superstars
How long has it been since you updated your websites’ or your blogs’ content?
Adding fresh content to your website is really important. And not only should you add fresh content, you should add it regularly. If possible, daily is the best, otherwise at least once a week.
Although it can be difficult to add fresh content on a regular basis, it needs to done, if it isn’t, then you’re the one losing out. Visitors and search engines love fresh content. This will bring repeat visits from both. From the view point of the search engine, this means your site will be spidered on a much more frequent basis. Fresh content can also suggest that you are an authority on a particular subject.
Don’t forget, the keywords here are: consistently and regularly.
Another question a lot of people might have is whether the purchasing of links to be a good thing or bad thing?
My answer to this would be:
If I wouldn’t do something myself, then I wouldn’t recommend it to any one else either. And there is no way I would ever buy a link from another persons’ site. I’ll vote against buying links. Many people pay for such links thinking that they are good quality links and that they carry a lot of weight. There are loads of scams in the world of Search Engine Marketing which can make links appear as, behave as, and for a short period of time act like good quality links, but in-fact they are of very little value.
Your best bet is to just stick to the more traditional methods of link-building which are:
Make sure you are indexed in all the main Search Engines
Submit your website to relevant directories
Create and publish articles
Request links from relevant websites
By doing these things you will see results and improvements in search engine rankings.
To see first hand how a Google searchbot acts when it crawls your website and what actions can be taken to help improve rankings and visibility, Summit has developed a set of tools - available over the web - that perform mature evaluations when requested, there and then.
The search engine spider simulator will produce a report on features of the page that are used to decide where in the search engine the page appears, as well as giving some general usability advice. Anyone can use the spider sim completely free of charge.
Another interesting tool can be found at Google fight. What you do is, you type in two keywords/key-phrases, then hit the “make a fight” button, then the tool proceeds to tell you which keyword is listed most.
Both are great tools and can be extremely helpful when optimizing your website. The links are in the Favourite Links section. Enjoy playing around with them!
At Google Fight, you can type in two competing key phrases and see which one
is listed more often in the Google database. Have fun!
How long has it been since you updated your websites’ or your blogs’ content?
Adding fresh content to your website is really important. And not only should you add fresh content, you should add it regularly. If possible, daily is the best, otherwise at least once a week.
Although it can be difficult to add fresh content on a regular basis, it needs to done, if it isn’t, then you’re the one losing out. Visitors and search engines love fresh content. This will bring repeat visits from both. From the view point of the search engine, this means your site will be spidered on a much more frequent basis. Fresh content can also suggest that you are an authority on a particular subject.
Don’t forget, the keywords here are: consistently and regularly.
Another question a lot of people might have is whether the purchasing of links to be a good thing or bad thing?
My answer to this would be:
If I wouldn’t do something myself, then I wouldn’t recommend it to any one else either. And there is no way I would ever buy a link from another persons’ site. I’ll vote against buying links. Many people pay for such links thinking that they are good quality links and that they carry a lot of weight. There are loads of scams in the world of Search Engine Marketing which can make links appear as, behave as, and for a short period of time act like good quality links, but in-fact they are of very little value.
Your best bet is to just stick to the more traditional methods of link-building which are:
Make sure you are indexed in all the main Search Engines
Submit your website to relevant directories
Create and publish articles
Request links from relevant websites
By doing these things you will see results and improvements in search engine rankings.
To see first hand how a Google searchbot acts when it crawls your website and what actions can be taken to help improve rankings and visibility, Summit has developed a set of tools - available over the web - that perform mature evaluations when requested, there and then.
The search engine spider simulator will produce a report on features of the page that are used to decide where in the search engine the page appears, as well as giving some general usability advice. Anyone can use the spider sim completely free of charge.
Another interesting tool can be found at Google fight. What you do is, you type in two keywords/key-phrases, then hit the “make a fight” button, then the tool proceeds to tell you which keyword is listed most.
Both are great tools and can be extremely helpful when optimizing your website. The links are in the Favourite Links section. Enjoy playing around with them!
At Google Fight, you can type in two competing key phrases and see which one
is listed more often in the Google database. Have fun!
Thursday, 20 September 2007
SEO tips and SEO guidance
When trying to improve your Search Engine Positioning ask yourself these couple of questions:
Is it absolutely necessary (or a complete waste of time) to submit my websites’ details to the numerous regional Google directories? Or will a single submission to the Universal Google site suffice and index my site in the most relevant regions?
Well, the answer to this is, according to Google itself;
“Only a single submission to the Global Google directory will do.” (And it’s a complete waste of time submitting to the loads of various Google directories dotted around the globe).
Now that aside, has anyone ever thought about having their website measured to become a source of information for Google?
If not, and you’re considering it, then submit your website to Google News at the following URL: http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py
Other important factors to keep in mind when creating content for your website are:
Who is YOUR "ultimate paying spectator?" Remember to focus on the potential customer when writing content for your website.
Do you favour a particular type of client as opposed to another when it comes to business?
You’re not creating pages for the Search Engines, they’re not ever going to be your customers/clients. Focus on your real potential customers. Give them what they’re looking for throughout your site.
The searchers original search query would be a good place to start; make it imaginative, creative, original, unique and honestly appealing.
And only then you’ll find that this is the motorway to everlasting victory.
In addition to this, the company I work for, Summit, have developed a spider simulator which lets you view your website from the eyes of a search engine spider, see how it can help you by clicking here Summit Spider Simulator.
Is it absolutely necessary (or a complete waste of time) to submit my websites’ details to the numerous regional Google directories? Or will a single submission to the Universal Google site suffice and index my site in the most relevant regions?
Well, the answer to this is, according to Google itself;
“Only a single submission to the Global Google directory will do.” (And it’s a complete waste of time submitting to the loads of various Google directories dotted around the globe).
Now that aside, has anyone ever thought about having their website measured to become a source of information for Google?
If not, and you’re considering it, then submit your website to Google News at the following URL: http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py
Other important factors to keep in mind when creating content for your website are:
Who is YOUR "ultimate paying spectator?" Remember to focus on the potential customer when writing content for your website.
Do you favour a particular type of client as opposed to another when it comes to business?
You’re not creating pages for the Search Engines, they’re not ever going to be your customers/clients. Focus on your real potential customers. Give them what they’re looking for throughout your site.
The searchers original search query would be a good place to start; make it imaginative, creative, original, unique and honestly appealing.
And only then you’ll find that this is the motorway to everlasting victory.
In addition to this, the company I work for, Summit, have developed a spider simulator which lets you view your website from the eyes of a search engine spider, see how it can help you by clicking here Summit Spider Simulator.
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