NASHVILLE, TN – Every industry has its own jargon. Doctors, marketing
executives and journalists tend to speak in different languages when
they’re in a room full of peers. The world of search engine optimization
is no different. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliar terms
used in SEO tips and guidelines. Hopefully if you’ve found your way to
our blog, then you at least know that SEO stands for “Search Engine
Optimization”.
Here, we hope to demystify some of the terms that circulate frequently in SEO-speak. Once you understand the process, you can better develop your SEO strategy.
How People Find Your Site
Analytics shows how traffic finds a specific website. Analytics record how people find you, how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they visit within your website. This information is useful in further marketing your site. We’ve written before on Google Analytics, the free analytic service offered by Google. When a user types in a search query, the SERP is what pops up in response. SERP is an acronym for “Search Engine Results Page”.
Websites don’t appear magically in Google’s index. Or maybe they do! Websites are “crawled” by computer software programs. These crawlers, or spiders, find new and updated webpages and add them to their search engine’s index. Spiders crawl webpages for new content, cataloging keywords and adding new pages to each search engine’s index. Google uses GoogleBot to crawl its search engine, thus making GoogleBot a spider. The pages are collected in an index using over 1 Million computer servers for speedy retrieval, and having your page in an index allows users to potentially find your site through a search query.
Now on to the important explanation of how giving and receiving inbound and outbound links should happen. Building links should happen organically, and the use of link farms and link buying is considered black hat. When you see text on the web that links to a different page, that linked text is called “anchor text”.
The behind-the-scenes programming of your website can also determine how easily people find you. Meta tags are used in HTML, specifically in the <head> section, so that spiders can better categorize websites. Google’s Webmaster Tools gives helpful information on how to use these tags. By outlining your website’s structure in a sitemap, your website can be more easily directed by search engines.
Google utilizes PageRank to give different weights to different websites. It takes into account how many links a website has linking to it, though not all links are created equal. Some links are from more “respectable” sources, and therefore, these links have higher weight. PageRank alone isn’t the deciding factor in whether or not a website has relevant, valuable content.
How You Help People Find Your Site
Adding fresh content to your website helps potential customers find you on the web. Many people use blogs to keep their content fresh. The term “blog” first came from “web log”, as in an online journal or record with regular updates. The term evolved to “blog”. Blogs show the most recently added content at the top of the page, and the older content moves down as new content appears.
Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni believes that WordPress blogs are an important factor in the SEO game. “Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis,” Husayni says.
The best blogs are those that take shape organically, and keywords should follow that rule as well. Keywords are important to SEO, as all relevant websites should stay true to their audience. Keywords can happen organically. If you’re a software engineer, your website should discuss programming, code libraries, and other specific things relevant to your niche.
Here, we hope to demystify some of the terms that circulate frequently in SEO-speak. Once you understand the process, you can better develop your SEO strategy.
How People Find Your Site
Analytics shows how traffic finds a specific website. Analytics record how people find you, how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they visit within your website. This information is useful in further marketing your site. We’ve written before on Google Analytics, the free analytic service offered by Google. When a user types in a search query, the SERP is what pops up in response. SERP is an acronym for “Search Engine Results Page”.
Websites don’t appear magically in Google’s index. Or maybe they do! Websites are “crawled” by computer software programs. These crawlers, or spiders, find new and updated webpages and add them to their search engine’s index. Spiders crawl webpages for new content, cataloging keywords and adding new pages to each search engine’s index. Google uses GoogleBot to crawl its search engine, thus making GoogleBot a spider. The pages are collected in an index using over 1 Million computer servers for speedy retrieval, and having your page in an index allows users to potentially find your site through a search query.
Now on to the important explanation of how giving and receiving inbound and outbound links should happen. Building links should happen organically, and the use of link farms and link buying is considered black hat. When you see text on the web that links to a different page, that linked text is called “anchor text”.
The behind-the-scenes programming of your website can also determine how easily people find you. Meta tags are used in HTML, specifically in the <head> section, so that spiders can better categorize websites. Google’s Webmaster Tools gives helpful information on how to use these tags. By outlining your website’s structure in a sitemap, your website can be more easily directed by search engines.
Google utilizes PageRank to give different weights to different websites. It takes into account how many links a website has linking to it, though not all links are created equal. Some links are from more “respectable” sources, and therefore, these links have higher weight. PageRank alone isn’t the deciding factor in whether or not a website has relevant, valuable content.
How You Help People Find Your Site
Adding fresh content to your website helps potential customers find you on the web. Many people use blogs to keep their content fresh. The term “blog” first came from “web log”, as in an online journal or record with regular updates. The term evolved to “blog”. Blogs show the most recently added content at the top of the page, and the older content moves down as new content appears.
Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni believes that WordPress blogs are an important factor in the SEO game. “Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis,” Husayni says.
The best blogs are those that take shape organically, and keywords should follow that rule as well. Keywords are important to SEO, as all relevant websites should stay true to their audience. Keywords can happen organically. If you’re a software engineer, your website should discuss programming, code libraries, and other specific things relevant to your niche.
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