Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Beginners Guide Part 2 ~ Surya Mishra

This is the second post in the Search Engine Optimization SEO Terms Explanation series. To read the first post dealing with terms like Algorithm, Alt Tag, Analytics, Anchor Text, Backlink, Black Hat SEO, Broken Link, Doorway Page, Dynamic Content, Flash Optimization etc. please go to: SEO Beginners Guide Part 1

In this post we shall learn about SEO terms like Geo-targeting, Gray Hat SEO, Keyword Density, Link Popularity and Meta Tags.

Gateway Page

A gateway page is identical to a doorway page, and is primarily used to funnel search engine or paid traffic to another website or landing page. These gateway pages have little useful content and are often de-indexed by search engines when discovered.

Geographical Targeting

Geographical targeting or Geo-Targeting refers to the process of focusing your efforts on getting visitors from a specific continent, country, state or even city, using Search Engine Webmaster Tools for those search engines which offer this service (Google does!). By using a country domain extension like .us, .ca or .in you are already informing the search engines that your website or blog is primarily of relevance to people from the same region. Maintaining a high keyword density of the name of the geographic region is another way to target region specific search engine traffic.

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation refers to analytics specific to geo-targeting, and segments the visitor traffic based on the physical location of the visitor, typically using the IP address of the computer. While this is very useful for local businesses and region-specific information websites, the IP addresses registered in a different location from the visitor’s computer may mess up the statistics. For example, someone may be using an internet connection with an IP registered by the ISP or internet service provider in another state or even country!

Gray Hat SEO

SEO practices which are neither ethical nor completely unethical, i.e. fall neither under White Hat SEO nor under Black Hat SEO, are referred to as Gray Hat SEO. These techniques include creation of Gateway or Doorway sites, re-publishing syndicated and duplicate content etc. In certain cases sites using Gray Hat SEO are blacklisted by the Search Engines, while in others they are not even detected.

Hidden Text

A very simple form of Black Hat SEO to increase keyword density and to add extra keywords, especially misspelled words, is to add text with the same font color as the background color. In some cases several title and comment tags in HTML are used for the same purpose. Usually search engines severely penalize and even blacklist sites using Hidden Text.

Hit

A hit is technically an HTTP request to a web server. So, for an HTML webpage with 1 CSS file, 3 images and 2 JavaScript files, there will be 1+3+2+1(the HTML page) hits per page view. Clearly hits are not an accurate measurement of a website’s visitor traffic.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the most common programming language used for creating web pages. It provides the directions or markup for web browsers about how to interpret the information contained in the file which then displays it to the user. HTML 5 is the latest version, which is still under development. With HTML 5, the data structure would be so advanced that no other codes will be required for videos and external device operation!

Hyperlink

A hyperlink is the link between two web pages connected using HTML. A Hyperlink is the address of the destination file specified using the IP address or a domain based URL. Hyperlinks are used for connecting pages on the same or different websites, hosted on the internet or a local intranet server. A search engine usually gives huge importance to relevant links from pages considered important by it. Google uses the PageRank algorithm to calculate the value of hyperlinks and the linked web pages.

Index

An index in the SEO context is the database of a Search Engine, with links to all the crawled web pages and information about what those pages are about. The search engine uses an algorithm to fetch pages relevant to the search term or query in a ranked list format. Search Engines generally use web crawlers, bots or spiders to go from one web page to another through links. Popular Search Engines like Google have billions and billions of web pages in their search index which is updated every few days. The index is usually spread over thousands of data centers across the globe to maximize storage capacity and minimize the time taken to return results based on the queries made by search engine users.

Inbound Links

Links or hyperlinks from other pages pointing to your web page are referred to as inbound links. These links have varying degrees of importance for different search engines. For example, Google uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank to calculate the value of each link, and accordingly all indexed web pages are assigned scores based on the number and quality of inbound links. For the purpose of PageRank calculation, usually only “dofollow” inbound links are considered important. For SEO, large numbers of highly popular and relevant inbound links are considered very important. The anchor text used for those links play a significant role in Search Engine Results Page Rankings.

Keyword

A keyword is a group of one or more words which are considered to be relevant to the given topic. Keywords are used by search engines to find out how relevant a given web page is to the search query made by the search engine user. While creating websites and blogs, it is very important to include as many related keywords as possible to rank high in the search results.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is the density of a particular keyword or keyphrase in the given content. It is expressed as the percentage of words on a given web page which are identical to the keyword. Keyword density is one of the most important factors of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The generally accepted thumb rule is that a keyword density of 2% to 4% is very good for most Search Engines.

Link

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a white hat technique to gain relevant backlinks for SEO. The most common form of link baiting is the creation of highly useful and popular content which others will want to link to from their blogs and websites. Sites like Wikipedia.org have millions of pages with comprehensive information about a wide range of topics in several languages. Thus, people naturally link to those pages, treating them as references. There are many such popular blogs and websites on different topics or niches, which gain high page ranks due to thousands of backlinks to their internal pages. The most popular posts which get linked to are lists like Top 10, Top 25 etc.

Link Exchange

Link exchange refers to a mutual reciprocation of linking to webpages in order to increase inbound links from relevant pages. Usually link exchange is considered ethical as long as both the pages are related. However, buying and selling links or linking to many unrelated pages may lead to blacklisting of a blog or website.

Link Farm

A link farm is a black hat SEO property, i.e. a webpage or several webpages linked to each other with the sole purpose of creating a closed network of links to gain high search ranking. When discovered, link farms usually get blacklisted or de-indexed by the search engines. Most link farms do not contain any unique or useful content, and are solely intended to create networks which can be sold off to others.

Link Popularity

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage or website and the relevance of the linking pages to the linked pages. As far as Google is concerned, search engine rankings are only improved when the pages linking to each other are related and the anchor text has contains one or more of the searched keywords. High PageRank inbound links are considered an essential part of SEO for Google.

Link Text

Link text is more popularly known as anchor text. It is the text which is used to link to another web page using HTML. Link text or anchor text tells the search engines what keywords are relevant to the linked page. Thus, the search ranking of the linked page would depend not only on the pagerank of the linking webpage but also on the anchor text used.

Listings

Listings in SEO parlance are the ranked lists of indexed web pages, sorted according to the Search Engine’s algorithm. The pages on which these listings are displayed are referred to as SERPs r Search Engine Result Pages.

Local Search

Local Search is a relatively recent concept in Search Engines, having come to the spotlight after non-internet based businesses started marketing their products and services through internet based advertising. Local search is very useful for finding out about hotels, geographically proximal shops etc. Geo-targeting is aimed at improving the search ranking of a webpage or website for local searches.

Meta Description Tag

Meta description tag, often referred to as simple description tag, is the HTML code that gives search engines information about the web page. It is not visible to the visitors, and is included in the “head” section of the web page. Currently, search engines either display the default Meta description tag in the search results along with the link, or select portions of the actual webpage content based on the search query.

Meta Keywords Tag

Meta Keywords tag is the HTML code which supplies information about web page in short phrases, thus helping the user agents like certain search engine crawlers to categorize the web page based on keywords. As opposed to the meta description tag, meta keyword tag is no longer considered useful for Google, though it is still used by other search engines.

Meta Robots Tag

Meta Robots tag is the HTML code which suggests some search engine crawlers how to crawl a particular web page. Some examples of these suggestions are crawl rate, whether or not to index the page, whether or not to use the links on the page as votes in favor of the linked pages etc. Some search engines however do not follow these instructions.

Example:

<html>

<head>

</head>

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Meta Search Engine

A meta search engine is not same as a traditional search engine like Google, and uses the search index of other engines. Meta search engines usually rank results based on the average ranking position of the various engines they query to get the search results. A couple of examples of meta search engines are Dogpile and Scour Search.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML codes which contain information about the web page, but are not visible to the viewer or visitor. These tags are useful for web browsers, search engines and other such user agents. Meta tags are included in the “head” section of a web page. Some examples are meta description, meta keywords, meta author and meta redirect tags.

Example:

<head>
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials" />
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript" />
<meta name="author" content="Hege Refsnes" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
</head>