SEO Guide – Where Does One Start?
A question came up the other day from my post on SEO vs social media. A reader wanted to know where does one start with learning SEO? So in response to that I found this adorable infographic, with definitions and other places I read on the latest SEO happenings. Let me be your SEO guide!
Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually. The Basics of an SEO Guide
Algorithm – The step by step procedure for calculations and automated reasoning. It is a method with detailed instructions for calculating a function. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page the founder of Google. It assigns a numerical weight to each link while measuring it’s “importance.” It is like a vote of support for the link. This is why link building is so important in building your website or blog.
Backlink – These are links that come into your blog. There were the primary function of web navigation years ago. Today the number of backlinks a website has is an indication of the popularity of a website and it’s importance.
Competitor Analysis – This is the study of your competitors website. The keywords used, the backlinks generated and so forth. It is important to study this to improve your site within the rankings for special keywords.
Directory – These are websites by categories and subcategories with links. Most of these are not found by web crawlers but by humans searching online. They are not as popular as they were a few years ago and are becoming less relevant for SEO purposes.
Error Pages – These can be the most frustrating things to fix on one’s website or blog. They happen when any links on your website no longer work. This can happen when you change the permalink or move pages or posts around. It happens when you link out and those links change. It’s very a fluid situation. Many times it happens when a blog or website is not longer around, your link has no where to go. I love using the CommentLuv Broken Link Checker for mine here.
Facebook – We all know what Facebook is right? You can read more at WebSEO on how Facebook links do affect your SEO. The higher a person’s pagerank is on Facebook and they link out to a website or blog – it will help the SEO efforts. Have you thought about using your Facebook page as part of your SEO?
Google – Google is the internet’s search engine. It is one of many. Google has a 67% share of search on the web currently. Bing is at 17.9%. (ComScore data).
Hyperlink – A hypertext file or document that is linked to another location either highlighted or in a dark text or different color so a user will know to click on it.
Infographics – These are visual representations of data and information. They are eye appealing, easy to read and may go viral on the web which in turn can provide a nice SEO benefit.
JavaScripts – These are a computer programming language. It is a popular language used in computer games and desktop applications. JavaScript should be used with caution for SEO and should be used sparingly.
Keywords – These are the words or phrases used in content on your blog or website so you may be found when readers are searching the web via the search engines. Using too many keywords can now appear spammy. It is now recommended you stay around a 2% use of keywords for your pages. If there are 300 words that would be 6x the keywords should be used.
Link Building – This used to a big tactic used for SEO. People would buy link building packages and exchange links. These methods will now hurt any SEO efforts. They must be build organically now and must make sense for your readers.
Meta Tags – These tags are supposed to give more information about a web page so a reader knows what the page is about. They are best found in the head element of a webpage. The meta description is the most useful today for SEO. They should not go over 160 characters. Meta tags are great to use on titles as long as you don’t go over 70 characters.
No Follow- A no follow attribute is used to tell a web page not to follow it. It lets you tell the robots not to crawl the link. These are very important for affiliate and paid links. This is so Google will not give these links importance due to money being paid for them. Make sense?
One Way Link – A one way link is a link that goes to one place and does not receive a link back. The best kind there is today for SEO. Long gone are the days of reciprocal links. An old SEO guide would recommend those two and three way links.
Penguins – We all know about the penguins work over at Google. They are the ones that make the changes to the SEO techniques used to come up to the top of the search engine rankings. Penguin is a code name started back in April of 2012 for the algorithm updates.
Query – How one searches, which words or phrases they use in searching. You should be able to understand via your Google Analytics which words are being queried to have your pages found. The better the queries are the better you may rank. Only 20% of queries for a keyword are the same.
Robots – These are programs and scripts that crawl the web and collect data from your websites. You want to be sure the robots do crawl your site and that nothing is preventing them from doing so.
Spiders – Spiders on the web are the same thing as the robots.
Twitter – We all know Twitter or at least we should, right? Twitter is a form of microblogging. Twitter has been around since 2006. If you have a high pagerank Twitter profile and tweet out links, those links can be filled with SEO Juice, did you know that? Have you checked out your Twitter profile’s pagerank lately? It hasn’t changed since February, the last time Pagerank was calculated.
Unnatural Link -These are known as spammy links. They are generated for SEO purpose only and not for the reader or websites value. Do stay away from these! It’s a black hat SEO tactic that Google now punishes websites for.
Video – We all have heard of YouTube. It is the 2nd largest search engine today. Video SEO now boils down to video sitemaps, robot text files, titles and keywords used with your video to generate the SEO value. Of course the video itself will have an impact on how long readers will stay on your page creating a bounce rate.
Wikipedia – This is a free encyclopedia project on the internet. It is a non-profit and is open to outside edit. They do accept donations to continue the projects they never run ads on their website. Some SEO specialists like to contribute to it to gain SEO juice.
XML – This is external markup language that allows users to define their own language for encoding web documents and services for readers and robots.
Yahoo – Yahoo is a web portal and search engine started page in 1995 and was the 2nd largest search engine for many years. They had merged with Bing over the past several years. The do remain a dominant force for content and email services.
Zeitgeist -This is the search pattern trends and surprises according to Google. I learned something new today. Have you heard this term before? It literally means the spirit of time. This is what we webmasters follow to guide us into making our websites and blogs be found more via search.
Here Are More SEO Guide Like Websites To Follow
Search Engine Watch - An authoritative SEO guide to search engine optimization with the latest news on SEO as well as analysis on the industry.
Search Engine Land - A news and information SEO guide site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry with regular updates led by Danny Sullivan.
Web SEO Analytics Blog - Another new one for me – a great SEO Guide blog on the latest SEO techniques explaining what works and what is not working today.
Traffic Generation Cafe - Ana Hoffman has expounded upon her SEO page with more info and it is continuous of the latest updates on Search Engine Optimization. You will need some extra coffee to go along with the reading here as some posts can be quite lengthy but very informative.
SEO Hints on Inspire to Thrive - I also have a collection of SEO Guide hints as well from my past experiences and what is new with SEO today! I try to keep the posts on them simple and easy to follow along.
Did You Learn Any New Terms From The SEO Guide For Kindergarten?
