Glossary of SEO terms…
(SEO) Search engine optimisation
This is the important part that your web guy should have done when designing your site, but left it out so that he could charge you more later on. It takes 30 seconds to optimise a site, and it takes that amount of time for us to know if your site has been optimised. The clever aspects of SEO involve the GREY AREA and ‘competitor analysis’, plus the use of advanced tricks and practices, some of which your web guy would probably not know. Competitor analysis takes a day or two to be thorough (sometimes a week or two), since their keywords need analysing with a modicum of skill and experience. You can pay £10,000 a month to have a good paid placement on Google, but I see people reach the No.1 slot for £300 all the time. It’s about ‘understanding’, and when you understand how it works … well, you’ll understand.
Organic ranking
This is the left hand side of a Google search engine results page (SERP if you’re a nerd), and it displays sites that are popular, have been around a while, and are generally very good. In order to have a good organic ranking it must be a very popular website … they say. And, if you’re dumb enough to believe that, don’t forget a little something for the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Things, are not always what they seem.
Multi-variant testing
When I was younger, around 3 years B.G. (Before Google, so around 1995 in real terms), I would alter a website’s colours, fonts and pictures till I found a combination that caused more people to click through and buy a product. These days that’s called multi-variant testing – by people who have too much time on their hands, and who need to get out more often.
Metrics
Another silly buzzword, that means ‘to measure’. In my day we might say that we had 200 clicks today. Today, you may hear that the company’s website metrics touched 200 clicks. Buy such people a magazine about adventure holidays, and ask them to stop playing computer games in the evenings.
Split A/B testing
If you split an email list into younger and older recipients, to see which works best, you have just performed a split A/B test – and are now a SEM professional. Walk with pride and a swagger.
Analysis
If you see which email broadcast worked best, younger or older people, you are now an analyst and deserve a better office.
eCommerce
A website that sells stuff, instead of just displaying information about how wonderful your company is. If your website has ‘add to cart’ then you have an eCommerce site.
Google Analytics
This is a series of facts and figures about how people found your website, how long they stayed on it, and which pages they visited – all very useful stuff. If you use Google Adwords, and sign up to Google Analytics (it’s free for Adwords users) you can get lots of useful info, and use it to improve your website message – and sell more products. If you have an eCommerce site and are serious about selling stuff, analytics is essential. Many other web hosts provide analytics, and they are just as useful.
Stickiness
Most people who find your website will, on average, spend two seconds deciding that they don’t like it – or that it’s not what they were looking for – and move on. If they stay and poke around, you have a ‘sticky’ front page message. Stickiness is the measure of how long a person browses your site.
Keyword
A word or search phrase that your customers may use to find your website. If you sell fish in St. Ives, with your seven wives, then you may have a paid Google keywords search of ‘St. Ives fishmongers’. If you simply used ‘St. Ives’ then you would attract many people seeking a cottage for the weekend, or a cosy bed & breakfast, and would be paying for the wrong type of people to view your website.
Click through rate CTR
This is how many people actually open up and browse your website, as opposed to those that may see your listing and pass you buy.
Cost per click CPC
What you pay Google when someone clicks on your advert. This could be as little as 1pence, or for some high-end products as much as £10 a click.
Pay per click PPC
This is the heart of Google advertising, and you will offer to pay an agreed sum (usually less than £1) every time someone clicks on your Google advert from a SERP (a results page). If lots of people click, and they buy your product, then great. If they click and don’t buy, you need to talk to someone like us to stop you from wasting money. If you set-up a new keyword, you can often see within hours how many people are clicking on it, and where your advert sits on the page, No.1 … or nowhere to be found. Changing the amount of money you offer for that keyword phrase, and the experimentation of differing keyword phrases, is something best left to a professional – or until you have had some training. Some people make a living from experimenting with which keyword phrases attract the most customers for the least money – the heart of the marketing process.
Content
Content is … well, words, facts and figures, and … well, content.
Call to action
This is the latest buzzword, and simply means a sentence and a button, typically to buy something. “Click here for offer details” would be a call to action. For most normal humans it would be a link.
Above the fold / above the line
This phrase used to be used by marketers involved in direct mail, and indicated the part of the letter with ‘content’, as opposed to the tear-off strip with a return address to take up an offer (below the line). In web terms, it is now used to describe the part of the website first visible, i.e. the bit you don’t need to scroll down to view. It can also be used to describe the blurb about an offer rather than the ‘call to action’ – which is a button they press if they want to buy something.
Google’s “display” network
This is Google’s left arm, the placing of your paid advert on someone else’s website. If the owners of that website sell wallpaper, and you sell wallpaper glue, then there is a close synergy – and you may pick up a few new customers from advertising your product on their site. Adsense ads are more hit-and-miss than Adwords definitive keyword searches, but can be very effective if you do your homework right.
Adwords
Google’s right arm and its money making machine, the paid search part. You choose a keyword such as ‘wallpaper’ and pay to have your site appear on the right hand side of Google search results relating to wallpaper, hopefully somewhere at the top.
NOTE. Most people still look on the left of Google, to those sites that did not pay, but got where they are because they are good, relevant, and popular or … have had their SEO handled by someone like us. You don’t need to have been around a while, be popular or relevant, to be number one. Some people pay £10,000 a month to be on the first page on the right, and some pay £300 to be No.1 on the left.
NOTE. The average consumer ‘trusts’ the listings on the left of Google, the ‘organic’ listings, far more than the paid listings. Those paid listings are often tacky. Sometimes you search for ‘St. Ives’ and see “Buy St. Ives on eBay”, causing the paid advert section to lose credibility and trust.
Adsense
This is the opposite of Google Adwords, in that you sign up to allow Google to place adverts on your own website, and earn some money from it. If your site is extremely popular then you may make a worthwhile amount, if not you may make $10 a week from the adverts that appear on your site. Many companies make money this way, but just as many consider the placing of adverts on their sites as a distraction – and of a lesser quality. You can make money when a placed advert is clicked on, or simply when it is displayed.
Backlinks
A link to your website from another site. Google works on the assumption that if many people put links to your site on theirs – that your site must be good. This is where the GREY AREA comes in, and … belief in fairies down the bottom of the garden, that your marriage will last, and that bald men really are sexy.
Outlinks
If you try and add to the quality of your site by providing many useful links to other websites of a similar nature, then you are helping those using your site – and that is a good policy. But … you will not increase your Google ranking by doing so. Don’t stuff loads of links to other sites on your website in the belief that it will help your ranking.
The Grey Area
This is the part of the internet SEO which you don’t talk about in polite company. This is people paying £300 to be No.1 on Google, even if their site is crap. The grey area is not illegal, nor even immoral, just the use of tricks to get what you want, not hard work. I often shock people by demonstrating the grey area used by their ‘very respectable’ competitors to advance their rankings.
Blogs
A short story, snippet, or brief yet useful description of something. Supposedly, it started off as “business logging” and became “blog”. And, it started off as nice people creating useful tips on products for other nice people – all done free of charge because they like the sound of their own voices, and like to see their words in print. It has now come to the attention of website owners and SEO gurus that Google rewards websites with blogs on, especially if the content keeps getting updated. So, we now have people writing all sorts of crap in blogs because it helps their rankings, not because it helps the reader of the website. It’s now seen that you ‘must’ have a blog, and update it each week. Because Google does respect blogs, bloggers now do the ‘black hat’ bit of SEO and try and affect other people’s page rankings. Other people will write your blogs for you as well – for a few dollars.
Black hat, white hat, blue hat
Aka, people who should get out more often. A white hat SEO guru sticks to the rules and charges his customers lots of money to get a modest ranking, a black hat charges his customers a small amount of money to get to No.1 ranking, and a blue hat plays computer games a great deal – after writing a clever and humorous blog about white hats and black hats.
Googlebot, robots, crawlers, spiders
A computer program that automatically inspects your website every now and then and tries to decide where your page ranking should lie, based upon a series of computations – and it compares you to other (similar) sites.
Long tail
This phrase started with musicians and writers, who sold their products in small numbers. Large companies realised that die-hard music fans and book fans would search out their favourite artists and buy their offerings, even when those offerings were not on the shelves in the stores, or on eBay or Amazon. Those large companies then realised that a large number of small sales added up to a big number, so they now see ‘the little people’ as being valuable. This is long tail theory, in that the sales curve diminishes to a long tail that ends up with a digit one, yet starts with millions of sales for the top artists. A search phrase of “Michael Jackson” will return millions of websites, yet “Michael Jackson’s best sporting moments” will not return millions of websites. The later is a long tail search phrase that may only return one or two matching websites.
Meta tags
In the HTML programming language, a language used for building websites, there are certain messages sent to Google and other search engines by the website itself.
<Meta name=”author” content=”Berty Basset”
This tells Google and others what to display about your website, and how to index your website. Many web designers get this wrong, and screw up their client’s SEO because of it. Many so called ‘SEO gurus’ and website designers now believe that Google does not pay attention to certain meta tags, since people used to abuse such meta tags. For people who no longer believe that Google takes these tags seriously, I refer you back to the fairies at the end of the garden. I demonstrate ‘conclusively’ on a regular basis how the position of a website on a search engine is affected by the meta tags.
SPAM
A junk email, or a junk link, or a junk blog, or an unwanted version of any of the above. It is also one of my favourite tinned meats, very salty. Try it with mint sauce in a sandwich.
Opt-in
An opt-in recipient is someone who wants to receive an email from you about your products. These days such people are double-opt-in, in that after they signed-up to your newsletter you sent them a confirmation email to ask if they were sure – with the option of cancelling. There are also rules and guidelines to follow when emailing people, even if they are customers. If you make a mistake, your email address will be listed as spam and your future emails will go nowhere. If that happens to a serious eCommerce site then you have a big problem, since your email provider will not listen to your protests, nor threats of legal action. You have to be very careful!
