Beginners Guide to SEO terms

SEO is essential to stand any chance of reaching the top of the results pages, here is a beginners guide to SEO terms and a few of the more useful operators you can use in the Google search engine.

CPC:  Cost Per Click: The amount an advertiser is willing to pay, to win the ad auction and have their ad displayed.

CPM: Cost Per Mille (Thousand): The cost per 1000 impressions. Ie the cost to make the ad appear on a page , 1000 times.

CTR: Click Through Rate: Percentage of Impressions that result in a Click.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language , is the language of the web, it is how the internet is mainly created, although there are other languages in play too like Javascript. Website builder platforms like WordPress are usually written in PHP, which outputs HTML when a user lands on the site, to actually display the content.

Impressions: No. of times an ad is seen ( but not clicked )

Keyword: a single word or multi word phrase, that you type into Google .

Keyword Tool: Any on site, in cloud or downloadable software that outputs keyword phrases, possibly also search volume, CPC, Difficulty of Ranking, Competition and many other metrics. These have to maintain huge databases so are not usually free, although several have free trials or limited searches each day, like Ubersuggest and Answer the Public.

Links: When you read a page and come across some highlighted text which when clicked leads you to another site, is a hypertext link for example:

     Great tracking software Bemob is available here

 Here is the same link in its HTML format, it is called an anchor text link :

 <a href=”https://mackdot.com/free-affiliate-tracking-software-bemob/”> Bemob

and gives us link on other sites pointing to our site. A link counts as a ‘vote’ for our site. The more links that point to our site, the better. Not all link types are equal, a link from an authority site eg .gov is worth a lot more than one from a cake recipe site saying “here’s a great ginger sponge”

Search Operator: (within Google)  This is an operator in the same way as  ‘divide’ or ‘add’,  are mathematical operators:  You can find a complete list of these in Googles pages , below are some of the most useful operators:

Site:

Eg.  Site:yoursite.com  will return only results ( pages ) from your own website domain

filetype:

searchterm filetype:pdf

ext:

same as above

related:

finds sites that are related to the search dom

allintitle:

returns only results containing all of the words in the  title of the doc

eg allintitle: the moons a balloon

intitle:

any result with 1 or more words from the  title.

inurl:

any result with 1 or more of the workds in the URL

allinurl:

only results containing all the words in the URL

intext:

results containing 1 or more of the words within the text

allintext:

only results containing all the words in the given text

note – this is a good test for plagiarism

SEO: search engine optimisation, the process of making your work visible, understandable and open to the search engines. Google does almost 90% of  all internet searches, so for most purposes read  Google = search engine.  First Google ‘crawls’ by means of a ‘bot’ or web-crawler program , your website and will ( if possible ) find all your pages and put them into its index. Then it will rank each page for the most obvious keyword phrase using the Google Algorithm. This algorithm changes over time and it is Googles stated intent to make the ‘most relevant information’ available to every searcher for the phrase they type in. Some of the most important factors are Links, Time on site, bounce rate, internal links, navigation, images and length of article. Also measured are loading speed, mobile ‘friendliness’ and finally the less tangible “user experience” is assessed.

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