In this post we examine key SEO terms and the way they affect your ranking ability on search engines. Our aim is to familiarize you with the terminology so that you’ll be able to point out issues that might affect your business and determine what actions you need to take to further improve.
Off-Site SEO
Pages Indexed
Indexing can be viewed as how many pages did google review from your website. If an error occurs with the crawler and some pages can not be read you need to find out why. The more searchable pages your website has the better.
This describes your domains relevance in your industry. Search engines strive to give the best answer to the users query. The more relevant your site is to the question the higher up it will appear in search results.
Inbound links are the number of links on other websites that connect back to yours. Its one of the most important ranking factors in high quality relevant sites.
Domain Age
Search engines don’t trust new websites and usually promote older ones. Anything under 2 years from the day you went live is in a “sandbox” of sorts until proven trustworthy.
Hosting Location
This has to do with the location of your hosting company’s servers. If your website is hosted in the United States and you operate from the US there is no need to make any changes.
Page Titles
Each page has a title that describes what that page is about. In page titles you should avoid duplicates and try to make the information as distinctive as possible while including your keywords.
Meta Description
Every web page also has a meta description. This provides Google with a short outline of what the page is about and displays 158 characters of it when someone makes a relevant search query.
Heading Tags
Headings <h1> to <h6> are used to highlight the most vital content on a page making your site even more user friendly and easier to navigate.
Robots.txt File
This is part of your website’s code. It tells search engines which pages to scan and which ones to ignore.
Flash Landing Page
Some websites still use flash landing pages as part of their design to add animation. Google and Apple devices can’t easily read flash and that can be a problem when it comes to indexing.
Error Pages
Error pages (404) are pages that have problems but are visible to Google. They should be corrected or redirected.
Readable URLs
These are URLs that are easy to read and don’t contain many special characters.
Content & Link Review
Locations & Keywords
We highly recommend you use the keywords you want to rank for & locations noticeably in your page titles and text. This sends out a clear signal about what you do and where.
Outbound links
These are links that originate from your website and direct users elsewhere. Having a few on each page is necessary as it shows what your work is associated with.
Internal Links
Internal Links are hyperlinks that connect one page to another resource on the same website. You can use them to tell search engines how your content is interconnected.
XML Sitemap
A sitemap is like a contents list for your website that you must submit to search engines so they can properly index it.
Physical Address
Having an actual address listed on your website is important for your local rankings (local SEO). Including a Google map link on your contact page is also advised.
Local Directory Listings
Citation websites are what the Yellow Pages used to be. Some have grown in popularity and should actually supplement your SEO efforts. It’s important that you list your business on the most important ones to tap into their audience. Just make sure all the information on them matches what you have on your website. Most importantly name, address and phone number have to be exactly the same. Some directory listings are free and in quite a few you can even add service descriptions and photos.
