You’ve probably heard the word SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) by now. In the digital space, we are surrounded by SEO specific terms: link building, local SEO, backlinks, black hat, white hat, cannibalisation..
As you can see in this article published by Cavaon, SEO is a certain way to make changes to your website and design content to make your site more attractive to search engines, like Google. Being SEO friendly means your site is ranking organically in the search engines for relevant keywords and phrases related to your business.
There are a lot of SEO terms, for that you would need to check an SEO Glossary. To simplify, here is a compilation of SEO the most used terms:
This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the page title or SEO title. When we search for a keyword in a search engine, you will see a list of results that appear as snippets. The SEO title is part of the snippet with a URL and a meta description.
HTML header tag is using for differentiate the headings h1 and sub-headings h2-h6 of a page from the rest of contents. h1 tag is the most important heading tag and least important is the h6 tag.
It’s an HTML attribute of the IMG tag. The IMG tag is responsible for displaying images. The alt tag/attribute is the text that gets displayed in case the image can’t be loaded (if the file is missing, for example).
To give you an example, here’s what a standard IMG tag could look like:
<img src=”clock.jpg” alt=”picture of a clock” />
Alt tags have some SEO value. The thing is that Google can’t (at least at the moment) see what the actual image presents, but it can read the alt tag. There’s no better way of informing Google what’s on your images than by using alt tags.
Keywords are single words or whole phrases of particular SEO importance for a given page or website.
For example, if your business sells “children’s clothes”, your main keyword could be “baby boy” (or baby girl) clothes. It is the keyword you want to rank for because you want people to find your website when they input “baby boy clothes” into Google.
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when pages on the same website have their focus on the same search term, which means, the company is competing against themselves.
A backlink is simply a link placed on someone else’s website that points back to your site. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO. Getting a lot of backlinks with relevant anchor texts is the shortest way of improving your search engine rankings.
Like everything SEO has its dark side too. Black hat SEO is the name for all SEO practices that are known for being manipulative or unethical, and in the long run can hurt your website, or even get it banned from search engines. On the other hand, white hat is what Google considers as good practices.
It’s a standard HTML link that doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Do-follow links are the most valuable ones from an SEO perspective.
PPC is a great way of delivering traffic to a website instantly, and it can be turned on and off. The downside is that it costs money. Sometimes, lots of money, making it difficult for smaller businesses to compete. That being said, as long as the ad spend is still generating a return on investment (ROI), it can work well as a stop-gap while waiting for longer-term marketing strategies take effect.
On the other hand, SEO takes a long time, but the rewards are greater as the more visible a website becomes organically, the less they may have to spend on paid search activity.
The short answer is, yes.
Google seeks to display information relevant to users in the search results. What would be the benefit of searching for something if the first 10 results are the same, copy of any other website? None. For this reason, Google will always give preference to diversified and engaging content. Besides that, copying content from another website implies legal questions, and it is considered black hat SEO.
If your company is looking to expand the reach of your services by using searching mechanisms like Google, contact us today and we will build the perfect SEO strategy for your business.