SEO FAQ

Welcome to our SEO FAQ, we’ll be writing about the most frequently asked search engine optimisation questions that we get… and that we imagine you’re asking yourselves day to day.

• What is SEO?
• SEO is a three letter acronym for “search engine optimisation”, which is the process by which websites are optimised to appear as highly as possible in the search engine results pages. It can also be said to be the process of getting visitors who see your search engine listing to click through to your website. SEO is not just about the optimisation of on-page factors like title tags, it also encompasses research of keywords, and off-page factors like link building.
• What is link building?
• Link building is the process by which websites “vote” for each other. It involves the placement of a hypertext link on one website which takes visitors to the link builders website. Links, or “backlinks” as they are often called are used by search engines to determine the authority and trust of the website being linked to.
  
  

  Image from Flickr, Author: J Kohen

• What is a backlink?
• A backlink is no different to any other hypertext link. The term backlink is simply used by webmasters to describe hypertext links which “point at” or deliver visitors to their website. They “point back” to the webmaster, so to speak.
• What is a hypertext link?
• Hypertext links are those blue underlined strings of text you see all over the internet. The most common being, “click here”. When clicked they take you another web site as specified by some fancy code inside the hypertext link. Search engine spiders also go along for the ride, indexing pages as they go.
• What is a search engine spider?
• A search engine spider is how search engines index the Internet. They’re little pieces of code that travel the web, much like a human visitor, recording what pages connect to what, the information contained therein, and more. You can block those little roaming pieces of code by using robots.txt or with meta tags in the header of your web pages.
  

  Each search engine has its own spiders who crawl the web and send results to their individual indexes. Users then search those indexes from the homepage of each engine.

• Why would I ever want to block spiders?
• You may have directories with private information, or information that search engines don’t need to crawl & index. Well written robots.txt files can also save bandwidth and stop some robots which you don’t want visiting your site.
• What is a search engine?
• Well known search engines include Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. A search engine creates an “index”, much like those found in the back of a book, and then tries to match user’s search terms with that index. Otherwise, we’d all be looking at a very, very large “Online pages” index, which would probably stand kilometres tall.
• What is a search engine index?
  
  

  Image from Flickr, author: Paul Keller

• A search engine’s index holds information about a website, allowing users to find it quickly and easily via keyword searches.
• What are keywords?
• Keywords are the words you type into a search engine when you want to find something.
• What is keyword research?
• Keyword research is the process used to determine which words or phrases to target for a website. Various factors are considered, including volume, commercial intent, competition and more. Common tools used to conduct this research include your brain, as well as Google’s keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword discovery, Keyword elite, and more. Google keyword tool is free and high quality, but many terms with low search volume can be difficult to get accurate readings for.
• What is commercial intent?
  
  

  Image from Flickr, author: A Magill

• Commercial intent describes the search engine user’s intent when searching for something. A phrase such as “buy lcd tv” can be said to carry high commercial intent, while a term like “buy LG 24 inch W2442PA-BF” is even higher. Many searches are informational, such as “lcd or plasma”, and “heat given off by plasma”.
• How do I do keyword research with my brain?
• Brainstorm. Think about what you would type in yourself if you were looking for a particular product, service, or piece of information. Keyword research tools can be a crutch that stops you finding the best terms.
• What SEO can I do without hiring someone?
• Keyword research is one of the best if you don’t have an SEO budget. Brainstorm with employees, partners and of course clients. Think about which pages the phrases you identify should be associated with what keywords.
• What does an SEO consultant do?
• It depends on budget, your website (or lack thereof), your competitive environment, and many other factors. Put simply, SEO consultants seek to get a web site to the top of search engine results pages.
• What tasks exactly do SEO companies perform, can you give me some examples?
• An SEO company or agency may:
  • Perform keyword research.
  • Optimise on site elements such as title tags, meta tags, site structure, interlinking, and complicated canonicalisation issues.
  • Build SEO optimised content.
  • Perform link building campaigns.
  • Advise you or your web development team on all of the above, without ever touching your website.
• What does canonicalisation mean?
• Canonicalisation is the process by which an SEO informs search engines of the “one true page”. Sounds like Lord of the Rings, but in reality we’re just trying to stop duplicate content creation by saying, “hey, search engine spider, I know you found this page which looks suspiciously similar to another page on this site, but I just wanted to tell you that the only page we want you to include in your index is at www.realpagename.com/realpagename.html please, please don’t penalise us!”.
  
  

  From Flickr images, author: NotoriousXL

• What is duplicate content?
• Because of the way pages on the web are handled by a variety of fancy technical creations, sometimes duplicates of pages can be found by a search engine spider. This is bad because Google doesn’t want to waste time or money indexing pages which are identical to other pages on your site. They also might get the idea that you’re trying to do something shady, so its important we try and reduce duplicate content if we want to maintain our speedy ascent up the search engine results pages.
• You’ve said “search engine results pages” a couple of times now, what are they?
• Search engine results pages, or SERPS, are the results which search engines display to users after they have entered a query. Google for example returns 10 results per search engine query, per page. Commonly used phrases include, “How do I check my SERPS?” Translated: how do I find out where my webpages are ranking on the search engines? “Something happened to the SERPS lately” Translated: I think Google has made an algorithm change, now my web pages don’t show up in Google anymore (I’m kidding… slightly).
• What is a search engine algorithm?
• A search engine algorithm, which companies like Google, Yahoo, and Bing all possess, is a complex piece of mathematical code which processes users search queries, compares the query to their index, and then spits out a search engine results page based upon factors unique to each algorithm.
  
  

  Image Source: Wikipedia

• What are some of the factors search engine algorithms use to rank web pages?
• This is a complex question, but in very simple terms they take into account:
  • Number of links to a website
  • The quality of the page from which that link came from
  • The quality of the domain that page came from
  • The variety of domains which those links come from
  • The various on-page tags, elements and attributes that make up a web page
• What is a good place to get links from?
• This is another hard one depending on how much depth you go into, but briefly, any place related to your website. If you’re a hairdresser you might ask for a link from a beauty salon, for example. You can also look for directory sites like the Yellow Pages, Dmoz, and the Yahoo Directory.
• What is page rank sculpting?
• It was all the rage until recently! Put nofollow on all the links that you don’t want to pass juice to and then use some really targeted anchor text on the links that are passing page rank. The theory went that you’d “funnel” all the juice to the pages you really wanted to rank highly, leaving contact pages, about us pages, and other boring stuff starved of page rank (because not many people care if their contact page can’t be found). The problem was, this whole idea is manipulative, and rightly so the major search engines penalised sites making heavy use of nofollow.
• What is nofollow?
• nofollow is a attribute assigned to a hyperlink element that tells search engines not to “count” the link for purposes of passing page rank, and not to index the page behind the nofollowed link. Pages already indexed are not removed from any index, however. The nofollow attribute originally appeared as a result of blog comment spam and other forms of spam, which it can be argued has been effective.
• What is page rank?
• Well, its not the “rank” of a “web page”, though this is essentially what most believe page rank to be (with good cause). Larry Page is one of the founders of Google, and the term uses his last name. Today, page rank is becoming less significant as a ranking factor. Just because one page has a page rank of 5 does not mean it will appear higher on search results pages than a web page with a page rank of 2. See: ranking factors.
  
  

  Image source: Wikipedia

• What is “anchor text”?
• Anchor text is the word or words used in a hypertext link. For example, this blue text is anchor text (leads to Wikipedia). Anchor text is useful because you can “inform” Google and your users about what lies behind the link. Informing Google or other search engines in this way helps them categorize and rank that web page next to other web pages. A web page about red cars with 100 links containing the anchor text “red cars” will rank higher than a web page about red cars with 100 links with anchor text like, “click here”.
• What is reciprocal linking?
• Reciprocal linking is where two websites link to each other. In the past webmasters constructed huge link reciprocation schemes in order to rank themselves highly in search engine results. Today, reciprocal links are sniffed out by search engines and their effect diminished. Reciprocal links are still valuable in certain situations, such as real estate agents linking to a mortgage broker, who in turns returns a link to them. Its called relevance.
• Why is relevance important in SEO?
• Its not just important in SEO, its important for your visitors. However, search engines like Google use relevance to rank your website against your competitors. One prime example is from the FAQ regarding reciprocal linking. Real estate agents are relevant to mortgage brokers. Links between them are natural, and visitors expect their presence. Large “farms” of links – pages with hundreds of unrelated links used for the purposes of building search engine rankings – are completely irrelevant to users, and Google/Yahoo/Bing generally completely discredit links from such sources. Likewise, a real estate agent with hundreds of backlinks from other real estate agents, removalists, property managers, home builders and bankers is likely to be seen by search engines as very relevant to searches regarding real estate agents.
• What is a doorway page?
• A doorway page is a commonly used page by disreputable SEO companies who seek to “game” the search engines to improve their customer’s website ranking. The problem with doorway pages is that they’re artificially created with the sole intent of influencing search engines. “Resources” pages or links pages with irrelevant or random groups of links are a dangerous thing to have on your website. If/when Google, Yahoo, or Bing find them, your website may be given a penalty which affects your livelyhood. Doorway pages are “easy wins” for SEO companies. If you think you have one, please contact me.
• What is hidden text?
• Hidden text, like doorway pages are an SEO’s attempt to manufacture ranking illicitly. Any page with white text on a white background is asking for trouble. An easy way to find this kind of text is to drag your mouse across the whole webpage, starting at the top left and finishing bottom right. Do you see anything that wasn’t there before?
• What are sitemaps? Do I need one?
• Everyone should have a sitemap… unless of course you have a 1 page website. Sitemaps can be useful for browsers to quickly find information, as well as for search engine spiders who can use the sitemap as a shortcut of sorts to index a website. Sitemaps become more important when a website is coded in flash, as flash has historically been difficult for search engines to crawl and index.
• Should I get rid of my flash website, then?
• Perhaps. If the entire site is one big chunk of flash, without any textual elements whatsoever, then yes. I recommend you start again with a good web designer who knows a little about SEO.
• Splash pages, are they bad for SEO?
• Yes. A splash page is generally, but not always, a big piece of Flash which either automatically redirects you to the front page, or lets you click the only piece of spider readable text on the page, “Enter here”. You just told Google your front page is about “enter here”, and at the same time you lost a bit of link juice through that link. Splash pages also annoy your poor users potentially causing problems with bounce rates.
• What is a bounce rate?
  
  

  Image from Flickr, author: Jan Ramroth

• A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who do not click through to another page on your website after viewing the first page they landed on. They essentially “bounce” back to the last page they saw before viewing your own. According to a Google engineer, Avinash Kaushik, “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis….” A bounce rate will be higher for informational sites, lower for low price ecommerce sites, and will vary dependent on a range of other factors.