SEO A to Z - part 1 - "A/B Test to Autocomplete"

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome to this latest episode of SEO as Ed here as usual, and today I'm doing part one of an SEO A to Z series.

Speaker 1: 0:35

So the SEO industry, you know, like all industries, has got a complete language of its own, and even seasoned SEO professionals might not know every single term in use across the whole sphere of SEO, and new terms are coined all the time. So you know even myself, you know, occasionally I'll come across people talking about something and, you know, using terminology that I don't know. So I've created over time, a big SEO glossary of all the terms I just thought you know it'd be interesting to go through them. I can give an opinion on some of them, I can maybe bring something new to each of these terms and if I'm missing something, I'd love to hear from you. So today I'm going to talk about SEO terms, beginning with the letter A. If there's any I've missed that you think I should add, then please do get in touch. I can add them to the glossary that we have on the Keywords for People to Use site. So let's dive in and we'll start with A-B tests.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Now, an A-B test is also known as a split test, and this is where you create new versions of a web page that you're looking to improve with how people interact with them. This is also kind of known as convert. It's part of the process of conversion rate optimization, so you're trying to increase, um, a certain aspect of how people interact with that page, be it the increased number of people that buy something, or increase the number of people that maybe sign up for a newsletter or something like that. So, essentially, you create to a new version of the page and you send a percentage of your traffic to the original page and a percentage of your traffic to the new page and then measure every time which version performs the best. Now, often you'll use, like some specialist software to help you do that traffic split and measure and how different people react to different versions. But it's a real foundational block of conversion rate optimization, this whole idea of having two versions of a page, an A version and a B version, and then testing how they both perform.

Speaker 1: 2:36

So the next day is about this result. Now, this is if you go to the Google search engine result page, do any search and for each result you'll next to the URL, there's three little vertical dots. So if you come up with a search and the first result was the BBC website bbccouk, where they list the URL in the search result there's three little vertical dots and if you click them, then it will give you about this result information which includes a varying amount of information about the site and the page and the author, if it knows the author, as well as information about the language of the site and what the target country the page is relevant for, and it can give you a whole load of extra context about each page and it's interesting to find what Google knows about pages and different sites. So, yeah, that's a little thing, that's a little, it's almost, it's almost an easter egg, because not many people know exists. So about this result worth checking out.

Speaker 1: 3:31

Next, we have ad content or ads. Now, the ad content of a web page is the content, that content or links which are displayed for the purpose of monetizing a page. So the most common form of ad content you'll see are display advertising and affiliate links. So display advertising is, you know, like banner ads, that kind of thing, and affiliate links where you know if you follow that link and say, sign up for a product or purchase something, then the page that you've been sent from will receive some commission. Now ad content is one of the three types of page content which Google define as the main constituents of any web page, along with supplementary content, which is things like navigation, and main content, which is the main sort of purpose of a page, the main content on a page to help a page achieve its purpose. So these ad content is one of these three constituent parts that Google breaks each page up into when it's analyzing the content on the page. And ad content is a real key part of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines which, if you're not familiar with those, those are the guidelines that Google Quality Raters use to make subjective assessment of pages to help train Google's main machine learning algorithms. So it's really key to sort of make sure you don't overdo the ad content on pages. Google does accept that people can use ads and monetize their pages. They see that as a necessary thing for people to do, but they also have limits on how much you can do. So if you put too many ads on so they distract from the main content and the main content, the main purse of a page, and you can find ads become problematic. But the best thing to do is read those google quality rate guidelines and I will put an into those in next up.

Speaker 1: 5:15

We've got affiliate now. An affiliate is a person or a company that promotes the products or services of another company in return for a commission for any customers they refer. So common online examples of where you might find websites acting as affiliates are sort of price comparison websites or review websites, where people review products and provide links to those products, um, but you'll find affiliates all over the place, um, and you know I do plenty of affiliate marketing myself. I've acted as an affiliate for over 20 years in many different spheres, most notably broadband, and some affiliates are very above board and give honest recommendations and others will only sort of promote those that give them the most commission. But in terms of what an affiliate is. They're the person who makes their income by recommending other people's products and then being rewarded for any sales that they drive to the merchants there.

Speaker 1: 6:10

So next up, we've got affiliate link, which I mentioned previously when we were talking about ads. Now an affiliate link is a link that will lead to a web page on a merchant's website that will contain tracking information so that any person who clicks and follows that link will then be tracked as coming from a certain affiliate. So if the person who follows the link subsequently purchases the product, then the affiliate is rewarded with a commission from the merchant for that sale. So affiliate links are considered as paid links by google, which means that you therefore have to tag them with a sponsored link or as a no follow link. Otherwise google may consider that you know. You therefore have to tag them with a sponsored link or as a no-follow link. Otherwise Google may consider that you're trying to manipulate PageRank by having those links if you don't mark them as having that kind of commercial relationship.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Next up, we've got affiliate networks. Now an affiliate network. They act as like a middleman between merchants, who are the companies that have products and services to sell, and the affiliates who have an audience they want to sell to. So the affiliate networks will provide tracking and transparency between the merchant and the affiliate to ensure that all sales are fairly recorded and commission is paid from merchant to affiliate. So you'll find affiliate networks are used by many big companies that have many, many affiliates working underneath them. Lots of smaller companies will not necessarily use affiliate networks. You know a lot smaller merchants might just use their own off-the-shelf software. We use our own off-the-shelf software with keywords people use for our affiliates. So you don't have that, that kind of transparency mechanism in between. But the affiliate networks are good once you get past a certain size. But there's an added cost of involving an affiliate network. So if you're a merchant looking to try and use affiliates, then it might not necessarily be in the first instance. It'd be great to use an affiliate network just purely because of the cost.

Speaker 1: 7:58

The next A is affiliate marketing. So we've just been talking about that across the past few entries. This is the joy of doing an alphabetical order. You come up sometimes in reverse, um, but yes. So affiliate marketing is a method of monetizing a website or an email list by recommending products or services of third-party merchants to your audience and then receiving a commission on any resulting sales. That's the kind of the basic idea, but I think we've covered it in the past few entries.

Speaker 1: 8:25

Next up, we've got AI generated content. So the rise of large language models LLMs like ChatGPT has made it very easy to create large amounts of content in a very short space of time. Now AI generated content is not limited to text, but it can also include images, videos and audio created by ai. Now what google doesn't want to see is its index filled with increasing amounts of generic ai content which it considers to be spam, and it's taken aggressive action recently to index sites with large amounts of ai content. Now, that's not to say that ai content hasn't got a future, but I think there's clearly going to be issues around just mass generating content at scale because of issues around. Obviously, ai content can hallucinate. You know it's not generating anything new. It's just working with existing content, learning from that and then creating. It's actually just rewriting what's existing. It's nothing new. Essentially, it's just an average of what's out there. So, yeah, I can see why google is going to take an action on that. So be careful if you're planning on creating lots of content using ai, it may not have the longevity that you would hope for.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Next up, we've got algorithmic penalty now. An algorithmic penalty is one that negatively hits a website in Google search results as a result of changes to Google's core algorithm. So these are penalties that you will find applied to a site if it has crossed a line one of the many lines that Google sets for various things, such as like link spam or on-page spam and these penalties are not ones that single out a website based on someone having looked at it manually and made a decision. These are ones where Google's algorithm has decided automatically, by itself, to apply this penalty to your website. So these are things that you obviously want to try and avoid, but it's not always simple to do, especially when these new penalties are brought in by A for the first time and B through core updates and things like that.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Next up, we've got alt text Now. Alt text is short for alternative text, and this is a method of adding a written description to accompany images on a website. The use of alt text is good for accessibility, as it's used by screen readers that help people who have visual impairments to understand the content of web pages. It's also used by Google to help understand images. In the same way, I think it probably was more important to Google in the past, when it didn't have any mechanisms to use machine learning to interrogate and understand the contents of actual pages. And it's not 100% clear if Google still is actually interrogating every page with machine learning, every image with the machine learning to understand the image, or whether how strongly it relies on alt text. But it's a good thing to do, just for accessibility reasons. So I would strongly recommend you do use alt text for any image you put on your website.

Speaker 1: 11:18

The next A is authority. Now, authority is a term that essentially covers, on a scale, the weight and importance of a website relative to others. So a website such as bbccouk will have a much higher authority, as it's a national broadcaster's website and it's been in existence a long time and it's rich in content and has many backlinks from third-party websites, so it's going to be a high-authority website. In contrast, a brand new website with little content, few or no backlinks and produced by an unknown entity will have very little authority. Now, sites with a higher authority tend to be able to rank faster and higher with new content than pages with low authority. Now Google doesn't publish an official authority metric. There are sites out there, like Ahrefs, which give things like domain authority, which is their kind of best guess pages or besides authority, and for many years google said they don't have a domain authority any kind of thing like that within their algorithms. But the recent google api documentation leaks there is a site authority attribute in there, so it's definitely something that Google have. They may have multiple authority metrics across a site, but the main thing to take into account when thinking about authority is when SEO a you know it's when seos talk about it. It's like a generic way of describing the effect of our established sites with high perceived authority appear to be favored by google.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Next day is amp, or accelerated mobile pages. Now it's a hate. This is a htl framework which is optimized for mobile browsing. It was launched by google in 2015. Now amp is designed to allow desktop websites to produce fast and efficient mobile versions. Now the problem that amp solved is now much less of an issue, as most sites nowadays are optimized to work on mobile, you know, straight out the box, and with mobile connectivity speeds being much higher, it's kind of a problem and that's been solved by the advance of technology, but if you ever see people talk about AMP or AMP pages, that's what they're talking about.

Speaker 1: 13:28

Next A is analytics. Now, you know analytics is known for a broad category of services that allow you to get data about how people interact with your website. So the core functionality would be to provide data on how many visitors you receive in any given time period and from what sources. And different analytics services provide a huge range of additional metrics to help you understand how your website is performing. So examples of analytics services include google's j4 which I hate, by the way, j4 is awful microsoft clarity, which is very good and I recommend, and clickycom, which I use, which is great for a sort of simple overview, but there's many others available and you know it's always key with any website to have some kind of analytics. So you know just basics on how many people are coming to your site, where from and where they're going to on your site.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Next up, anchor text. So anchor text is the descriptive wording of any hyperlink from one page to another page. So traditionally, like these are the pages highlighted in blue with underlined text on a web page. So often nowadays, you know, designers will use alternative highlighting, though often nowadays, you know, designers will use alternative highlighting. Google use this anchor text as like a ranking signal to try and determine what the subject being of a page being linked to is. So it's therefore it's better to use descriptive, keyword rich texture anchor text rather than just generic. Click here type wording.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Next up, we've got apis, which stands for application programming interface. So an api is an interface to a software application or service that allows other software to connect to it and interact with it. So an API allows you to build your own software that takes and extends the functionality of other services. So many software service tools and other services have APIs available so users can interact with them programmatically. And if you're on a certain level of package I think it's standard or higher on keywords people use, if you're on a certain level of package, I think it's standard or higher on keywords people use. We have an API and it means you can write your own software to essentially use keywords people use programmatically. So you can write your own software to sort of do searches at scale and get the data back in a format that you can then, you know, manipulate directly within software. It's not really beginner stuff, apis, but if you ever wondered what an API was. That's what it is.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Next, a is audience. So you know this is a simple one. You know your audience are the visitors to your website. They're the members of your email list, they're your podcast listeners, they're anyone that consumes your content. So when people talk about their audience, they're just talking about the people that come and consume any content that they create and, last up, we've got autoc.

Speaker 1: 15:45

Now, when used by an SEO, the term autocomplete will usually refer to the data that can be mined from Google's autocomplete feature. So these are like the autocomplete suggestions that appear in Google. As you start to type a search query, google will start offering you suggestions of searches based on the query that you're starting to write, and these suggestions are the most popular search terms related to the keywords you're typing, and this data is really really valuable. So if you're trying to discover how people are interacting with Google and topic area, it's a great sort of starting point to start going and look at what those autocomplete suggestions are that Google are providing and keywords people use. We've got a number of ways of mining the data with our Google autocomplete tool. So if you want to mine this at scale, then you can use keywords people use to do that. But even if you just go and do it manually, it's a fantastic way of seeing what people are. You know the popular volume searches people are using for any seed keyword that you're putting in. So that's it. That's everything in there Starting with letter A in our SEOo glossary terms.

Speaker 1: 16:48

Hope you found it useful. If there's any terms beginning with a that you think I've missed, then do get in touch. You can also see this glossary on our website and I'll put an insight in the show notes, and I am also working on publishing this into an ebook, um, which is going to make available, probably on amazon, but also available will be available free to download. So do keep listening, because when that is available, I will let everybody know and you can come and get it. So, yeah, hope you find it useful. Any suggestions? Do get in touch and look forward to seeing you next time.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 17:51

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to downloada free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.