"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Speaker 1:
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. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome to SEO is not that hard. And today we are on to part two of our SEO A to Z and we are starting at backlink and hoping to get to browser. So let's get going with that looking about.
Speaker 1:
So let's start with backlinks. So backlink, this is a. It's a link from a page on a third-party website to a page on your website. So sometimes you might hear people calling links between pages on the same site as backlinks, but technically these should be called internal links. Um, yeah, so backlinks really are links from from one site to another completely different website and, yeah, if they're linking within the site, then they are internal links. I mean, technically it's a backlink from one page to another page, but really in SEO terminology, backlink is links from other sites to your site or a site you're working with. Basically, we've got a complete, in-depth guide to backlink on keywordspeopleusecom. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So next up, we've got a backlink profile. So a website's backlink profile is the complete picture of all the backlinks that point to the website, and they can be categorised by volume, anchor text, types of links and the sources of those links. So if you hear someone talking about a backlink profile, that's like how all the different backlinks pointing to an individual website look like compared to another one. So people often compare backlink profiles between two websites when trying to see which one should be performing better for certain things within SEO.
Speaker 1:
So now, yeah, backup is the next one. So a backup is a copy of the website code and any related resources like databases, images, other files, and you should ensure everything you make that makes up your website is regularly being backed up, so that should you get hacked or your website is otherwise lost because sometimes servers die in data centres then you can restore it from those backups. Now some, if not most, hosting providers will automatically be backing up your website for you. Others, you may need to do this yourself. So just make sure you find out which and just action is appropriate. This is always one of my top SEO tips is always make sure that everything you do is backed up, because things happen, shit happens, you know, and you will end up if you're not careful. You don't want to lose years and years of work potentially by not having made sure this is happening.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got bad neighborhoods. So bad neighborhood is a concept that says that sites that break Google's guidelines can be considered to be in a bad neighborhood and that you don't want to associate them with them if possible. So this would involve mainly involve avoid linking or linking to or being linked from a site in a bad neighborhood. Now, whether Google believes in this concept, that's something that's a different matter. But I would certainly think twice before linking to a site in a bad neighborhood. Now, whether google believes in this concept, that's a different matter. But I would certainly think twice before linking to a site that I've believed was penalized by google manual action or a even an algorithmic action, or I knew was using techniques which could cause it problems in the future if they weren't already. There's definitely things in the google api leak around link spam mainly appears to be incoming links. I would say um, but that's not to say that google isn't clearly flagging sites as spam sites. So, yeah, you want to try and avoid linking to them if possible.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got bing. Now, yeah, you've probably heard of bing. It's the newest competitor search engine to google but, that said, it only has an audience of around about eight percent of that which google has. So, while it's useful to ranking in bing and you know it's a to do the not it's not really going to move the needle in terms of making a massive difference to your business. But it's always useful and interesting to see how two different sites might behave between bing and google, because it could essentially point out to you if a site's been hit by google but is ranking better in bing. Maybe google's got an issue with it.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got bing west webmaster tools, which is bing's equivalent to google search console. I've got to admit I've never actually logged into it but, uh, registered my sites with it purely because of the the difference between you know how much little traffic bing sends in to google, but yeah, they do offer an exact same, pretty similar service to google search console. Next up, we've got bing bot, and that is just bing's crawler software that crawls the web to discover new and updated content, and in the same manner as Googlebot, which is Google's crawler. So if you see bot in any of your logs, that's where it's come from. It's Microsoft's Bingbot and that's just crawling your site.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got Blackhat. Now, blackhat is a term that covers SEO techniques which are against Google's terms of service and which look to exploit weaknesses in Google's algorithm, and an SEO who uses black hat techniques may refer to themselves as a black hat. The risk with black hat techniques is that Google will penalise your website if they detect you exploiting them. So, yeah, this is a contentious thing in SEO. Some SEOs are really really against black hat techniques and some SEOs who are black hat are really really against people who are against black hats and think that white hats, which are the opposite of black hats white hats are people who only follow Google's guidelines. Some black hats think white hats are suckers, basically because they only follow google's guidelines.
Speaker 1:
Now I sit on the fence on this one. I've done stuff in the past that has been could clearly be called black hat. Um, like buying links, for example. We used to do a lot of link buying back in the day, sort of 12 years ago, before penguin came, and we got hit really badly. And I've experimented in the past with the Black Cat stuff. I find the trouble with Black Cat is it doesn't tend to have great longevity. So if you're building this long term, I find that Black Cat can be a bit too risky. But I find Black Cat interesting. You learn a lot about an algorithm by just even just keeping an eye on what people are doing. Black Cat wise in terms of what loopholes they exploit, because it teaches you about how the search engine works. But at the same time I don't use them commercially because, yeah, I say I want that longevity, but you can learn from it. Um, I don't moralize. If people want to do black hat stuff, that's absolutely fine. You know it's not against the law. All power to them. The only thing I would say that is a moral issue is there's techniques such as tracking other websites to place links on them. Now that is illegal, that is against um, all sorts of different legislation depending on where in the world you are and where in the world the services are that you hack and and you know you just shouldn't do that because you're encroaching on other people's services in a way that is against the law. So don't do that right.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got blog. Yeah, everyone knows what a blog is, but it's you know, does everyone know what? Where the term blog comes from? Well, it's coined as a short name of the term weblog. So you know, blogs. Originally they're almost like online personal diaries, but the term since has become shortened for any website running a blog style with posts ordered by date, most often using wordpress, which again is probably something you've heard of very popular blog software. But wordpress can also be used for creating sites that aren't blogs essentially. But that is the term for a blog and a blogger someone who operates and writes for a blog. Nice and simple.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got bounce rate. Now, the percentage of people who leave a website without taking any action on that page, be it clicking a link, filling the form, watching a video, etc. That percentage of people is called the bounce rate, and bounce rate may be used as a ranking factor. Um, and we've seen in the google um api leak that there is definitely stuff about how people interact and bounce off pages. We know that google is using clickstream data and I've done a recent podcast about that. I said we're about episode 120, if you want to go back to that. So bounce rate can be an issue, but there's no magic bounce rate that you've got to hit or miss, because google looks at all these kind of metrics in terms of how you relate relative to other sites that are ranking for the same thing. Because in some types of sites where you know it's a very quick like what date, what's the date of some celebrity's birth You've got to go to a website, read that date and then bounce off somewhere else, whereas other topics that are much more in-depth, you may end up, you know, expected to be spent a lot of time on that page and then potentially go forward to other pages. So there's no number. If someone says 80 bounce rate is terrible. It might be for some sectors, but not for others. Um, one thing you definitely want to watch for is if you're bouncing back to the search, if you're not answering people's questions to bounce back to the search and then click on another page and then that's their last click is on another site. Google is going to. If that happens, a lot of people's going to see that as a signal, as that other page that people have ended up on is more relevant than yours and is likely to push that up in the in the serps. So, yeah, it's something to think about, but not to obsess over too much.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got breadcrumbs. Now, breadcrumbs are a navigation method that provides a method for users and search engines to see how pages relate to each other within your website's hierarchy, and you'll usually see them just under the page header, navigation. Then I'll look like a a little yeah. Well, essentially they're breadcrumbs like from hansel and gretel. When they went through the um forest and they in the fairy tale they left, they dropped little pieces of bread behind them so they could find their way back. By following the breadcrumbs back, you'll see things that say like home, then a little arrow and then a category page, then a arrow and a content page and now in the current page you know they might say home, seo glossary, and each one's a link to the page in the hierarchy so you'll recognize them. They're really, really powerful. I strongly recommend that you put them on any website you have. They're great for internal linking, they're great for people to see where they are and it's great for um google to see what the hierarchy of your site is. So, yes, strongly, strongly recommend you look at breadcrumbs, and I've done a whole episode on it. So if you just search um for breadcrumbs and seo is not that hard in whatever platform you'll listen to this on, you'll find a whole episode about it.
Speaker 1:
Next up, we've got broken links. Now a broken link is a link from page to another page that no longer exists. So, yeah, at some point this one web page is linked to another web page and then, for whatever reason, that that web page has been linked to has been removed from the internet. So therefore, when you click that link, it goes to a 404 page or just to you know if the website's completely disappeared. It'll just go to nowhere.
Speaker 1:
Some people actively search for broken links, backlinks on third-party sites, and then contact the site owner to let them know that the link is broken and suggest the link to a page on their site instead, and this is known as a broken link reclamation. So you might have backlinks pointing to your web pages on your domain that no longer exists, and this can apply to internal links as well. So it's not just backlinks from third party sites. Also, this can apply to internal links as well, and this means you know you're losing link equity and what you need to do is reclaim these links. And you can do this by using a log file analyzer to scan your web server logs to look for pages on your site that have been requested which also have in that request. It will tell you which referring web page is making that request, so you can either 301 redirect to any old page you're also finding that are being linked to to a more relevant page, or you could contact the third party site that's providing that link and say to them hey, can you actually link this different page on our site? And obviously, if it's an internal link that's broken, you can fix that internal link yourself.
Speaker 1:
Finally, we've got a browser. So a browser is an application that allows people to open, interact with websites and web pages, such as chrome and safari. Interestingly, we know from the google API leak that google uses clickstream data from the chrome browser and as part of its ranking algorithm nowadays. So, and that is billions of people using chrome. So the browsers are actually that much more important for SEO than probably people realize. That's not what you can actually do, but just be aware that google is watching how people are interacting with your site through browsers, what click paths they're taking, and it just shows that it is important and I've always said this previously, but it's always important on a page to make sure you give people an action that you want them to do, whether it's to you know they've read your content. What's the next thing you want to do? Is it to read another guide? Is it to sign up for an email list? Is it just do something? Um, have it clear to them what to do, because that click stream is being watched. Oh, so that's everything for today. So that was backlink to browser. That's all the b's.
Speaker 1:
If there's any glossary term seo 8 is a term that you think begins with b that I've missed. Please do get in touch so that I can add it to the glossary. On keywords people use. I'll put a link to every um, any resources. I've mentioned um in this podcast. I'll put the link to it in the show notes, so do look at them, and then we have a complete glossary of all these terms and everything to z and beyond on keywords people use, and I'll put that in the show notes as well. So, yeah, thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:
Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that, you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I'll 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. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.
Speaker 1:
Seo is not that hard. Is brought to you by keywords people usecom, 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 keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a 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 channel5. On Twitter, you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.
