SEO A to Z - part 11 - "Image Sitemap to Javascript"

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.

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello and welcome to SEO A to Z. We're here with part 11 of our SEO A to Z, and it's me, ed, here, as usual. And today we're going to go from image sitemap to JavaScript. And why are we going to JavaScript? That's because I've only got one J in our SEO A to Z. So if you can think of a J other than JavaScript that should be in the A to Z, then please do let me know.

Speaker 1: 0:47

Anyway, let's get started. So image sitemap so a bit like a sitemapxml, is for pages. An image sitemap allows you to tell Google about images on your site and what pages they can be found on. Now this is particularly useful if you're trying to get your images indexed so they can be found in google image search. So if you've got a site where you've got a lot of unique imagery on there and that's the the kind of thing that you're trying to get people to search for and find images and that you can provide on your site, then you really need to look into image site maps and getting an image site map built, because it'll really help get all those different images indexed in Google.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Next up, we've got inbound link. Now an inbound link is one that comes from an external website to your website. Now these are also known as backlinks, which we covered back in an earlier SEO A to Z, so I won't go into too much detail. But obviously inbound links just another name for backlink, and we obviously all know how getting'm getting good quality backlinks is kind of key to getting your site indexed and ranked. Now.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Next, we've got index talking about we've talked about indexing and index already so far um in this podcast. Now the index. What is the index? Now, people, when they talk about google's index, what they're referring to is Google's database of web pages that they're able to rank and return as results for search queries. So a web page has to be in the index for it to even be able to be considered as a search result. So yeah, so just consider the index as Google's database of web pages that they draw their search results from. Now, indexed that is a term we use when a webpage is in Google Index. We say it is said to be indexed, so it's like it's been recorded in the database and made available to come up for search results. And then we've got indexing another term.

Speaker 1: 2:39

You'll hear around this and indexing is the process by which Google places a webpage in its index. So we talked about crawling in an earlier part of the seo 8.0. Now, once a page is crawled, google will then look at it and decide whether it's going to index it, and that's the indexing process. So sometimes you'll find, if you go to your google search console, that you'll find google has crawled your website but has not yet indexed it. Now this is where is where it's been crawled, this page, and Google is now deciding whether to index it or not. And it won't index all your pages necessarily. If you create a site from scratch a brand new site with no backlinks, no authority, no history, and then put a million pages on it using, say, a programmatic method to create a million different web pages. Google's very unlikely to index all those pages straight away because it doesn't know who you are, doesn't know your history, doesn't your authority hasn't worked you out and you know it has a. Has the concept of a crawl budget again? Go back to that, though. We covered that in the c, in the c's on our seo had said um, it's only going to give you so many pages that's going to to put in the index. So you will find that Google will crawl your pages and then when it gets to the indexing part, it'll decide no, we're not going to put any more in from this website right now. This content isn't spectacular enough. There's not enough authority in the site to justify us putting more in. So that's the indexing process. That's where Google decides whether to put a page in the index and if it does, then it puts it in the index and then it is considered to be indexed. I hope all that index, indexed and indexing I hope this makes sense there.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Next up, we've got infographic. Now an infographic is a visual representation of data or information in a way that's attractive and easy to digest. So infographics are often produced as a form of link bait. So that's where people hope that third-party websites will link to the content, to the infographic. Now, often, sites that produce infographics will allow other sites to share that content in return for an attribution link. Now infographics are absolutely huge maybe 10, 12 years ago and was like one of the main ways of link those ways of link baiting and getting people to share and there was lots of really great examples. The less popular now it's less of a technique that I see people use, but If done well and if done on the right subject, then you can find that it's still something that can work. But you obviously need great design skills, you need great visualization skills and you need great ways of reinterpreting data in a visual way. So you might need help from designers that kind of thing to do this. But yeah, they are a good way of doing it.

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Next, we've got information gain. There's a concept that was included in a google patent on a contextual estimation of link information gain that was awarded in 2022. Now, in this patent it describes how google might rank pages based on how likely they were to bring new information that's the information gain to a browser compared with pages that the previous pages had surfaced. So this will be achieved by calculating what they call an information gain score for every page, after every query, page view and search engine results, page view, and then recalculating this after every new interaction. And then by doing this it should ensure that a searcher then continues to surface new information rather than only being stuck seeing pages that contain the same or very similar content.

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So this might be a situation where if someone is, say, researching mobile phones, they'll do the first query and it'll show them a set of results and a user might then look at a couple of pages, pages, a couple of search results, and then refine their search. Now, when they do the search refinement, when they're when they're in between search google, look and say, right, the pages they've already seen have covered these topics. So we need to surface pages that answer, that bring new information to this, this particular user. So it's kind of like a dynamic reordering of the search results, so giving slightly different results than just if a user had come straight in on the second search. They're saying, well, we need to give them information gain. We can't just show them pages that are regurgitating or covering the same exact information as this person's already seen. We've got to show them something new. This is the information gain concept. It's quite new. So the the um painting was only awarded in 2022. So this is a new concept and people are still kind of working out exactly how this works. But it's a good way of thinking when you're writing new content on a subject is to look, do some research into the competitors, what people are writing about already, and try and make sure you're writing something new, some new information, something that hasn't been covered, a new angle or new data, something new that you can't find already. And this is the kind of thing that will give you an edge over AI content as well, because all AI content can do is sort of cover information that's already seen. It never finds new information. Ai doesn't create new at present. It is only an average of the content it's seen. So this is a way of standing out above AI as well. So that's information gain.

Speaker 1: 8:00

Next up, we've got informational intent. So informational intent is a classification of any search query where the user's trying to find information that will answer a question in informational terms, rather than trying to find a product or service. So it's one of the types of intent and I'll come to intent because that's the next one on the list here. So if a query has an informational intent, then we know that the kind of content that needs to be returned for it is going to be educational. It's going to educate someone on the topic they're looking at rather than try to sell them something or navigate them somewhere. Um, it is a, yeah, purely like an educational. That's a right you've got to. You've got to create educational type content for that informational intent query.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So intent, which we've just kind of been talking about. So every search query that people use with google can be considered to have an intent. Now, the intent is what, the end goal of, the or purpose of what the person is searching for. So intents can vary widely across an infinite kind of possible search queries, but commonly they're classified as belonging in one of four types. They're informational, which we've just discussed, navigational, commercial and transactional. So a navigational intent is where a user is trying to find a specific website or web page so they may search for Amazon or, more specifically, for Amazon customer services, and that's where this person is searching and they're trying to get to a particular place or a particular page on a website. So that's a navigational type intent.

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Commercial intent is a term where we classify search queries where the user is trying to find a product or service that will solve a problem or need they have Now with commercial intent, the user is probably not find a product or service that will solve a problem or need they have now with commercial intent. The user is probably not yet at the point of making a transaction but heading in that direction. So you know, they might not. If they're looking at lawnmowers, yeah, they've decided what type of lawnmower and they may even be at the point of now trying to work out what brand of lawnmower. So they're going down the purchase part of the funnel and they've made, you know, they've got past informational that's sort of educated them on what kind of lawnmower they need. And now they're making more commercial type careers to try and narrow down brands and products they're going to look to buy.

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And then, final, obviously, we've got transactional intent. And transactional intent is where a person's decided this is the product I want to buy. I am now looking around for the best place to buy it from that and their choice might be pretty price, it might be customer service, it might be how quickly delivered, but this person is in the market for a particular product and they're looking to buy it. This is like the gold if you're at e-commerce site. These are the. These are the exact intents for people who are trying to buy and you want to be covering off for them.

Speaker 1: 10:41

And last of the eyes is internal link. Now, an internal link is a link between pages on the same site, so these are the links that you control. So it's really important to get your internal linking right, because you want to make your content easy for people to find when they're on your site. You want to help them navigate around the site as easy as possible. There's a whole load of ways of doing this, which I'm not going to cover in this podcast. I think I've covered it in previous podcasts. We've also got fantastic in-depth guide to internal links on the keywords people, usecom website, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So to learn more about internal links, do go there.

Speaker 1: 11:19

And then, finally, we've got the sole, single, solitary, lonely J, and that's JavaScript. Now, javascript is a programming language that can add programmatic functionality to a web page to make static web pages more dynamic, and this can include things like form validation, creating interactive content depending on mouse movement, hiding and showing content on the page. You can create entire games out of javascript. It's, you know, incredibly powerful, incredibly flexible. Used to be years ago that didn't think in javascript. Google couldn't understand it. But now, for several years now, what google will do when it crawls pages, they do actually then render all the javascript and you know, understand the page with javascript on it. So it's no longer a barrier to getting stuff indexed. And you know there's a few things.

Speaker 1: 12:04

If you're doing heavily working with javascript, you obviously want to be careful about um. But there's full in-depth guides to that. I'm not going to go into detail now. Um, but yeah, that's the j and that's the only j I could. I've racked my brain thinking of other j's in seo. If you find one, you know of one. You're just shouting at the podcast now again, but there's this other j head, this is the j. Do let me know so I can get it added to the home glossary and I will credit you for that. So that's the end of today's um. We'll be back in a couple of days with the next one. Do hope you're enjoying it.

Speaker 1: 12:35

If you've got any questions, if you think there's anything we've missed, then do let me know and until next time, see you later. Before I go, I just want 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 keywords people usecom 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: 13:14

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is Not that Hard is 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 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 channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.