Speaker 1: 0:54

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: 1:20

Hello, welcome to SEO, is not the end of our SEO A to Z. We're going to cover social traffic to supplementary content here. Let's get started with social traffic. So social traffic is traffic to your site that's generated by content and links on social networking sites such as Facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, any other social networking platform that is driving traffic to your site. You can be considered as social traffic and analytics software will show it as such, or someone might show it as links in different places, but this is your social traffic if you are generating it, even if you're not trying to do it yourself. Sometimes you'll find you will get people talking about you on social media and that is what we consider as social traffic.

Speaker 1: 1:57

Okay, next up, we've got soft 404. Now this is one that can be quite confusing for some people, so let's try and work through it. So a soft 404 is a page that looks and acts like a page not found, so a 404 page but actually returns 200 status code. So these numbers I'm talking about, these are numbers that the web server responds with to the browser or any software that is requesting a page, such as googlebot. As well as the content of the page, the web server will also provide a status code that gives a status about the page. So a 200 pay 200 status code means the page of requested exists. And then here is the content following if they get a 404 status code, that means the page you've requested does not actually exist. I am showing you the error page that explains to the user that this page of requested does not exist. Now, sometimes CMS is, or web software doesn't handle pages that don't exist properly, so they will return a page that the user sees that says this page does not exist. This is a 404 page, but the header code that the web server returns is 200. So google gets confused because it sees this as a page that exists, but it's saying to it the page doesn't exist and it's what they refer to as a soft 404.

Speaker 1: 3:22

And you want to try to avoid soft 404s, as google may may index the page and spend time crawling them rather than, you know, having it spend its time crawling the parts of the site you do want indexed. So, essentially, google's only going to crawl and index a certain number of pages on your site. There's a thing called crawl budget, which we discussed back in one of the other episodes, where, depending on the size, the authority of your site, how many links you've got pointed to, that kind of page rank you've got will depend on how many pages they're willing to crawl and index on your site. So if you've got soft 404s, they're essentially taking crawl budget away from real pages that should be indexed, that you do want indexing and not these pages that really don't exist. So you want to try and make sure you don't have soft 404s. If possible, google Search Console will report where it thinks you've got soft 404s. So if you see them reported in Google Search Console, then investigate and see if you can sort that problem out.

Speaker 1: 4:21

Okay, next up, we've got spam and two versions of spam, so we'll cover the traditional version of spam first. So spam it's content solely designed to manipulate search engine rankings, which does not provide any value to end users. So spam's a catch-all term to cover things like cloaking, keyword stuffing, spam links, thin content, etc. And spam techniques are commonly associated with black cat methods or people who aren't creating great content also spam. The second meaning of spam is an acronym and it's spam search position above mine.

Speaker 1: 4:57

So this is a tendency for some website owners to consider that sites that rank above them are spam, when the actual truth might be that the higher ranking sites are there on merit. So obviously you know, as a site owner, as a site content creator, you sites are there on merit, so obviously you know, as a site owner, as a site content creator, you generally well, you should feel proud of what you're creating, and people who create content do tend to rate it more highly than, potentially, people who are just reading the content or seeing the content. They're very active, creating anything, whether it's on the web or in real life. People who create and build something do rate them more highly than stuff that they've simply just come across or consume in any other way. That's why there's a thing called the ikea effect, where people who actually build flat back furniture, tend to value that furniture more because they've they've been involved in building it than if they just bought the ready-built piece of furniture. So same happens with web content. People produce it, they think it's brilliant, and then they think anything that ranks above them must be there is spammy. It's there by spam reason, so it's always only rankable because they've used spammy link building or other spammy techniques. Get above me when really they're probably possibly most likely they're on merit, and so this tendency to call anything above you a spam is called search position above mine. So yeah, it's just a second meaning of spam.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Right next up we've got Spider. So Spider is just another name for a crawler software such as Googlebot. Anything which crawls and downloads pages on the web for future indexing is a spider. So if you see people talk about spiders, that's what they mean. That's why one of the reasons people refer to the World Wide Web because you can spider across the web like a spider crawls across a real web in real life. Next we've got split test. So a split test is where you create a new version of a web page that you're looking to improve how people interact with it, usually looking to improve its conversion rate. You send a percentage of traffic to the original page and a percentage of traffic to a new version of the page and then you measure over time which version performs the best on whatever metric you're trying to optimize for, and you know they're also called ab tests and split tests are the foundational building blocks of conversion rate optimization. I've done whole podcasts on conversion optimization and we also cover it in an earlier episode of the seo 8z if you want to learn more about conversion rate optimization.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Next s is sponsored link. So sponsored is an attribute introduced by google that can be attached to a link that allows people to link to web pages where there's a commercial relationship, such as an affiliate relationship or someone who's paying for a link. That says to google this is a commercial, sponsored, sponsored link, do not count it for ranking purposes. So this is a way of protecting your site from being penalized for having commercial relationships involving links, as the link will not contribute to help rank the destination page in the search engine. So essentially, it's the way that google says okay, we understand that some people are going to have commercial relationships and pass traffic along for commercial reasons, such as an affiliate, as I say, like affiliates do, or if someone just wants the traffic, so they're paying to have a spot on a page and they're hoping that people will flow through from that site to theirs for other reasons, and it's a way of doing that in a way that's open and transparent to Google, where you say don't count this link because there's a commercial relationship. It is sponsored to achieve the same effect if you want. But this just allows you to be very specific if you really choose to be. I personally never use this. I've always just like carried on using a nofollow link for anywhere I put affiliate links. So it is always good, if you have a commercial relationship, like affiliate links, to set that nofollow or sponsored link. You don't want to get caught out for any of the way. It's pretty obvious for google to work out affiliate links, especially if they're going through one of the established affiliate networks. So, yeah, use these attributes if you're doing that kind of link.

Speaker 1: 8:43

Next, s is a squeeze page. So a squeeze page is a very specific type of landing page which is designed to capture a visitor's email address, most often in return to some kind of gated content or other lead magnet, such as an e-book content or other lead magnet such as an ebook. So what makes squeaks pages unique is that use. They usually have lots of the usual sort of supplementary content of a page removed and we'll talk about supplementary content in a minute or two so they remove lots of the usual stuff you have on a page, like all the navigation and headers and things like that, so it's not detract from the email capture request. You really give, like the pages to nothing else on the page to distract them from the offer and from the email capture form that you want them to do. So you're really kind of squeezing the content and squeezing their options down to just being able to essentially give them your um, give you your, them your email address, or leave. Basically those are the torches. You're really squeezing them down to try and get them to take that action you want them to do.

Speaker 1: 9:37

The next text is structured data. Now, this is the same as schema, basically, which we talked about just a couple of episodes ago. So that's any kind of data that's designed to be machine-readable and used by Google to understand various types of content, things like break runs, product data, that kind of thing. So if you want more info on that, go to schemaorg. Next up, we've got subdomain. So a subdomain is a subdivision of a domain. So if your naked domain is domaincom, then if you had some content on blogdomaincom, then that is a subdomain of the main domain.

Speaker 1: 10:12

And there have been lots of arguments in the SEO community as to whether you should or should not split sites up into subdomains. Google has repeatedly said it's fine, fine, but the argument still persists. I have seen where google will sometimes work out that a subdomain is very closely related to a main site to the point where it will actually start considering the same for ranking purposes with keywords people usecom. We've got helpkeywords people usecom for all our help content because it's on a different domain and on a different wordpress install. Google started to clump helpkeywordcom content into the same google search console profile as keywords people usecom. So sometimes it will bring it together like that, but whether it does or not, I think can be a bit hit and miss.

Speaker 1: 11:03

This is followed up by a subfolder, which is our next item on the list of s's. This is where people have the should you have subdomain versus subfolders argument. It's a bit like a religious war in SEO. So a subfolder is a folder within the URL of a web page, such as exampledomaincom slash subfolder. So this is where subfolders later sort content into categories and subcategories and you'll see this used a lot and it is the more common way of doing it. So for example, at broadbandcouk we had like a subfolder slash home broadband and a subfolder slash mobile broadband to mix the two up so that you know, mobile broadband and home broadband were kept separate from each other in subfolders and then within that we had reviews from on both of them and it kind of kept the content separate in subfolders and it's the way we arranged the site and it's kind of a classic sort of hub and spoke or sort of topical authority, topic content type model where people do that and that's the way of using subfolders. Some people again this is again back to the argument with subdomain some people think, oh, you can do it all in subdomain so you could have homebroadbandcouk and mobilebroadbandcouk.

Speaker 1: 12:14

I personally will always go with the subfolders rather than with the subdomains, unless there's a really good technical reason or it's something you're not really trying to rank for. Like with keywordspeopledoescom, we weren't really trying to rank the help pages particularly so we didn't mind putting it on a different subdomain. Last up we've got supplementary content also sort of to SC in some cases. So supplementary content or SC of a web page is that content which helps a web page deliver a good user experience but which is not part of the main content of a page. So the most common item of supplementary content is site navigation links. Supplementary content is one of the three types of page content as defined by Google, together with main content and ad content.

Speaker 1: 12:57

Supplementary content is covered in detail in the google quality rate of guidelines. It is worth paying attention to supplementary content because, not just for seo purposes, but also for conversion purposes, it helps people find out where to go next. On your page you can highlight certain areas of your site that you want to draw people into and you can, kind of like, move other areas away that are less important. Um, so yeah, pay attention to it. Read the google quality rate guidelines. So that's it.

Speaker 1: 13:22

It's taken three episodes, but we have completed all the s's. I think s's is possibly the biggest section so far we've come across in this a to z um, hoping you find it useful. If you think we've missed any s's, do let me know. We'll get them added in at the end. And yeah, just before you go, just to say if you are finding these useful, if you're enjoying the podcast, please do rate and review us on the podcast app that you're using. It really helps, and these apps suggest us to new users and helps us broaden our reach. It'd be a fantastic favor to us if you could do that. And, yeah, we'll see you next time on seo, it's not that hard.

Speaker 1: 13:59

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: 14:37

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 keywordspeakleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.