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 and welcome. Back to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, as usual, and today we're on to part 24 of our SEO A to Z, where we're going to cover taxonomy to transactional intent.

So let's get started with taxonomy. So the word taxonomy generally means the science of classification or categorization. It's mainly used in sciences, but in SEO, taxonomy is also used, and it's used as a way of defining the structure of pages and content on your site and the links between them. So a well-organized taxonomy helps your users and Google understand the relationships between different pieces of content on your site. So things that involve your taxonomy are your website structure, so how you categorize content into different subfolders. So, for example, you might have a home broadband subfolder and then all subsequent content about home broadband comes under that folder and a mobile broadband subfolder and all subsequent content about mobile broadband comes under that folder and a mobile broadband subfolder and all subsequent content about mobile broadband comes under that folder. That's part of your taxonomy. You can also use things like categories and tags. If you're using, say, wordpress and using those functionality in WordPress so you can tag, say, recipes as being gluten-free or being lactose-free or being vegetarian. Those are all parts of the taxonomy of your website. So anything that you do to sort of classify and group content together based on shared characteristics is your taxonomy.

Next, we've got technical seo. So technical seo is any part of the seo process which is aimed at increasing the crawlability and indexability of a website. So examples would include looking at things such as page speed, site maps, structured data, schema, navigation, a whole bunch of other things. But anything that's kind of the technical nuts and bolts on how you best put together your website, the server infrastructure, all those things to do with getting it as well crawled and as well indexed as possible is your technical SEO Terms of service. Now, this is just another word that people use to refer to Google's guidelines as their terms of service. It's one use of the word terms of service. So if people talk about Google's terms of service and breaking Google's terms of service, then essentially they're saying you've done something that's against um, against their google guidelines, and the kind of thing that might get you penalized for the other um use of the word terms of services. Like most websites will have a terms of service, it's good practice to have a terms of service. If you just google around, have a look at lots of other websites and what they have on their terms of service, it's usually things like some of the legalities about you know where your, what jurisdiction, jurisdiction your website is based in and what laws apply and those kind of things. So it's just good to have and I will put that on every website terms of service.

Next we have tf, idf, which is short for term frequency, inverse document frequency. So term frequency, inverse document frequency, or t TFIDF for short, is, in very simple terms, is a formula that measures the importance of a word to a specific document. It's a term you might hear some people use but while it might in some small way be a part of Google's algorithm, very, very deep down, it's unlikely to have very much, if any, importance. It's a concept that real devotees of information retrieval may want to read upon, but for day-to-day seos it's not really something to worry about. But it's something you may hear people talk about who are sometimes you know those that kind of person that tries to use as many buzzwords as possible to try and bamboozle you and sort of impress you with knowledge, whereas if it's day-to-day, looking at trying to rank your content better, you haven't really got to worry about tf, idf. So I on that one.

So next we have thin content. So it's think content's a definition. It's a term that describes any page that has little or no value to end users. And you know google doesn't like thin content, um, it doesn't deem it helpful. So you want to try and avoid creating thin content because it could cause you problems if it's seen in excess. This was going back to the day when the panda updates really cracked down on thing content. So, yeah, you just want to be careful that, not to avoid it. It's where you just have pages that don't really say anything, you kind of create them for the sake of it and they don't really have any value. That's thing content. Try and avoid it.

Next we've got tiered link building. Now, tiered link building is a black hat link building technique where, to protect the site they're aiming to rank, often what they'll call their money sites. They will aim to get some backlinks to that money site using white hat link building techniques like digital PR, which is their first tier links spam links to the web pages that give them those organic links. The theory being is that they increase the page rank of the linking web page, that tier one page. It will pass through more page rank to the money site and increase its rankings while minimizing the risk of that money site being penalized for spam links. So it's essentially a method where you get legitimate links between you, your main website, and then those legitimate links. You then do a whole load of more dubious link building, more spammy black hat techniques, link building into the, into those pages to try and boost their page rank, which in turn boost the page rank to your money site, theory being that if you know anything goes wrong and there's a penalty given, it will be given to that site linking to you, not to your site. So you know it's a, like I say, I don't normally moralize about seo and black cat purposes. But if you're going to do lots of dodgy link building to somebody else's site and they may get hit, but hit for it, that's not really the greatest thing to do, not something I necessarily recommend doing, because you're essentially you're potentially hurting somebody else. If you're doing spam, links to your own websites or websites you control that ultimately are yours, fine, you know, because you're taking risk on your own website. If you're doing it to third-party websites with a hope of a gain on the other side, then you know. But the risk not being yours, that's a bit more suspect, if you ask me. But anyway, that's tiered link building. So if you hear people talk about that that tiered link building, that's the technique they're talking about.

Next we've got title, as in the page title. So the title html element of a web page is one of the more important on-page seo factors. Your page title is a strong indicator to Google as to what your page is about and it'll often be used as the anchor text of the link in the Google search results page. So it can also influence users on whether to click the link or not. So you always want to make sure you get a good sort of descriptive keyword, rich title. That's done in a way not spamming, obviously, because they you know Google won't like it spamming. But you know you want to include the keywords, descriptive keywords, about what the main content of the page is about in that page title.

Next we've got top level domain, or tld for short. So the top level domain for domain is like you know. So it's the dot com, the dot uk, the dot fr, the dot de, the dot whatever, dot ai of a domain. That's the top-level domain. It can send a signal to Google most specifically, though not always, as some of these are generic, but most of them are the geographic top-level domains. So if you've got a uk or fr or de, google will take it that this domain is going to target the location that matches the, the top level domain. So if it's a dot uk, then I think the site is going to be mainly targeting the uk, so fr, mainly going to be targeting france.

The exceptions are ones which have kind of been taken over by the web industry to be used for something else. So ai, which is the geographic top-level domain for the Ascension Islands, I believe, has actually been taken over by the AI industry. So Google now looks at ones like that which have been repurposed and used by specific industries for more specific purposes. As they now don't apply the geographic indicator to ones like that, they're kind of say okay, ai, the dot, ai, that's been taken over by the ai industry. We won't use that as a geographical indicator like. An early one was dot tv, which was um tuvalu and lots of tv stations. Um bought those back in, you know sort of probably 20 years ago. And that's where google says right, we're not going to assume that all these pages are about tuvalu, they're about the tv, they're about their tv stations. So but yeah, that's what your top level domain is. So in most cases it will target the um country that is given by the top level domain, but not all.

So next we've got topical authority. So topicalical authority is an SEO concept that shows that website can, over time, build up a corpus of content around a topic such that Google and visitors will start to consider them an authority in that topical area. So this allows a site with topical authority to start to rank well for keywords that match that topic, even against larger sites that might have higher levels of general authority but which aren't specialists in that area. And this is one of the reasons why at broadbandcouk we managed to rank quite well on broadband terms against much bigger, more general sites that covered similar topics. So in the uk we've got Money Supermarket. It's a massive site that covers lots of utilities because electricity, broadband, gas, insurance, credit cards, anything that consumers might want to buy and that they can save money on, and they do lots of price comparison across those. Now they're a big, general high authority site whereas broadbandcouk were a much smaller company, much, much smaller, because Money Supermarket are listed on the stock exchange in London of hundreds of staff. We were just a very small company Because we built topical authority around the term broadband. We could compete with them on quite big terms, big high traffic terms because we built that topical authority.

Topical authority some people there are doubters about it but I'm a strong believer in it because I've just seen it work for me over a large number of years and seen it working for other people. I've done whole further episodes on topical authority. So if you want to learn more about that, do look through the back catalogue on here and there's loads about topical authority and I'm bound to talk about it again in the future. Next up we've got topical authority score about topical authority and I'm bound to talk about it again in the future. Next up we've got topical authority score. So topical authority score, or TAS for short, is a metric we developed at Keywords People used to measure the topical authority of all the websites.

We discover a ranking on the first page of Google when we perform keyword clustering on sets of keywords related to a topic. So this is an excellent byproduct of the keyword clustering process, which our keyword clustering tool does is it gives an excellent view of the competitive landscape for topical area, as well as a comparison of where sites relate to each other in coverage. So if you are wanting to do this, I would say just go to keywords people use, do any kind of clustering process. Some of them are like this one-click clustering, where you can just give us a seed term and we'll go and get a whole load of questions and keywords and then form a cluster for you and if you do that, you can then see all the sites that are ranking across that sort of topical sphere and which ones are the strongest and how they all relate to each other, and and we can score it with an actual numerical score. So it's really, really interesting. Do take a look at that if you're wanting to see who your competition, your real competition, is, because it will bring up something you might not have noticed. It's really, really interesting, okay, next, we've got toxic link.

So a toxic link is a term coined by seo's to describe a link that may be actively harming your website's ability to rank. So toxic links can be backlinks from other websites to yours or external links, so that works, from your website to a third party website. Um, so this is all about where link spam may actually harm you. So a certain point, you know, if there's a, if there are websites that google knows are being used just to send links out to deliberately manipulate search rankings, they may start to penalise any site that gets a link from these. Now there is some arguments in the SEO community as to whether toxic links actually exist and that a single individual link can cause an issue. In that a single individual link can cause an issue, or whether you have to have a certain number of these links that are flagged as toxic before it starts to hurt you. Definitely, you can get penalised for links. So you can get penalised for having bad links, bought links, paid links, if Google decides that's what you're doing, so it can be done cumulatively, but whether there is an individual link can do it is a matter of debate.

Next up, we've got traffic. Traffic is just a shorthand word for the number of website visitors you receive over a given period. You can segment traffic by the source of the traffic or the amount of traffic different pages on your site generate. But traffic's generally just the catch-all term for people visiting your website, term for people visiting your website. Now, finally, for today, we've got transactional intent. So intent is you know what? When we say intent, we mean what's the, what's the aim of the person that's visiting the website, what's the, the job they're trying to achieve, what question they're trying to answer? And it has a type of intent and there are different types.

And transactional intent is the term used to classify search queries where the user is trying to find a specific product or service they wish to buy. So the user is ready to buy and is probably only trying now to answer the question such as where's the cheapest to buy, the most trustworthy place to buy, or the place that can deliver the fastest. This person with transactional intent is they know what the product is they want to buy. They're just now trying to choose exactly where to buy it from. These are obviously very high value Queries. These are the ones where you know if you can rank for these transactional queries. That's a good aim. Obviously, if you try to sell something, it's different to the other two query types they met.

The one prior to this is the commercial intent. This is where someone is thinking of buying a product. They've decided I want, say, a lawnmower, but they don't know exactly which one. That's commercial intent. That's where you're going to have kind of buying guides on different types of lawnmowers. Someone with transactional intent knows they want a specific brand and model and they're now looking to buy it, and that's where you're going to have pages very tightly focused on these specific brands and models that people want to buy, with the ability to buy and fulfill for them from that web page. So, yeah, that's everything in the teas. So we've gone. We finished the transactional intent. We started at the taxonomy covered quite a few things there.

If you think any teas that I've missed, please do get in touch and we can get them added. And before I go yet please, if you're finding these useful, if you want to do us a favor, it would be really appreciated if you can rate and review us on the podcast platform that you're using, because it really helps other people find us, and you know that's the aim we want to get found. We want to help as many people as possible, so please help us do that by rating and reviewing it. It would be much appreciated and yeah, until next time. See you later.

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