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. It's me here, ed Dawson, your host, as usual, and today we're on to part 26 of our SEO A to Z. We're going to cover web crawler to zero volume keywords. So let's get started. So, web crawler yeah, it's just another name for a crawler or a spider which we've spoken about in previous episodes. You know. So, googlebot is the most well-known web crawler and it crawls the internet. It finds new web pages, finds new content on existing web pages, finds links between pages and saves copies of them for later indexing. Okay, next up, we have web hosting. It provides you with the physical and logical space on a server where your website actually operates from, so a basic hosting service might provide you with some space on a single server shared with multiple other websites and customers and more complex hosting services. For, you know, much bigger sites may have component parts hosted on and replicated across multiple devices in multiple data centers worldwide. So it's just physically the, the actual physical layer where websites actually are stored and where they're served from.

Next we have web scraping. Yes, so web scraping, also known as just simply scraping, it's the process of using software to download and retrieve data from other websites at scale so it keeps people use. We use software to download pages from google and scrape the people so ask data, autocomplete data, ranking data and all sorts of other information from the search results pages. So that's a type of scraping that we use and it's part of our service. I mean google download and scrape data themselves so they can build their index and search result pages. So, yeah, and scrapers often use proxy services to escape detection, because many websites don't like being scraped, and so if you're going to engage any kind of scraping and he's run into trouble finding that sites are blocking you, then just look at using a proxy service to get around that issue. Next, we've got web server, so the webver is the actual software on your web hosting that listens for requests for web pages on a website and then serves them to whichever person has requested them. So popular WebServers include Apache, nginx and, amongst others. Some like Nodejs tends to use its own built-in server, so there's various different ways of doing it, but the most popular common one is apache.

Next up, we've got website. Yeah, so a website. This is a very basic one, but they're all in here for completeness. Yeah, it's just a term to cover a set of commonly related pages served from the same domain name, and you know a website is a website.

Next, we've got website monitoring. Now, downtime can negatively affect your ranking, so downtime is when your website goes offline. It's unavailable. So you can use website monitoring software to alert you to any issues you have with your site so you can react quickly to minimise the effects of any downtime. So basic uptime monitoring can be found in tools like Uptime Robot. But for more sophisticated seo checks like, say, monitoring robotstxt for changes, then a tool like little warden is worth looking at, because if your robotstxt gets altered and I've seen it happen where your robotstxt gets altered accidentally to to change to block all crawlers means that google will then think, oh, I'm blocked from this website and you can quite easily de-index your entire site by accident if you block crawlers. So having things that can watch out for changes on your site that could negatively affect your SEO is good website monitoring software to use.

Next we've got web spam. That is just another name for spam. So you know anything that's done to manipulate search results and can be considered web spam and it's just sort of the long form name of spam. Next we've got white hat SEO. So white hat SEO is the opposite of black hat SEO. It is the use of SEO techniques that do not break Google's guidelines. So it's the type of SEO that Google wants people to do. The closer you are to white hat SEO, the less issues you will potentially have.

The downside to white hat SEO is because it is the least aggressive and it's one which follows all the guidelines. It is the one that can take the longest to get results. Obviously, black hat is all about shortcuts which have risks. Grey hat is likes to sit in the middle and will push the boundaries a little bit, but will not try to go too far. But you know you skirt with potential penalties, but you're trying to really just stay just on the right side of the line. White hat on the other side will take longer in general to get results, especially in very competitive niches. Especially, you've got lots of black hats operating, but it is the one that has the most longevity. So if you can break through into a niche and, with white hat seo, and beat out anyone using black hat and gray hat techniques, you are the one that is going to survive the longest. So it is where I tend to align myself. Probably nowadays I'd say I'm more on the white hat side. That's not to say I've never done any black hat or grey hat in the past. I've talked about some of the things that have caused us issues and penalties in the past. I think it's a case of once bitten, twice shy. The more you get hit with penalties, the more likely you are to try and avoid them, and the easiest way to avoid penalties is not to break the guidelines and so. But it depends on your Risk tolerance, your budgets, your motivations and the people you're working with in the demands that are being made of you as to what sort of steps you'll take Along the line from white hat to black hat.

Next up, we have WordPress. Now WordPress is the most popular CMS system used for creating Websites. I mean over 40% of all websites are powered by WordPress. It's an incredible ecosystem of the actual core WordPress itself and also the plugins that third parties can provide for you can do just about anything you want in WordPress. I, third parties, can provide for. You can do just about anything you want in WordPress. I don't use WordPress for everything that we do. Some of my sites are on WordPress, others we code from completely or from scratch. But if you're looking to just to get started or even run quite complex and in-depth you know ecommerce and even more sites then WordPress can be fantastic choice to use. It's one I definitely recommend all beginners use, just simply because if there's something you need to do with it, you can generally find a plugin and usually a free plugin that will let you do whatever you want with it. So if you are not a technical person not wanting to be coding sites from scratch, then definitely WordPress is something I suggest you look at for getting any kind of site done. Don't bother looking elsewhere, just use. I would say okay.

Moving on to X, in our SEO a to Z and we've got one entry for X and that is the X dash robots dash tag, the X robots dot tag. So it has a similar effect to the meta robots tag, but it's instead of providing it on the actual source code of the html, it's provided in the header response from the web server, rather than in the web page itself. So, just to remind you, the macro robots tag is a element that allows you to define directions to crawlers as to whether they should crawl a page or not and whether or not to index a page, so you can actually provide this information in the header, like the user agent that we spoke about in a previous episode is provided in the header rather than on the actual page. It's a way of using that meta robots tag in the header rather than on the page, and it's good that it exists, because it's the only x that I could think of. So it's really good there was an x there to put it in, because it would have been annoying if we'd got a missing letter in the alphabet. So that's the x robots tag, which means we're swiftly.

I've got, and that is your money, your life, or ym yl for short. So your money, your life. Topics are those that google puts more scrutiny on when it's deciding whether to include web pages in their index. This is so they can minimize the risk of harm to people from poor or malign advice. So google defines yml topics as those pages or topics that could impact a person's future, happiness, health, financial stability or safety. Now there's much more detail on what google considers your money, your life and the additional scrutiny it expects to take in their google quality rated guidelines. So we covered those guidelines before and I've done even I did a whole series of podcasts on the google quality rate of guidelines. They really are something you must read if you're at all serious about seo. Um, yeah, and they cover ymyl your money, your life and why it's important. So these are areas where it's harder to compete, harder to get going on ymyl, um, but generally they are topics that are good. If you can get ranking on them, they are going to be the ones that will be able to earn you more revenue than others because they're important to people and there's plenty of people out there who are trying to provide services to Z.

The last letter, the SEO a to Z, and again just one said here so it's zero volume keywords. So zero volume keywords are those which key research tools will tell you have zero search volume. Now this means that many people ignore zero volume keywords because I think if the keyword research tools are telling me there's zero volume, then they're not worth going for. However, if you look at almost like all people also ask keyword phrases in a keyword research tool, they will give you a zero search volume result. And that's a false result because we know that people also ask. Results are based on real questions. Real people ask google, sorted by volume. So if google is there saying here's questions, people also ask. We know google's been asked those questions before and it's giving us the, the one the most asked questions first. So it means the.

You know the keyword research tools are wrong and they're wrong because they only work on a subset of sample data. They don't have the entirety of all the search data that google does. Google doesn't make this available. This, this data set of what the volumes are, to everybody. It's google's proprietary data that they don't publish it. What these keyword volume tools work on is these estimations from other data sources and they only really can pull out estimations on very high volume keyword sets, which means that a huge amount of keywords out there. They're going to say a zero volume.

But you're missing an absolute trick If you don't look at zero volume keywords. You know, basing a content strategy on zero volume keywords can actually bring great results as they help you cover a topic in such depth. It grows your topical authority over time and it also naturally starts to build rankings for many related long tail keywords which lead to well diversified traffic acquisition across a broad set of keywords covering a topic in depth, rather than just concentrating on your topic, just on high volume keywords, where there's so much competition. But it also means you also miss out covering the topic in its entirety, so you're harder to build your topical authority just going for high volume keywords. That's why zero volume keywords yeah, you must not discount them. You must, must take notice of zero volume keywords. So that's it.

We. We've gone from A to Z and you might think that's the end, but no, it's not, because there actually are a few more things that we need to cover and I'll be doing that in the next episode, which will be the final episode of the SEO A to Z. So until then, if you're finding this useful, as I've been asking in lots of episodes beforehand, if you haven't already, could you please rank and rate us in your podcast app. It really helps us if we get rankings and ratings. It helps us build our reach, reach more people, help more people, and that's what we want to do. We want to help as many people as possible. So if you could help with ranking and reviewing us and rating us, that would be fantastic. And yeah, so until next time I will see you later. Take care 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.

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