Pro-SEO

Welcome to the Pro-SEO blog on blogspot.
The purpose of this blog is to clear up some of the misconceptions people sometimes have when entering the confusing world of Search Engine optimization. So it's only natural that the first post on Pro-SEO should explain some of the terms that you will come across while studying search engine optimization.

What is anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible text on a hyperlink that you click that takes you to another page. In this sentence the word Google is the anchor text. Anchor text is important because it gives search engines a first glance at the content of the page, So if the page you are linking to is about Soccer Kits your anchor text in the link should be "Soccer Kits". A common mistake people usually make is having "click here" or something similar as the anchor text, This will drastically reduce the full potential for the text link.

What is a backlink?
A backlink is any link from one site to another. (and to a lesser extent internal links on your own site). Backlinks are important for search engine optimization, Backlinks from related sites are the best. These are sometimes called an IBL, or inbound backlink.

What is a bot?
A bot is what search engines use to spider the internet looking for sites, These are often referred to as spiders or spider bots.

What is cloaking?
Cloaking is a black-hat SEO techique sometimes used to deliver one page to a bot and a different page to human visitors. This is usually achieved by using a server side language to determine if the visitor is a spider bot or human. The page delivered to spider bots is usually stuffed full of keywords. This may result in your website being banned from Google.

What is keyword stuffing
keyword stuffing was used when search engine results were ordered by which sites had the word appear more frequently. So back in the day, If you wanted to rank well for "football kits" all you had to do is have "football kits" appear more times on the page than anyone else. These days though keyword stuffing is more likely to cause your site to drop down the SERPS.

What are SERPS?
SERPS are the search engine results page. It's the page you see when you search for a term on google or other search engines. Your goal as a webmaster is to get your site as high in the SERPS as possible and appearing as often as possible..

What is a Google Dance?
A Google Dance is what happens when google are in the process of updating their index. During this time you may see your rank in the SERPS drop, or you may disappear altogether. But don't worry, In most cases the SERPS are back to normal when the Google Dance is complete.

What is PageRank?
PageRank, Or PR, is something invented Larry Page at google.
It is the score google give you between 1 and 10 based on link popularity and the quality of sites linking to you. You shouldn't pay much attention to this, While it is fun to see the green bar move it has no actual value.

What is a stop word?
A stop word is a word that is ignored by Google. These are common words such as a, the, and.

Labels: seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 at 6/13/2006. You can skip to the end and leave a response.