Blogging A to Z: Your Glossary Guide for Success
Blogging has come a long way. From the earliest online diaries and journals, “web logs” became blogs, the noun turned into verb and, before we knew it, the vast array of topics and niches exploded into a blogosphere — with over 500 million to be found and 7 million posts every day. So whether you’re a seasoned blogger or completely new, you’ll need a smattering of the lingo for this journey. From the basics (Article, Feed) to the techy stuff (CMS, XML), take this as your handy A-Z for blogging success. ABC, D-F, G-J K-M, N-P, Q-S T-V, XYZ Article A is for… Article. An easily-digestible slice of written content. Once the preserve of print media, Articles can of course cover an infinite number of topics and themes. The idea is to keep readers informed, educated, and entertained — in a single sitting, or perhaps while they are on-the-go. Come up with a hook to engage the audience of your Blog Article right from the start. Choose a clear subject and take a unique point of view. Select a topic you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. Think about a current trend, an issue that piques interest, or a problem to be solved. Use your own words and ideas to develop to a unique voice and perspective in your articles. Finish with food for thought or a Call to Action (CTA). This will all help attract an audience and encourage social sharing. See also: Niche Author The creative brain behind the content. It’s their unique voice and perspective that breathes life into a text. Authors are named and credited with a byline (like “by Joe Blogs”) alongside a date of publishing. See also: Blogger Affiliate Marketing When readers click on links you’ve shared and buy something or take an action, and you then earn a little something each time, that’s Affiliate Marketing. Let’s say, for instance, you have a guitar blog, and you include sponsored link to a popular guitar manufacturer. When your readers click on that link and buy an instrument, you might earn a commission. It’s a way for bloggers to earn while helping others discover cool products or services. A potentially lucrative endeavour. But don’t mislead or overpromote: it’s essential to strike a balance between earning and bringing genuine value to readers. Plug that guitar because it rocks. See also: Monetisation Anchor Text The clickable text on a link, Anchor Text is there to act as a description for said hyperlink. For example, if I were to say that it’s so easy for anyone to buy a domain name and build a great website. Anchor Text also makes it easier for readers to find useful info on a page, but also helps search engines by detailing what your blog is all about. See also: Hyperlink Alt Text/Tag Alt Text (“Alternative Text”) is the brief description that you can add to an image on a webpage to give it more information or context. However, it exists within the HTML code. To describe an image to your readers you’ll want to use a Caption instead. These tags are optional, but useful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s also a good thing for those who may not be able to see an image. The text can be read out loud by screen reader software or Alexa (or your favourite). Some choose to declare image rights/authorship in the Alt Text, but this isn’t really the place — better to state this clearly in the Photo Credit and other copyright notices. B Blog, Blogger First coined in the late 1990s, Blogs are now staggeringly popular. It’s a way to share our experiences and ideas. The ease and speed of Blogging is arguably the main factor. It’s ripe for the modern age. Forego the smoky publishing house: you are the author, editor, proofreader and publisher, all rolled into one. And if you are, then you may call yourself a Blogger. There are millions out there all vying for our attention. Of over 1.6 billion websites, 500 million are certified blogs, according to hostingtribunal.com, and 7 million new articles posted every day. Blogging Platforms A collective term for all the apps, software or services that let you create and manage a blog. Some of the most popular Blogging Platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. For more, see: CMS Blogosphere The Blogosophere is the entire network of blogs and bloggers on the net. Blogtopia, the Blogolopolis, Blogton-on-Sea, Blogstonbury Festival — none of these choices ever proved quite so popular. Backlinks Also known as an Inbound Link, a Backlink is a connection from one website to another. In the context of blogging and SEO, the term generally refers to links that point towards your blog or website from external websites. Links that point from your blog to other websites are Outbound Links. These offer your readers chance to gain additional info or sources related to your content. Links are a fundamental part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Search engines take quality Backlinks as a sort of vote of confidence for the relevance and quality of content. By contrast, linking to less credible (or dodgy) sites can damage your rank. See also: Link Building Bounce Rate A certain number of website visitors may take one look at your website and run. Navigating away without so much as a click is, in the world of web analytics, a metric known as Bounce Rate. A high percentage isn’t good. It would suggest visitors aren’t finding that content very relevant or interesting. Fortunately, you can do things about that. See also: Quality Content C Canonical Links Technical stuff now. A Canonical Link is an HTML tag that directs to a primary webpage, preventing duplicate search results. That is to say: every website is made up of multiple pages and Canonical Links point to the most relevant one(s). Visitors can then arrive at a logical top-level page (eg., your Blog Homepage). With platforms like WordPress, this is
URLs are your first line attack
URLs are important on-page SEO elements as we use them to travel from a page to another so they underpin your entire website. When you create a new site, create it with SEO in mind and try to come up with the best way to form URL structures for it. What Google says Google recommends using short URLs, thus trimming unnecessary parameters. In Google’s article on URL Structure it is mentioned that complex URLs can become an obstacle for crawlers and Googlebot may consume too many resources thus making it impossible to index all the content on your site. “Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.” The ironic thing is that Google preaches but seems to be ignoring its own recommendations. Just take a look at all the Google Maps links, such as: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=98115&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1&iwloc=A What short URLs can do for your SEO Short URLs are easier to: Copy and paste Share over the Internet Email Write on a business card Write directly into your browser Spell when shared over the phone These are just a few of the benefits of having short URLs. However, even though the URL is short, it should be descriptive of the content the visitor will find on that page. For instance, here are some examples of good URLs from our website: https://www.123-reg.co.uk/domain-names/ https://www.123-reg.co.uk/vps-hosting/ How including keywords in your URLs can help Specialists recommend including in the URL the keyword we are targeting for that specific page. This will not only help with optimising the page for search engines, but also make it easier for any person to accurately deduce what information he will find on that page. Make use of Google’s Keyword Tool and SEOMoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool as these are two great resources for your keyword research.
Titles give your content a name
So many web pages on the Internet have poor page titles like “Home”, About us”, “Services” or no titles at all. Web page titles are very important because these describe the content on a page and, from an SEO point of view, they are priceless. There are some CMS (content management systems) that can create the title for your page from the main heading ( H1 tag). However, this is a general title and doesn’t say much about the content that can be found on that page. That’s why it’s important that you write your own relevant title for each page. What is a web page title? If you are using browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you may notice that these don’t show the page title text unless you move your mouse over the tab. Maybe that’s why so many people pay little to zero attention to web page titles. Take a look: You can also find the titles in the source code of your web pages within the title tags- <title></title> – included in the <head></head> area. Why are titles important? The title of your page web is what makes it unique. If people find your content to be useful and attractive, they will most likely share it and when this happens, the title of your page becomes the representative text of what’s on that page. Web page titles are important for: Web browsers Browsers use the title of a web page for various purposes, such as: labelling browser windows, links added to favourites or bookmarks, tabs, as well as mark entries in the history of your browser. Search engines Search engines are using your web page title to determine what content or information is included on that page. That’s why it’s recommended that you include your primary keywords in the page title, so that your page can rank higher. When searching for “register domain name”, search engines will return several results and based on the title and the keywords included web users decide if it’s relevant for them or not. Therefore, the title can encourage people to click in order to find out more. Social media When people are sharing your content on social media, the web page title will be published automatically along with the meta-description you wrote for that page. If you have web page titles and these are well written, be sure people won’t hesitate to share your content with their friends. As you can see, there are so many benefits to using a title for each of your web pages, so take the time to create it so you don’t miss out on all the advantages.
Quality, quality, quality – The better you are the better you rank
Usability, links and content all have an impact on search engine rankings. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are constantly trying to improve their algorithms so that web users find exactly what they are looking for in as little time as possible. In general, to rank higher in search engines, you site should be: User-friendly, easy to navigate and understand Useful by providing relevant information and high quality content Accessible to the majority of browsers and browser versions Links It is a known fact that high quality sites are more popular and earn more links than low quality ones. Today or 10 years ahead, some search engine algorithms will change but these principles will be constant. If the content on your site is high quality, it will attract attention and get people to write about it and share it. This translates into valuable links and better rankings. Usability Usability and user experience also have an impact on search engine rankings. A quality site is also a site that has a good structure that people find to be logical and easy to use. If the site is easy to use, it can increase its popularity and, as a result, influence its search engine ranking. That’s why it’s important to determine which site structure would make it easier for your visitors to navigate and ensure their experience on your site is positive. If they are happy with your site, they will share it, bookmark it and return to it every chance they get. All of this is beneficial for your site from an SEO point of view as you are getting backlinks and can promote your site efficiently. Content worth sharing Publishing unique, appealing and useful content on your site is essential to SEO. The content on your site should provide solutions, solve problems, teach or guide your visitors. When they enter your site as a result of a search on Google, for instance, your content should satisfy their quest and informational needs. When visitors find what they need fast and easy, you get bonus points not only from your visitors who can recommend you to their friends, but also from the search engines. Use every tool you have to give your visitors what they want – useful content backed with examples – images, podcasts, videos and other multimedia files that can help you reach your goal.
Paid for or not paid for? Investing in Linking
Buying links is not the most effective technique to earn your way to the top rankings. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin believes that paying for links is short-term and a waste of money because: Rankings are tactical: When you pay for links, you’re earning a small amount of traffic and the conversion is a lot lower than if you would grow your site with honest branding, trust, social media and word-of-mouth. It’s Overpriced: Buying links is more expensive than you would think. You could pay several hundred pounds for a few links in a post, but prices are a lot higher when you are dealing with big sites with a great authority and huge amounts of traffic. It’s Risky: Buying links is not accepted by the major search engine Google, thus you might be penalized for being a “link spammer”. Are paid links a waste of money? Buying and selling links to increase ranking was considered normal back in 2000 but 7 years later, Google declared that manipulating search results with paid links was not an acceptable SEO link building technique and will be penalized according to their Webmaster Guidelines. However, depending on the source, the quality of the links and the short or long-term impact, paying for links can sometimes be a good way to increase your rankings. There are three main types of paid links: Directory links Directory submissions can be a useful component of your link building strategy as long as you select just a few relevant and authority directories to submit your links to. When you have a new website and want to get the word out there and get some traffic back to your site, you can use online directories for that. Some are paid and some are free, but the important thing is for these to be relevant for your site, otherwise you’ll be losing money as well as time. Paid blog reviews Paid blog reviews are not as trusted as unpaid blog reviews. That’s because people tend to assume that a paid review cannot be honest or critical because the author has been paid to write it. On the other hand, when you pay someone to review your product, the review might just not be as favorable as you’d wish it to be. However, if the review is positive, it can work in your benefit and generate the buzz you need to make your product known to the public. Blog reviews also have a great effect on your SEO because when you choose a popular blog that is relevant for your business you can get high-quality links and targeted traffic especially. Online PR links Paid PR distribution sites are only valuable when you use them to share real news. Of course these can work against your company if you are publishing three, four, five press releases a week. It’s unlikely you have such big news to share every two days, thus you should limit your press releases to when you are promoting new products or services, or when you are hosting an event or conference that is of real interest to clients or potential clients. In other words, you can’t get away with spam or press releases that aren’t newsworthy. Press releases are meant to increase brand awareness and generate buzz around your products and services. So, should you invest in paid links as part of your SEO strategy? Yes, as long as you are aware that this is a short-term way to drive traffic to your site. Otherwise, invest the cost of paid links into promoting your business online through the use of fresh content and social media sharing.
Old is Gold in terms of domains
There has long been much debate about whether older domain names rank higher simply by age or more by having more chance of being indexed, linked and found, but even after Google’s most recent changes, the general consensus still appears to be that an older domain name can help with your search engine ranking. To get the best value out of an old domain name however, remember that SEO is a package of tools. An old domain without an track history may be limited in worth but an old domain with a strong existing PageRank, a set of worthy backlinks and a track record of traffic becomes very valuable, but equally will be reflected in the cost if you are looking to buy a domain. So let’s have a look at how the various factors may affect whether or not you buy an older domain name: Availability A targeted keyword in a domain name can be a massive boost to site rankings and with often limited availability of those in the first-come-first-served market of domain names, a ‘previously-owned’ domain offers a chance to tap into that potential. Equally it may be the best domain to match your branding is not longer available new, but it may well be owned by another who has yet put it to proper use and may even be keen to sell for the right price. Quicker results Many experts now suggest that it is far more difficult for new websites to achieve decent rankings on Google. This may or may not have a scientific reason, but with more domains than ever an older domain with an existing ranking is easier to push up the list from lower down than jump straight in. In addition, an older domain is more likely to have more Google trust and organically good rankings for keywords that can quickly be tapped into. PR, PR Many domainers will constantly cite PR as their measure as to how valuable a domain is. In specific terms they are referring to Page Rank, so where the domain ranks on the search engine lists, but more generally it can also apply to Public Relations. The more popular the domain the more value it has. That is important not only to help you work out the value of a domain you are considering buying, but also as to the value of any advertising you may be able to sell on the site once you own it. In terms of attractiveness to would-be advertisers, a top page ranking is a lot more appealing than one several pages on which is unlikely to attract their money. Link value Google’s new focus on the need for relevant and quality links has made this factor even more important. A domain name with a batch of authoritative links to sites relevant to the content you want to push, has great value in the Google-sphere. Equally, quality is the important measure as quantity may actually have a negative impact if the links are deemed irrelevant to the content on the site. Traffic Heavy traffic domain names obviously come at a premium, but they can offer obvious benefits. It’s a bit like buying a ready planted flower garden compared to planting the seeds yourself which is the standard approach of buying a new domain name. However, be sure you know what traffic you are buying into. Is it still relevant to what you want to put the domain to use for? Traffic can go down as well as up, so make sure you know exactly what is driving that traffic there before you invest. Once of the biggest fears of those looking to buy a second-hand domain is that they may fall foul of a scam. What if the seller doesn’t actually own that domain? what if the statistics provided are just wrong? If you’ve searched for a domain name recently on 123-reg you will have seen we now offer premium domain names as alternatives to your initial search. Our premium domain names are all domains previously purchased by someone that they are now selling for a set price via our premium domain partner. While not every domain listed will be aged, the chances they have some additional ‘age’ value over a new domain name as well as the usual ‘catchy’ nature of premium domains. So if you want to find the best way of tapping into the value of older domain names, our Premium domain offerings are a great first point of call and you can be sure the seller is legitimate leaving you with at least one less worry.
Making your site unique
When you are starting a business, targeting the general public is hardly the way to go. You want to offer a product that satisfies a specific need. That’s why when you are targeting general keywords such as travel, footwear or domain names, you can have 5,000 searches a day but in reality discover these keywords rarely convert. The competition is fierce on general keywords so your best bet is using long-tail keywords. There are millions of unique searches performed by people that are looking for specific information on the Internet. What are long tail keywords? Keywords can be short-tail (often generic keywords such as “women sandals”) or long-tail. Long-tail keywords are phrases starting with three, four terms that are extremely specific to the product or service that you are selling. Long-tail keywords are more efficient and more likely to convert because when customers are searching for a product, they use a highly specific phrase to ensure they will find exactly what they’re looking for and buy it immediately. Why use long-tail keywords? There are two very important reasons to use long-tail keywords: Rank well much easier than with generic keywords where the competition is high Increase sales, as people who reach your page through the use of long-tail keywords usually end up buying the product or service. Highly specific long-tail keywords often rank well easier than generic single keywords. For instance, a site that sells travel packages for a specific area (mountain, sea or Dubai, London, etc) would convert better when it’s optimised for long-tail keywords such as “all inclusive Dubai holidays” or “family short break London” or “couple short break London last minute” than it would for a generic keyword such as “travel” or “travel packages”. When you choose to optimise for generic keywords, you will soon come to discover you have to compete with big sites, in this case travel sites like Travelocity.com and even Wikipedia, Yahoo.com or CNN.com. Also, people are often using generic keywords when they’re researching on a product or service and they’re not yet decided. When they visit your site on a long-tail keyword, it means they’ve already made their decision and are ready to buy your product or service. This also means that long-tail keywords send you targeted traffic that is there to buy, not to research. Create more pages Put a list together with the long-tail keywords relevant for your niche and create more pages for each combination. Google likes the websites that include more pages so you can’t go wrong with that. Each webpage should be unique. This means unique title, meta description and content for each page where you focus on a specific long-tail keyword from your list. The purpose is to optimise for each valuable keyword so you can outrank your competitors, attract more customers and get more sales. Combine short and long-tail keywords There are many benefits to optimising your website for long-tail keywords. However, try not to overdo it and optimise for keywords that are too specific because you might get little traffic which would make it difficult to sustain your business. You should have many pages with content that is optimised for long-tail keywords, which will send you a smaller amount of traffic that is highly targeted. Along with that, you should also create a few pages with content optimised for more generic keywords. These pages will send you a larger amount of traffic, although less targeted. At the end of the day, it’s the 100 buyers that count, not the 1,000 visitors that are visiting your site for research purposes only.
Descriptions – more than just what you see
The meta description is mainly used by search engines and is a great way to get traffic to your site, but it can be tricky to get it right. This short paragraph is used to describe the information that is included on a page and it should be written to “sell” it and get people to click. The meta description is the short paragraph that appears on search engines like Google so it’s very important to pitch it perfectly. It’s an elevator pitch We are all busy people, so you have just a few seconds (10, the most) to pitch your idea, article, product or whatever it is that you’re trying to get the world to see. Take an hour or two or how many you need to come up with maximum 160 characters of content that will summarize the information on your page and get people to click. So your meta description should be short, catchy and perfect for your target audience. Craft your description Start with research. See how your competitors or other businesses you look up to are writing their meta descriptions and what details they are including, then start crafting it. You might not get it perfect the first time, but with practice you will get better and better at it. Soon enough you will be able to write it in a few minutes. Another thing to consider is the uniqueness factor. Try to write your description as creatively as possible because if it’s predictable, chances are your audience will not pay attention to it. Things to do, things to avoid The meta description should be written for people, not for search engines. You can include a keyword or two that is relevant for your site or business, but try to avoid over-optimising it or stuffing it with keywords. Each page should have a different meta description, usually between 100 and 160 characters, otherwise search engines tag it as duplicate content. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action, such as “Buy now”, “Find out more”, etc. Have we missed anything? Do you have any tips to share that can help write a perfect meta-description?