If you’re new to the world of search engine marketing (SEM), you may be confused by the terms we’re constantly slinging around. Don’t worry though–everyone has to start somewhere and our team of search engine optimization professionals at Big Red SEO are here to help guide you through the learning curve!
After you read and digest the terms and definitions in this article, you’ll be on your way to understanding the finer points of internet marketing and what we at Big Red SEO can do to help your company’s online presence!
301 redirect
A 301 redirect is used to direct web traffic from one page to another. 301 redirects are used (instead of simply changing your page’s URL) to preserve a page’s current ranking. 301 redirects are often used with business websites that are transferring from one domain to another, or if you have a website that’s accessible by more than one URL.
ALT text
Every image on your website should include ALT text, which is a description of that image that search engine crawlers can read to see what the image contains. If your images don’t have ALT text defined for them, these crawlers can’t identify what the images are about.
Black Hat Omaha SEO tactics
Just as there are white hat SEO tactics that follow search engine guidelines and are completely above-board, there are also black hat tactics that use unethical means to try to manipulate a website’s search engine ranking. Examples of these tactics include keyword stuffing, link wheels, and doorway pages. Using black hat Omaha SEO techniques to artificially raise your ranking can lead to penalties.
Google Algorithm Updates (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon)
Google makes hundreds of small changes to its search algorithm every year, but every so often it makes a big change meant to improve a specific user experience problem.
The first Panda update of 2011 was implemented to lower the rank of “low-quality” websites, allowing higher quality sites to rise to the top. The Penguin update in April 2012 was aimed at lowering the ranking of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. August 2013 brought the Hummingbird update, dealing with semantic search, and July 2014 brought the Pigeon update, which was meant to improve local search results.
Heading Tags
Heading Tags are a powerful tool in SEO. Formatting the text on your web pages with H Tags (like H1 and H2 Tags) allows for easy reading by breaking up the text into manageable and scannable chunks. Not only that, though, but search engine crawlers also look at H Tags to compare how relevant a given page is to a user’s query. Every single page on your website should have at least an H1 Tag.
Inbound links
Inbound links (or backlinks) are links that point to your website or one of its pages from an external site. Inbound links are great to have, but they have to be relevant to your business. If you run a plumbing company, say, having an inbound link from a company that manufactures sporting goods would be bad for your Omaha SEO. In the past people relied on purchasing thousands of spammy backlinks to raise their search engine ranking, but search engines have gotten smarter over the years to combat this black hat practice.
Keywords
In order to raise your website in the search engine rankings, you have to know what terms your ideal customers are using to search for your products and services. Our Omaha SEO company performs in-depth keyword research to discover these terms, and by using them strategically you can develop content that is found more easily by your potential customers.
Meta Description
Every page on your website should have a meta description associated with it, which you can think of as that page’s elevator pitch. That is, the meta description should give a compelling reason for a searcher to click through and read the rest of the page’s content. A page’s meta description appears below the page title and URL in the search engine results page (SERP) and should be around 140 characters in length.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is simply the implementation of black hat SEO techniques on a website other than one’s own for the purpose of sabotaging its search engine ranking. There are lots of unscrupulous companies out there that perform these types of services, but playing dirty is never the key to long-term success!
Penalty
If you’re caught using black hat SEO techniques to unfairly boost the ranking of your website, you could end up with a penalty from the search engines which can either lower your ranking or remove you from the SERPs entirely until the problems are fixed. Even big companies like JC Penney have gotten hit with penalties from Google, but as long as your website isn’t violating search engine guidelines, you should be safe from penalties.
Site Map
A site map tells search engine crawlers how your website is organized and exactly how they can follow its structure to be able to index every page. If you don’t have a site map, or your website’s architecture is poorly designed, crawlers can have more trouble accessing and indexing every page, which means that your pages won’t show up in the SERPs.
Contact Big Red SEO at (402) 522-6468!
Our Omaha SEO team here at Big Red SEO hope that this article helps you wrap your head around what we do on a daily basis. There are a lot of balls to juggle to implement and maintain a successful Omaha SEO strategy, and our team has the knowledge and years of experience to do it for you! Give us a call today at (402) 522-6468 or fill out our online contact form for a free basic website audit.