The Digital Marketing Bible (A-K)

ALT TEXT

Alt text (alternative text) is a short description, read only by computers, that describes a website image. It is also valuable for informing visually impaired surfers, using screen-readers, what’s on the page.

So, what does alt text mean for your SEO strategy? It’s extremely important to make images SEO-friendly and the best way to do this is by optimising alt text descriptions, but without keyword-stuffing. Although the user won’t see this text, Google’s all-seeing spiders will seek it out and it will contribute to your page ranking.

There are instances when alt text needs to be more than a simple visual description of the picture and include its function. For example – a warning sign displaying a picture of a shark shouldn’t be described as “Shark picture”. It needs to be “Shark picture warning sign”. This will further assist Google in evaluating the image and returning the best search results, which will in turn benefit your site’s SEO.

ANALYTICS

Where would us SEO specialists and webmasters be without tools like Google Analytics or its many alternatives, like Piwik, KISSmetrics and Woopra – and where do they get these bizarre names?

Website analytics reveal ueful information about site traffic, often in real-time, and are crucial to the development and refinement of effective SEO strategies. Whilst they provide vast amounts of data reporting, interpreting it can be tricky and the learning curve is as steep as the Eiger.

Googler Analytics (undisputed King of the Hill if judged on sheer numbers) divides its functions into three main categories:

• Data Collection & Management
• Data Analysis, Visualisation & Reporting
• Data Activation

These further subdivide into no less than twenty sub-categories that reveal virtually all you need to know about the numbers, demographics, interaction with third-party systems and other online behaviours of your site visitors. Hell – they can probably even tell you their shoe sizes! The reporting is also highly refined and includes a comprehensive range of access controls, management tools and alerts that can be configured by the user.

ARTICLE SPINNING

Article spinning is an SEO technique commonly employed by webmasters and entails rewriting an original article for inclusion in other websites or similar sources of backlinks. Although spinning copy is one of the many practices that gets Google’s hackles up and therefore considered a ‘black hat’ method (duplication and plagiarism being two of the many things hyper-sensitive Google abhors) it can still be an effective tool if used judiciously. There is even software on the market that can do the content-spinning job for you, instead of having to train monkeys or use copywriters, although the results can be erratic, to say the least, and the monkeys may well do a better job.

It’s not entirely clear to what degree search engine algorithms can detect spun copy and then impose ranking penalties but it’s certainly preferable to manually spin articles using human beings, rather than scrape copy from other sites wholesale and pass it off as original content of your own. That would be tantamount to poking the Google-monster with a sharp stick.

AUTHORITY

The authority of domains and individual web pages are ranked on a 100-point scale (100 being the best) that aims to predict how strongly they will rank with Google. Authority stands alongside Relevance as one of the twin towers of SEO.
(Contd.)

The authority scale works logarithmically (cue blank expressions!). A real-world example would be: if you join a gym and start bench-pressing 30kg, it’s relatively easy to up the weight from 30 to 40 to 50kg. However, once you move on to heavier weights, it becomes progressively harder to make those jumps. The same is true of authority rankings – it’s easy at first but far harder to grow your score as you creep up the scale towards 100.

Domain authority is currently measured using over 40 ranking signals and below are some of the most dominant: –

• Link building – The number of high-quality websites that are linking to yours and the number you link to your own site. N.B. We said ‘high-quality’ and linking to toxic sites packed with spam or with zero relevance is likely to incur the wrath of all-seeing Google and wreck all your valuable SEO work by attracting harsh penalties. In general, the more links to trusted sites the better.
• Domain age – there’s nothing you can do about the age of your website, but it’s a bad idea to frequently change domain names, because if your position was on page one, it will often take search engines a good few months to catch up and give you such favourable ranking again.
• Keywords in Domains – this is proven to work best if the first word in your domain name is a powerful keyword. Keywords occurring later in the name carry less SEO weight.
• Site quality – this is all about offering great user experience which begins with ensuring that pages load real fast. If they fail to do so visitors will vote with their feet or in this case their mice. Page copy should be well written and relevant. Again, it’s all about providing a great user experience.
• Traffic – this is something that will grow with time if you’re committed to using all the SEO tools in your bag. Search engines will notice sites that have a lot of visitors and view them as having greater trust and authority, ensuring they will inexorably climb up the rankings. How long this takes will depend on the competition.

AZURE COGNITIVE SERVICES

Azure Cognitive Services is a suite of cloud-based AI services offered by Microsoft Azure, designed to empower developers with ready-to-use AI capabilities that enhance applications without requiring extensive machine learning expertise. These services cover a broad range of AI functionalities, including vision, speech, language, and decision-making, enabling developers to integrate features like image recognition, text translation, sentiment analysis, and chatbot interactions seamlessly into their applications. Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms and APIs, Azure Cognitive Services facilitate the creation of intelligent and user-friendly applications across various industries, such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing. With Microsoft’s commitment to security, scalability, and compliance, Azure Cognitive Services provide developers with the tools needed to build innovative AI-driven solutions while ensuring data privacy and regulatory adherence.

B2C

Business-to-consumer. Content should be tailored to your targeted visitors in the same way as B2B. A good SEO writer will understand the mindset of prospects and pitch their copy accordingly by establishing the right tone of voice.

BARD

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service from Google AI, powered by LaMDA. It allows users to have conversations with a large language model, which can be used for a variety of purposes, such as brainstorming ideas, sparking creativity, and accelerating productivity. Bard is still under development, but it has already learned to perform many kinds of tasks, including:

• Generating different creative text formats of text content, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc.
• Translating languages
• Writing different kinds of creative content
• Answering your questions in an informative way

Bard is currently available to a limited number of users, but Google plans to make it more widely available in the future.

Bard is a powerful tool that can be used for a variety of purposes. It is still under development, but it has already learned to perform many kinds of tasks. If you are interested in trying Bard, you can sign up for the waitlist on the Google AI website.

BLACK HAT SEO

Black hat is an umbrella term for any nefarious SEO technique that breaks search engines rules or terms of service by trying to fool them into ranking sites higher, almost always to the detriment of user experience. It’s considered unethical or bad netiquette.

Below are some common black hat strategies that make Google and other search engines blow a gasket.

• Keyword stuffing – one of the main ways (but not the only way) that search engines establish relevancy is by scanning websites for keywords typed into a search enquiry. Crafty web developers will don their black hats and freely distribute these keywords throughout a site’s copy. But this is a trick that most search engines became wise to years ago, and will now penalize once they detect it, usually by reducing the site’s ranking. Worst case scenario is that the offender is totally banned from search results.
• Hidden text – this is a sneaky approach to keyword stuffing that can’t be viewed by site visitors, as the text is buried deep in the computer code. Back in the day it was easy for web developers to employ simple tricks, like disguising text by matching it, chameleon-style, with the background colour. But this and many other old ruses are easily spotted by today’s intuitive search engine spiders and you will pay a high price for your subterfuge!
• Doorway pages – essentially these are fake websites crammed with keywords, key phrases and meta tags, purely aimed at attracting Googlebots and other search engine spiders, rather than genuine traffic, and thus improving rank. Sometimes termed cloaking or redirection pages, they immediately funnel users to a different URL, meaning they are forced to take an annoying additional step in their searches. This is bad SEO.
• Link purchasing – if you still don’t appreciate the vital importance of backlink building to SEO, you’ve clearly not been paying attention! It’s so important that a whole new industry of professional link-sellers has grown up to sell insatiable webmasters all they can consume. Big fish in the link-buying ocean throw a lot of cash at it – tens of thousands of dollars far from uncommon. It’s a highly sophisticated business and link advertisers commonly sell their wares by category, language, domain authority or other groupings. They also buy links themselves, providing a means for site operators to earn passive income. Despite its popularity, link purchasing is regarded by Google as a manipulative, black hat practice. It may work as a short-term strategy but in the long-term it’s seriously risky, because Google is on the case and has the brains to work out which links are bought in and which are ‘natural’.

BOUNCE RATE

If a visitor lands on your page you need to pull out all the stops to encourage them to stay and drill down into your site. If they choose to click away after viewing just one page, it’s known as ‘bouncing’. A high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who immediately leave) is often an indication of a poorly designed website or one with little or no relevance to the user’s original search query.

So, does bounce rate affect search engine ranking and, if so, how much? Well, the answer is – it’s complicated! There have been numerous geeky SEO experiments conducted that have produced inconclusive results, but the consensus is that Google, for example, would find the necessary bounce rate data hard to acquire and track. Bounce rate taken in isolation also fails to qualify the user experience. For example: if a visitor lands on your ‘Contact Us’ page, acquires the phone number they need then leaves, this would be a positive outcome and it would be wrong for a search engine to penalise it as a bounce. Equally, the time someone spends on a certain page indicates very little. If they’re on a page for half-an-hour they could be transfixed by your Shakespearean prose, distracted by a conversation or simply asleep. Having said all this, it’s good SEO practice to build alluring webpages that encourage visitors to click on links. You don’t want them bouncing simply because your site looks cheap and tacky.

CANONICAL ISSUES

Canonical issues or canonicalization (don’t even try to pronounce it) both refer to single web pages accessed via different URL’s (Uniform Resource Locators). It might help to imagine a room with several doors, each marked by a slightly different sign. Confusing? Well many search engines would tend to agree and have a tough time deciding which is the best to point the user to.

Web spiders aren’t good at riddles, so it’s best not to confuse them by having several URL’s, as in those below that link to the same homepage:
realconfusion.com
realconfusion.com
realconfusion.com/index.php
realconfusion.com.au
realconfusion.com.au/index.php

The problem is compounded when ‘session IDs’ are added to the equation, which generate a unique URL for every visit e.g. http://realconfusion.com/localhost88page8.aspx. At this point the spiders will be tearing their own legs off! Webmasters often use session IDs for depth-tracking purposes but a cookie-based approach would be just as effective and far kinder to our arachnid friends.

Why is all this so important? Well, it all comes down to ‘link authority’. Having a multitude of URL’s has the effect of diluting this authority. Powerful link juice becomes an insipid concoction, like watered down whiskey. Think of the ‘canon’ as the official page and anything else as duplication – and you understand by now how much Google and its competitors frown duplication.

There are various fixes available for canonical issues, including Google’s ‘canonical tagging’ that allows you to indicate in the HTML header that the URL is a copy. Plus, there’s always our old, spider-friendly ‘301 redirect’ to fall back on.

CLOAKING

Cloaking is yet another nefarious, black hat SEO practice that you need to avoid or risk termination with extreme prejudice by Google and its fellow search engines. Cloaking ruins the user experience by producing a result that doesn’t match the original enquiry or, as Google puts it: “Serving up different results on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index”. The goal of cloaking is usually to boost a website’s ranking for specific keywords. Back in the old days, it was common to click on a site promising, for example, cinema reviews, only to be presented with a hardcore porn page. Avoid cloaking at all costs. It’s just not worth the risk.

CODE-SWAPPING (Bait-and-Switch)

This is another black hat strategy used by unscrupulous webmasters, who create highly SEO’d web pages known as ‘doorway pages’, wait for them to achieve high page ranking, only to switch the content at a later date. You might also see them referred to as gateway, zebra, portal, jump or bridge pages. They work by using fast ‘meta refresh’ commands but the practice will be penalized by most search engines if they detect it.

CONTENT

If you’ve spent any time at all worshipping at the temple of SEO, you can’t fail to have heard the mantra, “Content is king!”, intoned by countless high priests. Sorry, but you’re about to hear us join in the chorus, because great content remains the puppy’s nuts and the cat’s pyjamas, so don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.

So, what makes for great content? For a start, it needs to be the opposite of everything Google despises and punishes, which includes plagiarism, keyword-stuffing, duplication, irrelevance and hidden text.

Instead, you need to present your visitors with completely original, well-written copy (text) that’s bang on topic, interspersed with powerful keywords and packed with useful information and hot topics. If you can add complementary images and video to the mix, all the better.

The aim is to satisfy the increasingly demanding search engine spiders, while encouraging your visitors to come back for more. In the long-run you hope to build a trusted, appealing site with bags of authority – the Morgan Freeman of websites!

CONVERSION

Having a classy, professionally-built website that you can show off to friends and clients is all well and good, but the ultimate goal of commercial websites is to elicit some sort of action or response from visitors. This is known in the online marketing world as ‘conversion’ and is typically measured in advertisement clicks, sign-ups and sales. An effective website should have a prominent ‘call to action’ on every page – if a potential customer is forced to drill down into a site just to find your phone number, he will vote with his mouse and probably click away to a competitor. Read more here..

COPILOT (Github)

GitHub Copilot is your AI coding assistant, acting as a virtual pair programmer within your development environment. It analyzes your code and context, suggesting relevant completions, functions, and even entire lines of code to accelerate your development process. Unlike simple auto-completion tools, Copilot leverages advanced AI to understand your intent and generate code tailored to your specific needs, boosting your productivity and streamlining the coding experience.

COVARIENT

Covariant is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) robotics company dedicated to revolutionizing warehouse and logistics operations. At the core of Covariant’s technology is the “Covariant Brain,” a sophisticated AI platform designed to empower robots with exceptional vision and problem-solving abilities. This allows robots to autonomously and reliably handle diverse tasks like picking, sorting, and packing a wide array of items. Covariant’s solutions streamline operations, reduce labor costs, and increase efficiency, helping businesses meet the ever-growing demands of e-commerce and supply chain logistics.

Covariant Brain is the heart and mind of Covariant’s robots. It’s an AI platform specifically designed for robotic tasks in warehouses and logistics. Here are its key features:

• Pre-trained: Unlike many AI systems, the Covariant Brain is pre-trained on millions of real-world picking scenarios from Covariant robots around the globe. This “out-of-the-box” knowledge allows robots to handle diverse items without extensive human programming.
• Versatility: The Brain can pick virtually any item, regardless of size, shape, or packaging, making it adaptable to various warehouse tasks.
• Continuous Learning: It doesn’t stop learning after initial training. The Brain continuously improves through “fleet learning,” where all connected robots share their experiences, allowing the entire network to adapt and become more efficient.
• Autonomous Picking: The Brain empowers robots to “see, think, and act” on their own, meaning they can pick items, handle unexpected situations, and even recover from minor errors without constant human intervention.

Overall, the Covariant Brain is a powerful AI system that transforms robots into intelligent and adaptable workers, boosting efficiency and flexibility in warehouse and logistics operations.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions

CPM is another way that pay per click advertising platforms calculate your costs and their revenue (if you’re wondering where the ‘M’ comes from, it’s the Roman numeral for 1,000). CPM differs from CPC, in that it counts impressions i.e. the appearance of an ad on a search engine results page. If your CPM is $2 you’ll be charged $2 every 1,000 times your ad is viewed. CPM is a good way to raise brand awareness.

DALLE-2

DALL·E 2, introduced by OpenAI in 2022, is an advanced generative model that builds upon the original DALL·E model, which was renowned for its ability to generate images from textual descriptions. DALL·E 2 extends this capability by allowing users to generate images from both textual and image prompts, providing greater flexibility and creative control. Leveraging a combination of techniques such as hierarchical representation learning and transformer-based architecture, DALL·E 2 can generate high-quality images with intricate details and diverse styles. With applications in various fields such as art, design, and content creation, DALL·E 2 represents a significant advancement in AI-driven image generation, enabling users to effortlessly translate their ideas and concepts into visual form.

DEEP LINK

Deep links are great for SEO because they direct the user straight to a specific webpage, rather than just stranding them on a homepage. This means the page in question will naturally build more authority and the website’s backlink portfolio will become more diversified. Both great for site ranking. It also leads to an effortless user experience which often translates into improved conversion rates. There’s also a real buzz about deep linking in the world of mobile apps, which leverages the use of URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to offer a richer experience and increased engagement.

DISAVOW BACKLINKS

As previously discussed, backlinks can be good or bad (toxic). It’s all about following Google’s quality guidelines by avoiding or taking down low-quality, irrelevant links that will damage your ranking. But first they need to be identified and tracked. In Google, a handy list can be downloaded using Webmaster Tools. Bing also offers its own version, as do other companies like Moz and Ahrefs.

The next stage is time-consuming, as it involves a lengthy evaluation process, during which you need to establish the quality of each link. It’s important not to throw the baby out with the bath water! You need to look out for cheap looking, spammy or low relevance sites.

Finally, the owners of the offending websites must be contacted by email and asked to either remove them or add a “rel=no follow” instruction to the link tag. This is called ‘link pruning’. If repeated requests are ignored you need to advance to DEFCON 1 and send a disavowal request to Bing or Google, telling them to disregard the links.

E-E-A-T

E-A-T, an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, stands as a critical framework within the realms of content creation, especially in the context of Google’s search quality guidelines. This framework is pivotal in evaluating the quality and reliability of online content.

Expertise pertains to the level of knowledge and skill demonstrated in producing content within a particular field or topic. It requires not just surface-level understanding but a depth of knowledge that adds genuine value and insight to the audience. Authoritativeness delves into the credibility and reputation of the content creator or the website itself. Factors such as credentials, experience, and endorsements contribute to establishing authority. Lastly, Trustworthiness revolves around the reliability and transparency of the information presented. It involves factors like accuracy, citing credible sources, and providing transparent and honest content that users can rely on.

For content creators and businesses aiming to thrive online, adhering to E-A-T principles is paramount. Upholding high standards of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness not only elevates content visibility in search results but also fosters a loyal and engaged audience base by offering reliable and valuable information. It’s not merely about meeting search engine criteria; it’s about building a foundation of credibility and trust with the audience, ultimately driving sustained success in the digital landscape.

FEEDS

Web feeds are subscribed to by users and provide a continuous flow of regularly updated news or other data. The two principal feed formats are ‘RSS’ (rich site summary) and ‘Atom’. Because news feeds are syndicated around the web, they obviously don’t provide unique content, which means they won’t improve SEO directly. However, they can contribute in a secondary way by helping to establish your website as the place to go for up to date information, which should increase traffic, keep visitors onsite longer and bolster ranking.

FRAMES

Frames are webpage designs that display two or more pages in rows or columns on a single screen, often resulting in a poor user experience and utter bafflement for easily confused search engine spiders. The greater the number of frames, the greater the likelihood that the site will achieve poor ranking or fail to be indexed at all.
Other drawbacks are that frames may not display correctly on small screens, mobile phones or tablets. Some browsers don’t support frame technology at all. There are also reports of the ‘back’ button not working on frame pages. All things considered – it’s best to stay away.

GANs

GANs, short for Generative Adversarial Networks, are a class of machine learning models that excel in generating realistic synthetic data. Consisting of two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator, GANs operate in a competitive setting where the generator aims to create data resembling the real examples, while the discriminator aims to differentiate between real and fake data. Through adversarial training, GANs iteratively improve both the generator’s ability to produce realistic data and the discriminator’s ability to distinguish between real and fake data. This results in the generation of highly realistic images, text, audio, and more, with applications ranging from image synthesis and style transfer to data augmentation and anomaly detection. GANs represent a powerful tool in the realm of artificial intelligence, driving advancements in creative content generation and data synthesis.

GOOGLE BOWLING

This may sound like fun bit it’s actually the term for reverse SEO and falls firmly into the black hat category. Essentially, Google bowling is the underhand practice of building toxic backlinks to a competitor’s website, with the intention of attracting penalties and damaging their page ranking. Profoundly evil webmasters have even been known to build links that redirect to viruses. A subtler approach is to report a competitor to Google’s WebSpam Team, by filing a spam report, if you suspect they’re buying in links. If you’re tempted to indulge in Google bowling, just remember that ever-vigilant Google is constantly searching the web for suspicious link patterns and you could end up sabotaging your own site.

So, what does a webmaster do to protect his site? First, they need to identify any low quality or unnatural links, using one of the many third-party tools available or by manually investigating the sites. Next, they need to contact Google and report them via their Disavow Links facility. This will ensure that the links aren’t taken into consideration and your page rank will remain unaffected.

GOOGLE LINK JUICE

As mentioned previously, link juice is the lifeblood of SEO. Google sees links as votes or recommendations for your site. The higher the quality of the link, the greater its positive SEO weight and the more elevated your pagerank, particularly when combined with superb content.

Googlebots automatically assess the links on every web page, to come up with an overall domain rank. Many webmasters are tempted to overload their homepages with links, whilst neglecting the rest of the site. This is a bit like showing off in a flashy sports car with a tiny engine. A more effective approach is to sprinkle high quality links across all pages in a process known as ‘deep linking’. That will make them easy for spiders to find and rank accordingly. This is even more crucial since Google launched its Panda update, which actively penalizes link-heavy homepages. And don’t forget – link juice can also be channelled internally. Check which pages on your site are getting a lot of traffic and high quality inbound juice, then simply link them to your underperforming pages.

Certain pages will never rank highly, despite your best efforts, so don’t waste valuable link juice on them. We’re talking about Contact, Pricing and About Us pages, in particular. You can easily discourage the attention of spiders by adding robot and robot.txt tags to the top-level directory and using nofollow tags.

H20.ai

H2O.ai is a leading provider of open-source AI and machine learning platforms, empowering organisations to harness the power of data to drive business innovation and insights. Founded in 2012, H2O.ai offers robust and scalable solutions that enable data scientists and developers to build and deploy machine learning models efficiently. Their flagship product, H2O-3, provides a comprehensive suite of algorithms for tasks such as classification, regression, clustering, and anomaly detection. Additionally, H2O Driverless AI automates the machine learning pipeline, from feature engineering to model deployment, accelerating time-to-value for organizations. With a focus on democratising AI and fostering collaboration, H2O.ai’s platforms are widely adopted across industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, enabling businesses to extract valuable insights and drive actionable decisions from their data.

HELPFUL CONTENT UPDATES

Google’s Helpful Content Updates are a series of algorithm updates aimed at identifying and rewarding content that is created primarily to help people, rather than to rank well in search engines. The first Helpful Content Update was rolled out in August 2022, and there have been several subsequent updates since then.

The Helpful Content Updates are designed to improve the overall quality of search results by rewarding content that is informative, comprehensive, and well-written. They also aim to discourage content that is written primarily to game the search engine ranking system, such as content that is keyword-stuffed or that lacks original insights.

To ensure that your content is aligned with Google’s Helpful Content Updates, there are a few key things to keep in mind:

• Focus on creating content that is genuinely helpful and informative. Ask yourself: Is this content something that I would find useful if I were searching for information on this topic?
• Make sure your content is well-written and easy to understand. Use clear and concise language, and avoid technical jargon that your target audience may not be familiar with.
• Provide original insights and perspectives. Don’t just rehash information that can be found elsewhere. Offer your own unique take on the topic.
• Follow Google’s Search Essentials guidelines. These guidelines provide a comprehensive overview of what Google considers to be high-quality content.

By following these guidelines, you can help ensure that your content is rewarded by Google’s Helpful Content Updates and that your website is seen by a wider audience. Read more here…

HITS

Hits may mean everything to Kanye West but their value to a website is frequently over-emphasised by unscrupulous SEO ‘experts’, who falsely claim them as measures of their success.

Remember, a hit is not the same as a ‘visit’. Hits are what register every time a web browser requests a file download from a website – these may include images, graphics, java applets and buttons, with each counting as an individual hit. You can see that a single webpage with numerous buttons and photos will rapidly accumulate many hits. In fact, the average per webpage is fifteen. Dishonest SEO consultants (sadly there are many of them out there) will bank on clients being ignorant of these facts and claim hundreds of daily hits as the result of their brilliant work, while glossing over visitor numbers.

A visitor, however, is an actual human being, who navigates to a site and can potentially answer a call-to-action. Visitor numbers interest us most – everything else is just smoke’n’mirrors. It’s quality over quantity every time when you hire SEO North Sydney!

HOPLINKS

Hoplinks are used in affiliate marketing to a) Link a potential customer to a website and b) Track which affiliate took the customer there, so that ClickBank can arrange the appropriate payment. Hoplinks work by embedding cookies into the user’s computer before redirecting to the merchant’s site.

Higher Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the vehicle or language by which data is transferred between a web server and a browser. A newer, more secure version, “HTTPS”, has lightweight PageRank advantages over HTTP, according to Google, so it’s worth considering migration if your site uses the old protocol. However, the switch is no substitute for great content and top quality links.

Google and other search engines are big on security, and HTTPS verifies that the user is interacting with the authentic website. Its encryption also helps protect credit card details and browsing history.
Higher Test Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) stands as an essential security protocol that encrypts the data exchanged between a user’s browser and the website they’re visiting. It’s an advanced version of the standard HTTP, adding a layer of encryption via Transport Layer Security (TLS) or its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This encryption ensures that any information shared, such as login credentials, payment details, or personal data, remains confidential and secure from potential eavesdropping or tampering by malicious entities.

Adopting HTTPS is crucial for ensuring user trust and data integrity. Websites that implement HTTPS display a padlock icon in the address bar, signifying a secure connection. This not only reassures users about the safety of their information but also contributes to better search engine rankings. Major search engines like Google prioritise HTTPS-enabled websites, considering them safer for users, thus potentially boosting their visibility in search results. As cyber threats continue to evolve, HTTPS has become a fundamental standard for any website, offering a baseline level of security that’s increasingly expected by users and search engines alike.

IMPRESSIONS

Impressions is a term relating to digital advertising platforms, such as Google AdWords or Adversal. An impression is registered each time an advertisement is displayed on a search result page. These impressions are automatically counted by the search engines and used to calculate and report the cost of ad campaigns. They are usually measured in CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). A quoted advertising rate of $15-per-CPM means the customer pays $15 for each set of 1,000 ads displayed on their webpage.

INDEXING

Indexing problems inevitably arise from time to time, particularly with newly launched websites or pages. There are numerous open source tools and plug-ins available that enable you to check if all your site’s URL’s are being indexed. The Google Webmaster Tools dashboard is the place to look first for crawl error messages, under the Google Index tab (see below).

There are many technical reasons that can lead to indexing errors, including:

• Poorly configured .htaccess files leading to loading problems
• Robots.txt files preventing crawlers form indexing
• Webmasters failing to update sitemaps
• URL parameters wrongly defined in Webmaster Tools.
• Insufficient pagerank
• Connectivity or DNS issues
• Historical domain issues
• Scraped content
• Lack of links

But one of the most concerning reasons is that Google or another search engine has ruthlessly de-indexed your site as punishment for underhand, black hat SEO tactics. If this happens it’s a long road back.

INTERNAL LINK

Links that point from one page to another within the same domain (or to a different part of the same page) are extremely beneficial to SEO for several reasons. Firstly, they aid navigation and improve user experience, encouraging them to stay longer. Secondly, they establish a hierarchy for the information within the site. Lastly, they help to convey precious link-juice around websites, like an efficient irrigation system, thus increasing authority. All these things are magnificent in Google’s eyes.

As a rule, a site’s pages need to be linked via the shortest route, to make life as easy as possible for those hard-working spiders. Even your best-optimised page won’t rank if spiders can’t reach it or aren’t even aware of its existence. There’s also a limit to the number of links the crawlers will follow and it is good practice not to exceed 150, even though some important pages can handle as many as 250. Don’t link purely for the sake of linking and ensure the process is natural and relevant. Anything else may look spammy.

Avoid using JavaScript for link-building and stick to spider-friendly HTML. Links embedded in Flash, Java applets and other plug-ins will often remain invisible to web crawlers. It’s also best not to over-rely on linking via images. Hyperlinks and anchor text generally carry more SEO weight.

JASPER

JASPER AI is an AI writing assistant designed to help businesses and individuals create high-quality content faster. It analyzes your brand voice, suggests different creative formats, and helps you write engaging copy for marketing materials, social media posts, blog articles, and more. By leveraging AI, JASPER aims to save users time and effort while maintaining brand consistency and potentially improving content quality.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

All keywords were not made equal, so you need to choose those most likely to attract the right people i.e. prospective customers not sightseers. Any webmaster worth his salt will know the right keyword research tools for the job. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a good example of a useful program (though this is FAR LESS HELPFUL than it used to be). Moz’s Keyword Explorer also contains bags of useful of data, to help you figure out how difficult it will be to rank for your site’s keywords. Checking out successful competitors’ websites will also offer you a degree of insight.