SEO

Some Essential SEO Terms you should know (Part-2)

As promised earlier, Tech Entice is back with the job of introducing the fresh innovating bloggers and writers to the remaining terminologies relevant with SEO. For the ones who missed the earlier post, here is where you can retrieve it from. So let’s continue the voyage.

1. Link Sculpting :

Earlier we discussed about the NoFollow attribute that notifies Google about spam links and links that the owner of the website is not accounted for. This process is called Link Sculpting. It is a much debated subject amongst experts because of its strong pros as well as cons. On one hand the search lists get stronger and focused targeting organic audience and providing better credibility for the legitimacy of the content and on the other hand it might be misused by unhealthy competitors to cancel out the possible page rank that the link could get.

2. Title Tag :

Since a webpage is designed with the help of HTML tags, one of the main tags that help in SEO is Title Tag. Title tag is contained within the Head Tag of the file and it contains the main title of the document. Keywords enriched Title tags are preferred the most by Google’s search engines and attain higher page ranks. The title mentioned in the Title Tag is visible on the top left corner of the browser, the moment the site page opens up. Since it is one of the key factors considered for page ranking by Google Search Algorithms, hence a blogger must keep the title unique, precise and keyword rich.

3. Meta Tags :

Meta Tags are elements of HTML or XHTML that provides some well-defined meta data about the site to the search engine. It is contained within the Head Tag and is not visible to the user who views the web page. Meta Tags are used to give page descriptions, specify keywords or include any other important data that is not specified by other attributes. Meta Tags basically gives an idea about the web page that it contains to the Google Search Algorithms while they refine the sites based on the quality of content. Some important meta tags are shown in the screenshot below.

4. Search Algorithms:

Search Algorithms can be considered as the brain of SEO as it does the main processing of each website considering about 200 factors to sort them out and bring them into the SERPs. Search Algorithms take into account the keywords of the query fed in the search engine, the age of the domain, the legitimacy and the quality of the content, the page rank, the back links and many other in order to present the users with the best of the results. These are the algorithms that carry out the processing in a fraction of second between the query being fed by the user and the search results being presented to the user.

5. Keyword Density :

Keyword Density is the measure of number of keywords that appear on the site as compared to the total number of words on the site. It can be calculated by dividing the keywords or phrases on the webpage by the total number of words on the same page. In context to SEO, Keyword Density is used in order to determine the maximum amount of relevance of a page with the query fed into the search engine.

6. Keyword Stuffing :

After recognizing Keyword Density as one of the key factors to get the webpage into the SERPs, bloggers and site owners started feeding up the page with as much of Keywords as possible unnecessarily and artificially. This act is known as Keyword Stuffing. But Google smelt something fishy and caught the act. Now not only Google gets attentive enough regarding Keyword Stuffing but also has declared it to be a punishable offence. If once caught, the chance of the site getting into the SERPs will be out of the window.

7. Web crawler :

Also known as Web Spider or automatic Indexer, Web crawler surfs through the World Wide Web for the web pages on behalf of the search engines. It is mainly used for indexing the contents of the websites. The search engines make use of a Web Crawler in order to keep their web contents or indexes of other sites updated. It keeps a copy of all the pages that it visits for the search engines to process them at their own sweet will and time, thereby giving quick results to the user.

8. Cloaking :

Cloaking is a process in which the contents delivered to the Web Crawler is different to what the user can access on its browser. One does that by differentiating the user by his IP address. If the user is identified as a Crawler, then the server-side script presents it with a different version of the actual webpage. Cloaking is a process to deceive the search engines in order to achieve visibility on SERPs by hook or by crook. It has been declared a penalized act by Google if found guilty.

9. Duplicate Content :

Duplicate Content refers to Plagiarism in context of web pages. Using already existing content exactly into one’s blog and claiming to be the original creator of that page is what Duplicate content is all about. Google considers Plagiarism as an offensive act and penalizes one if found accused of having a Duplicate content in his blog. Hence one must avoid the practice of copy pasting the contents from other sites into their own site and try to be as creative and original as possible to get into the good books of SEO.

10. Canonical URL :

A Canonical URL is a unique and standard way of addressing a webpage amidst multiple representations of the webpage. Considering the literal meaning canonicalization is a technique where a data with numerous representations is converted into one standard canonical representation. For instance the canonical representation of http://techentice.com is http://www.techentice.com .

11. Robots.txt :

Robots.txt is a file developed by Robot Exclusion Standard which is a set of governing rules to prevent web crawlers to get an access over the website. Whenever the site owner wishes to instruct the web robots, it can place the robot.txt file in the domain of the site in a specific format. If the robots choose to follow those instructions, they would open the embedded file and read them but in case the owner does not include a Robot.txt file, the robot considers that the site owner does not want it to follow any kind of instructions.

These are the various alien terminologies kindred with SEO which Tech Entice turned into amiable little creatures for its readers. All these terms are reflected on the webpage for being selected into the web results of search engines. Get a grip on all of it and blogging will seem even more fun.

Aurisha Sengupta is a Software Engineer. Apart from technology, she is an insatiable art lover and a perpetual student when it comes to knowledge in any form.