Internet Marketing Blog » Search Engine Optimisation Glossary

SEO Glossary Terms: Sandbox

Richard — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:37:38 +0000

The term sandbox is used in various aspects of SEO and online marketing, but in this respect we are referring to the Google Sandbox that new websites and new links have to endure before their efforts and rewards are truly recognised. The Sandbox is so named because it is an area where Google is said to let new websites play until they can prove they're worthy of playing in the main playground.

For the SEO, the sandbox effect is quite real, although different sites experience seemingly different lengths of time in this state of index purgatory. Also, the actual effect of the sandbox will depend largely on how organic your SEO is and the competitiveness of the keywords you target. With ultra competitive keywords, it may not be the sandbox effect but simply that it takes time to compete for these keywords.

Reports from different websites do vary, but estimates range from several weeks to several months languishing in the lower echelons of the search results. The reality is that some SEO campaigns can take time to have a genuinely beneficial effect and there are some techniques that can help avoid the negative impacts of the SEO sandbox phenomenon.

Google attempts to discern between low and high quality sites as well as those that are likely to disappear overnight compared to those that will stick it out for the long haul. Buying an existing domain name with traffic, building a reasonable number of links early in an SEO campaign, and registering hosting and domains for an extended period can all help.

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SEO Glossary Terms: Anchor Text

Click Consult — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:21:09 +0000

The anchor text is the section of an HTML link that is located between the close and end HTML tags. It is the part of the link that is seen on your web page by readers and the words that are usually underlined and clickable within the main body of content. When building SEO links to a web page, it is important to try and gain some level of control over the SEO anchor text that is used in inbound links because this can help to improve rankings for specific, relevant keywords.

Controlling the anchor text isn't necessarily an easy task. There are many ways of building SEO links for a page, and while some allow complete control, there is almost always an element of SEO link building that is left to chance. One area where this is especially true is in the generation of organic links, or those that offered naturally and freely by other websites without any intervention on you part.

Organic links are great to have but difficult to generate. Very high quality and unique content is essential, but so to is generating traffic to that page that will include other website owners. Once this occurs, many site owners will use either their own brief description, the title of the page, or your website name when writing the SEO link anchor text. Ensure that these are all keyword optimised and consider offering your own HTML linking code on the relevant pages of your site in order to keep even more control.

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SEO Glossary Definitions: Black Hat

Richard — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:35:23 +0000

Black hat is a term that is used in SEO usually to mean unethical. Black hat SEO techniques are those practices that are deemed unethical especially by the search engines, who take a dim view of such practices, while a black hat SEO is an SEO professional or SEO service that uses those techniques in order to try and gain an advantage over a website's main competitors.

When we refer to ethical SEO we talk about white hat SEO, and more recently the term grey hat has been coined to refer to those practices and services that fall somewhere between the lines of ethical and unethical. The fact is that it seems unethical or if it feels like you're attempting to manipulate the search engines into ranking your site highly without providing useful and informative content for your customers then it is likely that you are partaking in black hat SEO techniques.

Search engines, like good website owners, attempt to provide value to all of their visitors and users. They aim to do this by offering high quality content in their listings. A lot of effort is put in by certain search engines to help ensure that their index is clean and does not include spammers or sites that have evidently used black hat SEO techniques in a bid to outperform other, more beneficial websites. Ignorance is not deemed a valid excuse by the search engines meaning that you need to take care in all your actions and ensure that an SEO service uses only ethical practices when working on your behalf.

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SEO Glossary Terms: Supplemental Index

Dan Taylor — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:52:53 +0000

Google and other search engines employ more than one index when they crawl websites. As well as the main index, there is a secondary index often referred to as the supplemental index. It is so called because the results of that index are considered supplemental to the results in the primary index for the same search terms. Being consigned to the supplemental index of the search engine can result in very poor rankings and traffic levels.

The supplemental index is like a form of indexing purgatory. A page that appears in the supplemental index has not been blacklisted but it is not deemed worth consideration for the main index for one of a number of reasons. Using practices like duplicate content or offering a page that has no links, both requiring SEO attention, may result in a page or several pages being placed into the supplemental index. Fortunately, it is possible to climb out of the supplemental listings and gain a seat in the main rankings in order to drive traffic to a page.

It is conceivably easier to be ranked in the supplemental index than in the primary one because fewer restraints are placed on pages before they are considered for inclusion. While the spiders that crawl pages for the main index are looking for unique SEO content, for example, the supplementary index will allow duplicate pages to be added to their list and ranked accordingly. In SEO terms, though, this means that your page is highly unlikely to enjoy the benefits of search engine traffic; the ultimate goal of SEO.

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SEO Glossary Terms: Algorithm

Dan Taylor — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:02:43 +0000

Search engines use a series of complex algorithms to rank pages in their index for a given search term. The exact contents of the search engine algorithms are unknown, because the search engines realise that armed with this kind of information, black hat SEOs would be able to manipulate the search results to their own ends without having to provide a good quality website for the rewards.

Algorithm updates occur when Google and the other major engines make a change to one or more of their calculations, or when they remove or release a new algorithm component. Often referred to as the Google dance, there's typically a lot of SEO hysteria following algorithm updates because they can lead to unexpected and often large variants in search results.

If a page performs well in the search engines then it means that their SEO campaign has been a success and that the web page has conformed to the search engine algorithms. The job of the SEO is essentially to try and determine, at least in part, the content of the algorithms and then ensure that each web page under their tenure conforms to these requirements.

The busiest and most thorough SEO may keep one eye on patent applications, blogs, and other resources in a bid to try and find information pertaining to the search engine algorithms because this give an invaluable insight into what exactly the search engines are looking for from web pages.

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SEO Glossary Terms: PageRank

Dan Taylor — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:49:11 +0000

PageRank is Google's measurement of the number and quality of links a particular web page has. Most often, the term PageRank is used to describe the Google Toolbar PageRank which is a graphical, numerical representation of a page's link profile at any given time. A lot of novice SEO campaign managers and website owners have a tendency to place far too much stock in the PR of a page subsequently paying less heed to more important factors like ranking, traffic, and conversion rates.

In reality, there are a number of reasons why the PageRank of a page is less important than it is widely considered. For a start, it is updated so infrequently that you could be looking at a figure that is a week, a month, three months, or even six months out of date; a long period of time in the world of SEO and it certainly makes a poor benchmark and measurable data figure.

Google PageRank does not consider relevance or other factors that will help determine the ranking of a web page. Without these factors the PageRank has no correlation to the ranking of your pages and it is not uncommon to see pages with a PageRank of 2 beating pages with a PageRank of 7 or 8 – this is largely because of the factor of relevance.

Finally, there is no connection between PageRank and traffic levels, which should be the most important consideration when measuring SEO effectiveness. Rankings will effect your traffic figures and both of these factors are worth concentrating on considerably more than the PageRank of a page.

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