Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML elements used on every page of a website that help search engines understand what each page is about. These can include the page title, description, keywords and other data. Properly optimizing this meta data to correlate with popular words and phrases people are searching for in search engines can help a website to increase search engine rankings.
Alt Tags
An alt tag is an image’s HTML description. Since search engines cannot read the image itself, they use these alt tags to read the image.
Links
There are three types of links:
- Internal Links – Internal links are links throughout your website that links to other pages on the same website. Internal links allow users to navigate through a website much easier. If you have a link on an important page that points to a less important page, that less important page receives more authority because of that link. This in turn helps that page rank higher in search engines.
- External Links – External links are links pointing from your website to different website.
- Inbound Links – Inbound links are links pointing from a different website to your website. The more inbound links you receive from authoritative websites, the higher you will be able to rank in search engines.
Link Building
Link building is the activity of building internal and inbound links to help improve brand authority and search engine rankings.
Anchor Text
When creating a link to a website, you use anchor text to tell search engines what the page is about that you’re linking to. When the user hovers over the link, the anchor text most often pops up.
Keywords
Search engine users search for specific keywords to find what they need, whether it be “Legal Services in Utah,” “Can My Dog Eat Carrots,” or “Buy Mattresses Online.” Google keeps track of how many times people search for these keywords. This information is then useful for SEO, because it tells us which keywords we should optimize a website for.
We want to optimize for keywords that people search for often in order to attract the most traffic to that website. We place these keywords in the meta data, headings, body content, and other places throughout the website to tell Google that the website is relevant to those keywords.
Long Tail Keywords
A long tail keyword is a variation of a broader keyword. For example, “Best Dentists in St. George, Utah” is a long tail form of “Dentists St. George.” In many instances, it is best to optimize a website for long tail keywords because they are less competitive but still attract searches.
Search Results
There are 3 types of search results Google displays when you search for something:
- Pay Per Click Ads – Pay Per Click Ads are usually displayed at the very top of the page in a pink box and to the right of the page as well.
- Local Search Results – Local results will only be displayed if the keywords you search for relate to your local area – for example, “Pizza Restaurants,” “Shoe Stores,” or “Attorneys.” Along with local results, a map will usually be displayed on the right side of the page to show you where these local businesses are in your surrounding area.
- Organic Search Results – Just like local results, Organic results are free and take up the majority of the search results page under the ads and local results. Most SEO activities performed help to boost the organic search rankings, as they are the most prominent results.
PageRank (PR)
PageRank is a number assigned by Google from 0-10 that describes how authoritative a certain Web page is. The more valuable links you receive from other websites, the higher your PageRank gets. If you are ever penalized for going against Google’s SEO guidelines, your PageRank can fall.