SEO Flashcards
(28 cards)
SEO vs SEM
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is focused on optimizing a website in order to get traffic from organic search results.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to get traffic and visibility from both organic and paid search.
One of the main differences between SEO and SEM is speed.
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are search terms with relatively low search volume and competition levels.
Keyword stuffing
don’t want to go overboard and use your keyword 100x on every page. That’s a black hat SEO strategy called “keyword stuffing”
LSI Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are conceptually related terms that search engines use to deeply understand content on a webpage.
They’re terms that are closely tied to your target keyword.
SERPs
Search Engine Results Pages (also known as “SERPs” or “SERP”) are Google’s response to a user’s search query. SERPs tend to include: organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results.
There’s also another important factor to keep in mind when it comes to evaluating the SERPs: “no-click searches”.
Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results in order to quickly answer a searcher’s query. The content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index.
Types of Featured Snippets
- The Definition Box
- The Table
- The Ordered List
- The Unordered List
Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets (also known as “Rich Results”) are normal Google search results with additional data displayed. This extra data is usually pulled from Structured Data found in a page’s HTML. Common Rich Snippet types include reviews, recipes and events.
The vast majority of Google search results display the same 3 pieces of data:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- URL
Semantic SEO
Semantic SEO is the practice of writing content search engine optimized around topics, not just individual keywords
Internal Linking
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to pages on the same domain. These are different than external links, which link out to pages on other domains.
In short: internal linking is key for any site that wants higher rankings in Google.
SEO Friendly URLs
SEO friendly URLs are URLs that are designed to meet the needs of users and searchers. Specifically, URLs optimized for SEO tend to be short and keyword-rich.
Along with your title tag, link anchor text, and the content itself, search engines use your webpage’s URL to understand what your content is all about
SEO Writing
SEO writing (also known as “writing for SEO”) is the process of planning, creating and optimizing content with the primary goal of ranking in search engines.
Amazing content + solid on-page SEO = SEO writing
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine spiders to not crawl certain pages or sections of a website.
That said, there are 3 main reasons that you’d want to use a robots.txt file:
- Block Non-Public Page.
- Maximize Crawl Budget
- Prevent Indexing of Resources
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is content that’s similar or exact copies of content on other websites or on different pages on the same website.
Page Speed
Page Speed is the amount of time that it takes for a webpage to load. A page’s loading speed is determined by several different factors, including a site’s server, page filesize, and image compression.
Crawl Budget
Crawl Budget is the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe.
In short: if Google doesn’t index a page, it’s not going to rank for anything
So if your number of pages exceed your site’s crawl budget, you’re going to have pages on your site that aren’t indexed.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that help search engines find, crawl and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important.
There are four main types of sitemaps:
- Normal XML Sitemap
- News Sitemap
- Image Sitemap
Website Architecture
Website Architecture is how a website’s pages are structured and linked together. An ideal Website Architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they’re looking for on a website.
Resource Page Link Building
Resource page link building is the practice of building backlinks from pages that have curated lists of links to external websites (resource pages)
Link Bait
Link Bait (also called “linkbait”) is the process of creating content designed to attract backlinks. Common types of Link Bait content include controversial content, data, guides and newsworthy pieces.
Link Bait works because it’s designed to to do ONE thing: build backlinks.
Broken Link Building
Broken Link Building (also known as Dead Link Building) is the practice of building backlinks by replacing links to 404 pages with a working link to a target website.
Backlinks
Backlinks (also known as “inbound links”, “incoming links” or “one way links”) are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.
Backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful”.
A single quality backlink can be more powerful than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. Core Web Vitals are made up of three specific page speed and user interaction measurements: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift
.
In short, Core Web Vitals are a subset of factors that will be part of Google’s “page experience” score (basically, Google’s way of sizing up your page’s overall UX).
Search Intent
Search Intent (also known as “User Intent”) is the main goal a user has when typing a query into a search engine. Common types of Search Intent include informational, commercial, navigational and transactional.
Simply put: satisfying Search Intent is ultimately Google’s #1 goa
Organic CTR
Organic click-through-rate (also known as “Organic CTR”), is the percentage of searchers that click on a search engine result. Organic CTR is largely based on ranking position, but is also influenced by a result’s title tag, description, URL and presence of Rich Snippets.
Why Is Organic CTR Important?
First, higher click-through-rate=more traffic.
Second, CTR is a key search engine ranking signal.
