Backlink – an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website.

The number of backlinks your page has is an indication of the overall popularity of the page. They are important in SEO since websites like Google still use the quality and number of backlinks as a ranking indicator in the SERPS.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Gaining really good quality backlinks from authority websites to your pages is imperative to your SEO strategy. The more quality backlinks your page gets, the higher it will rank. If it ranks high then you will get more traffic (eyeballs to your page).

The more eyeballs to your page mean you have more chance of converting as many visitors to either sign up, subscribe and even purchase something.

For example, type in Google “cheap USB cable” and 9 times out of 10 Amazon will be in the top 3 organic results. That’s the power of getting backlinks to your page.

There are several other factors at play here, but backlinks are one of the major reasons that pages rank in the SERPS.

Important Note: There are both good and bad ways to gain these links. Some ways are really unethical and our advice is to stay well clear. If you can afford it, employ a digital marketing agency to carry out this task for you. Its task where you really need to know what you’re doing and getting it wrong could see not only your page but your whole website penalised by search engines.

Recovering your page or website when this happens is extremely difficult and can take several months to fix. Depending on how much that page/site is worth to you could cost you thousands 🙁

CTA – Call to action

If you have a page full of content and you want to instruct your client to do something, you do this by adding several call to action’s (CTA’s) to your page or within the content like: “visit our store today” “call now” and “find out more.”

A CTA can also be associated with buttons with the words “Buy Now”, “Subscribe Here” etc.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It is imperative that you have CTA’s dotted around the pages on your website (obviously don’t go too mad as this will be a turn off). Even though someone might be on the verge of purchasing or getting in touch. Sometimes that need a gentle nudge in the right direction. That’s what CTA’s do.

Google 3 Pack – Local business listings within a box

This was a controversial change that happened on Thursday, August 6th 2016 from the previous 6 and 7 pack in the Google local search results. The new way of listing local search listings.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Getting your business listed in the 3 pack isn’t that easy. Especially if you’re in a competitive niche. However, if you can manage to get your business listed for the various keywords in the SERPS then you will get lots of lovely free traffic. To improve your business listing then check out the article: How Do I Get My Business Higher On Google Maps?

H Tags – Also Called Header Tags

Separate the sections of your content with headers. It doesn’t really matter if you use H1, H2, H3, H4 tags etc, just make sure you use them. This not only helps the reader of your content, it will also aide the search engines when presenting your content.

IP Address – Means Internet Protocol address

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer). There are two standards for IP addresses: IP Version 4 (IPv4) and IP Version 6 (IPv6).

You can find out what your own IP address is just here.

Keyword

A keyword is the word or words we type into a search engine (query) to find a particular page or answer a question. In SEO the keyword would normally be found in the title of a page and form part of the metadata.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Having the keyword in the title of your page is really important and vital for your SEO efforts. Better still, ensure it is located at the front of the title rather than at the very end.

It used to be the case that you needed to have that keyword placed throughout the content on the page. However, with all of the updated Google algorithms, this is no longer the case.

Meta Data (also known as Meta Tags)

SEO metadata is what generally appears on search engine result pages (SERP) when a website is shown for search queries. It normally includes title, description and URL of the page.

We used to involve keywords as part of the metadata. However, with the development of machine learning by the search engines, they don’t seem to use the keyword tag anymore.

Paid Ads – Are paid for local advertisements by companies

Sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-impression (PPI), and display ads. Paid ads are adverts that you have to pay for as opposed to earned advertising or owned advertising.

For example, when you do a search in Google, the SERPS may display a page with paid ads (normally at the top and bottom of a page) as well as organic search results.

If the search is for a local business, then it will show a result with a Google 3 pack listed just below the ads.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

We advise the vast majority of businesses to have 3 clear strategies:

Paid ads, Organic traffic (SEO) and content marketing as part of their marketing mix. With a healthy dose of all 3 strategies (depending on niche), then you should be able to crush the competition.

If you want to get to get fast traffic to your site or page. There’s no quicker way to achieve this than paid ads. That’s because your ads can go live within a matter of seconds and if you’re using Google as a platform, then your ads will probably appear above the natural search results.

Call to action (CTA) and conversions will then be the next step in the marketing strategy. Get these things right and your business will flourish 🙂

Rich Snippets – Extra bits of text that appear under search results

Rich snippets (or Schema.org markup) are a type of on-page markup. They are the extra bits of text that appear under search results.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

• The search engines are able to use this data to provide your potential clients with more relevant results.
• Even though each page and post has a title that describes that content, the rich snippet gives the reader even more relevant info.
• Having decent rich snippets allows for a greater click-through rate, reduced bounce which in turn helps your overall SEO strategy.

SEO – means by definition “search engine optimisation”

So what is it? SEO is the process of getting “natural”, “organic”, “editorial” and arguably “free” traffic from the search engine result pages.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Tests have shown that the further up the SERPS your page is, the more traffic you can get. Therefore the lower down your page is you’ll receive less traffic. That’s why companies employ agencies to get their pages ranked higher.

The more pages your business ranks for, the more traffic you’ll receive.

SERPS – Search Engine Results Page

A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by search engines like Google, Bing and Internet Explorer when a user has typed in a query (or in SEO speak, a “keyword”).

These results will differ from IP address, country, state, county, town, city and whether or not you are logged into Google or not logged in. These pages have both natural and paid listings.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Where possible, you gain more traffic to your website by getting as many pages of your website ranking for as many keywords as you possibly can. This is achieved by writing great content and offering real value to the reader which in turn means other websites might link to it by way of a reference (sometimes called a backlink). The more respected (in Google’s eyes) the referring website, the more link juice will be transferred)