When it comes down to it, SEO is about clear communication between your site and the search engines. Likewise, for your own peace of mind, it is important when you approach your site’s SEO that you are able to communicate with your SEO consultant. To this aim, it’s a good idea to be thoroughly familiar with the terms that are likely to be mentioned in developing your SEO plan.

The initial part of your plan will involve an analysis of the existing content of your site, the formulation of a competitive keyword list, and a plan for the search engine optimisation techniques to apply to your site. Keywords will be placed within the text of your page, but also in some of the codes that communicate with search engines. A couple of the tags that are commonly involved in SEO include:

Keywords Meta Tag – A tag featured in HTML which lists the keywords used on a page. The purpose of a keyword meta tag is to help search engines discover the keywords on a page. Unfortunately, not all search engines pay attention to keyword meta tags. The usefulness of keyword meta tags is the subject of great debate in the SEO community. Talk to your consultant at SEO Consult about the tags you should focus on as part of your search engine optimisation strategy.

Description – Just as it sounds, the description tag describes your page. It is a meta tag which allows you to provide a short blurb about the page, with an emphasis on short.

Long Tail Keywords – Keywords can be one word or a short phrase. When they are phrases keywords are called long-tail. Long-tail keywords are more specific, meaning that they might not come up in as many searches but will feature in more focussed results. Long-tail keywords are becoming more popular both with websites and with viewers.

Link Juice – Link juice is a catchy term used to describe the relative power of links. A popular page that links to you alone will have a lot of link juice. A popular page that links to you and twenty other sites has slightly less link juice.

Some of the things your SEO consultant will watch for in optimising your site include:

Cloaking – Presenting one form of content to a search engine spider and a different kind to your human viewers is called cloaking. This can be used legitimately, but is an area to watch out for. If you have any doubts about the way you are presenting content to the search engines, talk to us at SEO Consult.

Dynamic Content – Content that is generated in response to the input from a site’s viewer. Google itself is a prime example of dynamic content. Dynamic content also complicates your SEO strategy.

Keyword Blurring – When you use the same range of keywords on several of your pages, your SEO can become less focused. This is keyword blurring.

If your site is in trouble, a couple of the terms you will come into contact with may be:

Re-inclusion Request – This is the request sent to Google, Yahoo! And the other search engines if your site has been removed from the index for a perceived infraction. Your SEO consultant should do this on your behalf after the problem has been tracked down and corrected.

Sandbox – The place you don’t want your site to be. Being ’sandboxed’ means that your site’s ranks are being held back until your bona fides are proved. The way out of the sandbox involves time and patience.

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