So now we get the gist of What is SEO part 1 it’s on to the next step of understanding the intricacies in What is SEO part 2. This requires a better understanding of links and back links and the importance of keyword terms in the actual text used for the link or back link. It has to be said that this is the most time consuming aspect of SEO and is not for the faint hearted! This is why we have specialist SEO experts to do the job though it is important to work closely with the expert to ensure that the content of your website is in tandem with your off site strategy.
Keyword terms
As you will already know from What is SEO part 1 the web is indexed by search engine spiders, all they find they carry back to the Google brainbox. If they find a link to your site no matter where the link is on the internet, your website gets a point and is marked accordingly. This is where the anchor text comes into play, that is the little bit of text used as a link, usually blue with an underline and looks like this. It’s also referred to as the ‘keyword term’ and it’s the keyword that you want your website to get on page 1 of Google for.
What is a link?
A link is a score, a goal, a strike, a wicket… it’s a plus point as far as Google is concerned. It’s one of the many gauges that Google uses to measure how popular a site is. If a web site has 2000 links obviously you are more noteworthy than a site with 20 links.
Sorry if this sounds like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs but, a link is a connection between two pages, it is what you click to go from one place to another on the interweb. If you click the “About Us” text in a navigation menu on a website this would generally be considered as a link. Other possible links are inline links that look like this and are used within the content of a website. A link can be text or it can be an image, it’s worth pointing out that both text and image links can contain additional tags that add additional weight to the relevance of a keyword like title and alt… it can get very confusing sometimes! A link is considered in the calculation of relevancy in terms of what your site is all about and therefore tells the likes of Google where to position your site amongst all the other websites out there.
What is a back link?
Ok, so what’s the difference between a link and a back link? Well, a back link would generally not come from the same domain or host.
Lets say your web site is abc123.co.uk and you had a page called ‘about us’ – usually the domain would resolve like this: http://www.abc123.co.uk/about-us.html … the page ‘about us’ would contain links back to the homepage as well as going back to the ‘about us’ page. Technically you would consider them to be a back link but because they resolve on the same domain ‘abc123.co.uk’ they are not considered by search engines to be back links. A back link comes from a domain other than your own domain.
The code for a link is called an anchor tag and looks like this <a>. It generally contains an attribute called ‘href’ which refers to the destination url for the anchor tag and the anchor text used for the link (usually the keyword). The anchor tag can have a ‘title’ attribute as well and this will help describe the link, it will not harm to include it and indeed could help your SEO efforts. A full example would look like this:
Say for instance you wanted to get on page 1 or number 1 position in Google for the keyword term ‘pappa richmonds home made pizza’ the trick is to create as many links across the web as you can using that anchor text like this: pappa richmonds home made pizza the code for this would look like this:
<a href="https://squareonemd.test" title="pappa richmonds home made pizza">pappa richmonds home made pizza</a>
Now because this is quite an obscure term it wouldn’t be that difficult to get page 1 if not number 1 position in Google for that term. Because of this it is important to do keyword research before choosing a term to target and actually target a term that a searcher would be looking for and not something as obscure as the example used.
Want more? Well don’t forget you can subscribe to the next installment all about the importance of your internal link structure.