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SEO FAQ and general Internet marketing answers - SEO Definitions


What do all the abbreviations stand for? What is Canonical? All this and more are answered in the SEO definitions section of our SEO Faq.

What is SEO (search engine optimisation)

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in the search engine directories

So that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on top of the search results page (SERP).

It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process.

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results.

A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Algorithms can differ so widely that a web page that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents.

It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

Because search algorithms constantly change or in continual flux, it is advisable to seek the assistance of a professional SEO company, such as We Seo. As with typical adversing such as the Yellow Pages, the SEO campaign is a ongoing investment in your company.

Because search algorithms do change it is required to maintain the optimisation process, to enable high ranking key phrases to stay that way. The campaign can be lowered in to a maintenance mode as it were but continual maintenance is often required to keep a site at the top of it's market.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is an unethical practice of using server side scripting to give a user one version of a web page, while a search engine spider or bot receives a different version

Why is it unethical? Because it is designed to manipulate the SERP results and is not a natural ranking factor. Apart from it being unethical it can also result in the offending domain being banned from the search engine directories.

What is Google page rank?

Page rank is a rank Google use to assign a relevance to your page and the search term being searched for.

Factors that can increase your Google PageRank

If you are looking to increase your page rank, we have put together a list of factors which influence the algorithm. Each criteria has a score of relevance or an importance factor to better enable you to work on different factors that add up to the overall score.

You should also keep in mind that it is not a hard and fast rule to live and die by in obtaining relevance within your site. If you have good relevant content, in relation to what the user is searching for, and the site and copy is well optimised, your pages will rank in the corresponding search.

Page rank overall is in our opinion only one criteria Google looks at when finding relevant content to the searchers query. Above all is quality and relevance of content, if it is on subject, well put together and an attention to SEO has been taken into consideration, your pages will be found.

  1. Update Pages Frequently 2/10
  2. Add Pages Frequently 4/10
  3. No Broken Links 5/10
  4. Good Neighbourhoods Directories with high PageRank Levels 7/10
  5. Authority Websites 7/10
  6. Quality Inbound links 8/10
  7. Quality Relevant Links 9/10
  8. Article Submissions (this can increase your PageRank by getting more inbound links)
  9. All these put together 10/10

Factors that can be detrimental to your Google PageRank

  1. Bad inbound links such as Porn, Sex, Drugs, Some medication text, Gambling, amongst others.
  2. Link spamming
  3. Bad Content, this includes scraped content, irrelevant content and duplicated content
  4. Lots of broken links
  5. SEO Black Hat Techniques

How Google PageRank is Calculated

Moving on to the calculations that make up the Google page rank, now only the powers to be really know the entire inner workings to page rank, as far as we know no actual release of the internal working of the Google page rank have been released.

Below is the actual Google page rank algorithm that was released during the developmental stage of Google. This is as much as anyone has as far as we know, but is enough to serve our purposes. 

      PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

A simplistic view of this can be seen as

      a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

Share = The linking page's PageRank is divided by the number of outbound links

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value will be shared equally between all pages.

This equates to it would be better to get a page linked to your website that has a PageRank of 5 with 2 outbound links then it would be to have a page linked to you with a PageRank of 8 with 500 outbound links. With all things considered it would be better to have both of these sites linking to yours, but if you can only have one, then it becomes clear.

Google PageRank algorithm is based between a PR of 1 to 10, but many people believe that these numbers are set to an algorithmic logarithmic scale. Furthermore there is a very good reason to think this, but no one knows for sure outside of Google. It is probable that people have already figured this out, but the only way to be certain would be to duplicate the algorithm yourself.

Who invented the Google PageRank Algorithm

Google PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page, and Sergery Brin. This was part of a research undertaking for these two people. The project was started in 1995 and then led to a functional prototype. In 1998 Google was born and the rest is history in the making.

What does SEM stand for?

SEM means 'Search Engine Marketing'

Search engine marketing covers any means that a site is listed within search results that is not organic.

For example

  1. Paid placement
  2. Paid inclusion
  3. Pay per click
What does SE stand for?

In Internet forums, articles and general posts you may come across the abbreviation SE.

SE stands for 'Search Engine' some popular search engines include.

What is a Canonical URL?

Your website can bee seen as a slightly different number of different URL's.

http://weseo.com.au
http://www.weseo.com.au


Having multiple locations of where a search engine can find your homepage, can lead to a penalty. Having a canonicalisation URL means that you have only one location where your web page is possibly found. By setting up your website properly you can redirect visitors and search engines, who view other versions of your web page. This is achieved in the .htaccess file located in your website root directory.

.htaccess example to avoid canonicalisation

< IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on


# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*/index\.(php|html)\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.*)index\.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

# force www.
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^weseo.com.au/ [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.weseo.com.au//$1 [r=301,nc]



You could use the above example in for your own website just changing the reference of weseo.com.au to your own website url.

What does SERP stand for?

SERP stands for "Search Engine Results Page" When you type a query into the Google search engine and you are presented with a list of results this is a SERP.

These results are listed in order of relevance to your search query, as determined by the search algorithm. Some search engines (Google) also include news, video results, books on the search term query among other various information, this is also known as universal search.

Typically the higher your site shows on the SERP page directly corresponds to how much traffic your site will receive from the corresponding search term.

Below is an example of estimated traffic according to the placement of your website on the SERP page.

The first position in the SERP result can typically expect to receive around 42% of all visitors who searched for that particular query. Below is the breakdown of the other positions.

  1. 42.30%
  2. 11.92%
  3. 8.44%
  4. 6.03%
  5. 4.86%
  6. 3.99%
  7. 3.37%
  8. 2.98%
  9. 2.83%
  10. 2.97%



It is interesting to note that the 10th place position on average receives a higher percentage of visitors than the 9th position of the results.

What is the Google sandbox?

Google sandbox in essence is a holding area for new domains or domains that are seen to change in ownership frequently.

Some people have claimed it could take up to a year for a domain to be released from the sandbox, we have not experienced such time lengths but have witnessed occurrences of three months or more.

It is said to help cut down new SPAM domains or understand the value of a new domain before it is ranked and allowed to rank for the desired search term phrases.

See FAQ getting out of the Google sandbox to minimise this happening to your new domain.

How do I get out of the Google sandbox faster?

This is an often asked question, and it all relates to trust. To be lifted from the Google sanbox faster and establish your site in the SERPS requires some quality backlings. You could attain some of these back links from resources such as, www.DMOZ.org, Yahoo Business Listing, www.LocalBusinessGuide.com.au, www.HotFrog.com.au or to some extent social media sites such as www.Digg.com or Propeller.com.

Obtaining some high quality backlinks from one or two sources will get your site out of the sandbox far quicker than 30 links from poor quality websites. Remember when it comes to backlinks quality over quantity.