SEO A to Z - part 1 - "A/B Test to Autocomplete"

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Hello , welcome to this latest episode of SEO as Ed here as usual , and today I'm doing part one of an SEO A to Z series .

So the SEO industry , you know , like all industries , has got a complete language of its own , and even seasoned SEO professionals might not know every single term in use across the whole sphere of SEO , and new terms are coined all the time . So you know even myself , you know , occasionally I'll come across people talking about something and , you know , using

terminology that I don't know . So I've created over time , a big SEO glossary of all the terms I just thought you know it'd be interesting to go through them . I can give an opinion on some of them , I can maybe bring something new to each of these terms and if I'm missing something , I'd love to hear from you .

So today I'm going to talk about SEO terms , beginning with the letter A . If there's any I've missed that you think I should add , then please do get in touch . I can add them to the glossary that we have on the Keywords for People to Use site . So let's dive in and we'll start with A-B tests .

Now , an A-B test is also known as a split test , and this is where you create new versions of a web page that you're looking to improve with how people interact with them . This is also kind of known as convert .

It's part of the process of conversion rate optimization , so you're trying to increase , um , a certain aspect of how people interact with that page , be it the increased number of people that buy something , or increase the number of people that maybe sign up for a newsletter or something like that .

So , essentially , you create to a new version of the page and you send a percentage of your traffic to the original page and a percentage of your traffic to the new page and then measure every time which version performs the best .

Now , often you'll use , like some specialist software to help you do that traffic split and measure and how different people react to different versions . But it's a real foundational block of conversion rate optimization , this whole idea of having two versions of a page , an A version and a B version , and then testing how they both perform .

So the next day is about this result . Now , this is if you go to the Google search engine result page , do any search and for each result you'll next to the URL , there's three little vertical dots .

So if you come up with a search and the first result was the BBC website bbccouk , where they list the URL in the search result there's three little vertical dots and if you click them , then it will give you about this result information which includes a varying amount of information about the site and the page and the author , if it knows the author , as well

as information about the language of the site and what the target country the page is relevant for , and it can give you a whole load of extra context about each page and it's interesting to find what Google knows about pages and different sites .

So , yeah , that's a little thing , that's a little , it's almost , it's almost an easter egg , because not many people know exists . So about this result worth checking out . Next , we have ad content or ads . Now , the ad content of a web page is the content , that content or links which are displayed for the purpose of monetizing a page .

So the most common form of ad content you'll see are display advertising and affiliate links . So display advertising is , you know , like banner ads , that kind of thing , and affiliate links where you know if you follow that link and say , sign up for a product or purchase something , then the page that you've been sent from will receive some commission .

Now ad content is one of the three types of page content which Google define as the main constituents of any web page , along with supplementary content , which is things like navigation , and main content , which is the main sort of purpose of a page , the main content on a page to help a page achieve its purpose .

So these ad content is one of these three constituent parts that Google breaks each page up into when it's analyzing the content on the page .

And ad content is a real key part of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines which , if you're not familiar with those , those are the guidelines that Google Quality Raters use to make subjective assessment of pages to help train Google's main machine learning algorithms . So it's really key to sort of make sure you don't overdo the ad content on pages .

Google does accept that people can use ads and monetize their pages . They see that as a necessary thing for people to do , but they also have limits on how much you can do . So if you put too many ads on so they distract from the main content and the main content , the main purse of a page , and you can find ads become problematic .

But the best thing to do is read those google quality rate guidelines and I will put an into those in next up . We've got affiliate now . An affiliate is a person or a company that promotes the products or services of another company in return for a commission for any customers they refer .

So common online examples of where you might find websites acting as affiliates are sort of price comparison websites or review websites , where people review products and provide links to those products , um , but you'll find affiliates all over the place , um , and you know I do plenty of affiliate marketing myself .

I've acted as an affiliate for over 20 years in many different spheres , most notably broadband , and some affiliates are very above board and give honest recommendations and others will only sort of promote those that give them the most commission . But in terms of what an affiliate is .

They're the person who makes their income by recommending other people's products and then being rewarded for any sales

that they drive to the merchants there . So next up , we've got affiliate link , which I mentioned previously when we were talking about ads .

Now an affiliate link is a link that will lead to a web page on a merchant's website that will contain tracking information so that any person who clicks and follows that link will then be tracked as coming from a certain affiliate .

So if the person who follows the link subsequently purchases the product , then the affiliate is rewarded with a commission from the merchant for that sale . So affiliate links are considered as paid links by google , which means that you therefore have to tag them with a sponsored link or as a no follow link . Otherwise google may consider that you know .

You therefore have to tag them with a sponsored link or as a no-follow link . Otherwise Google may consider that you're trying to manipulate PageRank by having those links if you don't mark them as having that kind of commercial relationship . Next up , we've got affiliate networks . Now an affiliate network .

They act as like a middleman between merchants , who are the companies that have products and services to sell , and the affiliates who have an audience they want to sell to . So the affiliate networks will provide tracking and transparency between the merchant and the affiliate to ensure that all sales are fairly recorded and commission is paid from merchant to affiliate .

So you'll find affiliate networks are used by many big companies that have many , many affiliates working underneath them . Lots of smaller companies will not necessarily use affiliate networks . You know a lot smaller merchants might just use their own off-the-shelf software . We use our own off-the-shelf software with keywords people use for our affiliates .

So you don't have that , that kind of transparency mechanism in between . But the affiliate networks are good once you get past a certain size . But there's an added cost of involving an affiliate network . So if you're a merchant looking to try and use affiliates , then it might not necessarily be in the first instance .

It'd be great to use an affiliate network just purely because of the cost . The next A is affiliate marketing . So we've just been talking about that across the past few entries . This is the joy of doing an alphabetical order . You come up sometimes in reverse , um , but yes .

So affiliate marketing is a method of monetizing a website or an email list by recommending products or services of third-party merchants to your audience and then receiving a commission on any resulting sales . That's the kind of the basic idea , but I think we've covered it in the past few entries . Next up , we've got AI generated content .

So the rise of large language models LLMs like ChatGPT has made it very easy to create large amounts of content in a very short space of time . Now AI generated content is not limited to text , but it can also include images , videos and audio created by ai .

Now what google doesn't want to see is its index filled with increasing amounts of generic ai content which it considers to be spam , and it's taken aggressive action recently to index sites with large amounts of ai content .

Now , that's not to say that ai content hasn't got a future , but I think there's clearly going to be issues around just mass generating content at scale because of issues around . Obviously , ai content can hallucinate . You know it's not generating anything new . It's just working with existing content , learning from that and then creating .

It's actually just rewriting what's existing . It's nothing new . Essentially , it's just an average of what's out there . So , yeah , I can see why google is going to take an action on that . So be careful if you're planning on creating lots of content using ai , it may not have the longevity that you would hope for . Next up , we've got algorithmic penalty now .

An algorithmic penalty is one that negatively hits a website in Google search results as a result of changes to Google's core algorithm .

So these are penalties that you will find applied to a site if it has crossed a line one of the many lines that Google sets for various things , such as like link spam or on-page spam and these penalties are not ones that single out a website based on someone having looked at it manually and made a decision .

These are ones where Google's algorithm has decided automatically , by itself , to apply this penalty to your website . So these are things that you obviously want to try and avoid , but it's not always simple to do , especially when these new penalties are brought in by A for the first time and B through core updates and things like that .

Next up , we've got alt text Now . Alt text is short for alternative text , and this is a method of adding a written description to accompany images on a website . The use of alt text is good for accessibility , as it's used by screen readers that help people who have visual impairments to understand the content of web pages .

It's also used by Google to help understand images . In the same way , I think it probably was more important to Google in the past , when it didn't have any mechanisms to use machine learning to interrogate and understand the contents of actual pages .

And it's not 100% clear if Google still is actually interrogating every page with machine learning , every image with the machine learning to understand the image , or whether how strongly it relies on alt text . But it's a good thing to do , just for accessibility reasons . So I would strongly recommend you do use alt text for any image you put on your website .

The next A is authority . Now , authority is a term that essentially covers , on a scale , the weight and importance of a website relative to others .

So a website such as bbccouk will have a much higher authority , as it's a national broadcaster's website and it's been in existence a long time and it's rich in content and has many backlinks from third-party websites , so it's going to be a high-authority website .

In contrast , a brand new website with little content , few or no backlinks and produced by an unknown entity will have very little authority . Now , sites with a higher authority tend to be able to rank faster and higher with new content than pages with low authority . Now Google doesn't publish an official authority metric .

There are sites out there , like Ahrefs , which give things like domain authority , which is their kind of best guess pages or besides authority , and for many years google said they don't have a domain authority any kind of thing like that within their algorithms .

But the recent google api documentation leaks there is a site authority attribute in there , so it's definitely something that Google have . They may have multiple authority metrics across a site , but the main thing to take into account when thinking about authority is when SEO a you know it's when seos talk about it .

It's like a generic way of describing the effect of our established sites with high perceived authority appear to be favored by google . Next day is amp , or accelerated mobile pages . Now it's a hate . This is a htl framework which is optimized for mobile browsing . It was launched by google in 2015 .

Now amp is designed to allow desktop websites to produce fast and efficient mobile versions .

Now the problem that amp solved is now much less of an issue , as most sites nowadays are optimized to work on mobile , you know , straight out the box , and with mobile connectivity speeds being much higher , it's kind of a problem and that's been solved by the advance of technology , but if you ever see people talk about AMP or AMP pages , that's what they're

talking about . Next A is analytics . Now , you know analytics is known for a broad category of services that allow you to get data about how people interact with your website . So the core functionality would be to provide data on how many visitors you receive in any given time period and from what sources .

And different analytics services provide a huge range of additional metrics to help you understand how your website is performing .

So examples of analytics services include google's j4 which I hate , by the way , j4 is awful microsoft clarity , which is very good and I recommend , and clickycom , which I use , which is great for a sort of simple overview , but there's many others available and you know it's always key with any website to have some kind of analytics .

So you know just basics on how many people are coming to your site , where from and where they're going to on your site . Next up , anchor text . So anchor text is the descriptive wording of any hyperlink from one page to another page . So traditionally , like these are the pages highlighted in blue with underlined text on a web page .

So often nowadays , you know , designers will use alternative highlighting , though often nowadays , you know , designers will use alternative highlighting . Google use this anchor text as like a ranking signal to try and determine what the subject being of a page being linked to is .

So it's therefore it's better to use descriptive , keyword rich texture anchor text rather than just generic . Click here type wording . Next up , we've got apis , which stands for application programming interface . So an api is an interface to a software application or service that allows other software to connect to it and interact with it .

So an API allows you to build your own software that takes and extends the functionality of other services . So many software service tools and other services have APIs available so users can interact with them programmatically .

And if you're on a certain level of package I think it's standard or higher on keywords people use , if you're on a certain level of package , I think it's standard or higher on keywords people use . We have an API and it means you can write your own software to essentially use keywords people use programmatically .

So you can write your own software to sort of do searches at scale and get the data back in a format that you can then , you know , manipulate directly within software . It's not really beginner stuff , apis , but if you ever wondered what an API was . That's what it is . Next , a is audience . So you know this is a simple one .

You know your audience are the visitors to your website . They're the members of your email list , they're your podcast listeners , they're anyone that consumes your content . So when people talk about their audience , they're just talking about the people that come and consume any content that they create and , last up , we've got autoc .

Now , when used by an SEO , the term autocomplete will usually refer to the data that can be mined from Google's autocomplete feature . So these are like the autocomplete suggestions that appear in Google .

As you start to type a search query , google will start offering you suggestions of searches based on the query that you're starting to write , and these suggestions are the most popular search terms related to the keywords you're typing , and this data is really really valuable .

So if you're trying to discover how people are interacting with Google and topic area , it's a great sort of starting point to start going and look at what those autocomplete suggestions are that Google are providing and keywords people use . We've got a number of ways of mining the data with our Google autocomplete tool .

So if you want to mine this at scale , then you can use keywords people use to do that . But even if you just go and do it manually , it's a fantastic way of seeing what people are . You know the popular volume searches people are using for any seed keyword that you're putting in . So that's it .

That's everything in there Starting with letter A in our SEOo glossary terms . Hope you found it useful . If there's any terms beginning with a that you think I've missed , then do get in touch .

You can also see this glossary on our website and I'll put an insight in the show notes , and I am also working on publishing this into an ebook , um , which is going to make available , probably on amazon , but also available will be available free to download .

So do keep listening , because when that is available , I will let everybody know and you can come and get it . So , yeah , hope you find it useful . Any suggestions ? Do get in touch and look forward to seeing you next time .

Before I go , I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use , that you can free , no obligation , one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have . You can also ask me any SEO questions you have .

You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again . That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode . Hope to chat with you soon . Thanks for being a listener . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share .

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Then find the link to downloada free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel 5 on twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .