SEO is a topic that has slowly become more commonly understood and spoken about, even outside of the marketing world, as more people start to realise the value in getting to grips with SEO. However, as this awareness of the subject grows, some people start to worry that they can’t ask questions about SEO, for fear of sounding like they don’t have a clue what they are doing.
The truth is, SEO involves so many different elements and it is evolving all of the time, so there are very few experts that know every single aspect of SEO and are fully up to date with the latest trends and best practices. Whether you are completely new to SEO, or you have a basic understanding, if SEO is not your area of expertise, don’t worry, here are some of the most common questions that people don’t like to ask about SEO:
- What is SEO?
Even if you think you have a basic understanding of what SEO is, it might help to look at this in more detail. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is essentially a set of techniques that will help your website to be more visible in search results. In other words, if you apply good SEO techniques to your website and content, when somebody uses Google, Bing or any other search engine to search for services you provide, you have a better chance of them finding your website.
- What is the difference between paid results and organic?
There are two main ways to get more traffic to your website, one is through paid search results, which is where you pay Google or another advertiser to appear at the top of the results. The other way is organic search results, where an algorithm analyses websites to determine where they should stand in the search results. This involves how effective the SEO techniques are on the website, i.e. how well they perform against the priorities set by the algorithm.
- What are meta descriptions? How important are they?
The meta description is the section of text that is displayed below your page when it is shown in search results. This content is important as it helps to make it more compelling for a user to click through to your website, so it is worth spending a bit of time getting this section of text perfected to drive more conversions.
- Do I need to optimize my domain name to include keywords?
Whilst there are some benefits of having a domain name that includes a keyword, this is not the most important consideration. Having a domain name that is long and difficult to remember will really harm your SEO, so don’t try and force a keyword in just for the sake of it if the short and snappy domains with that keyword have all been taken.
- What is the difference between an inbound and an internal link?
This is an area that people confuse quite a lot and you can see why! To clarify, an inbound link is one where another website links to your content. Internal links, on the other hand, are ones within your website that go from one page to another.
- Is there a difference between indexing and crawling?
Crawling is the process where search engines ‘crawl’ through your content to review it before determining how or whether it will be indexed. Indexing is basically how the content is organised, a database of the content. Some content will be crawled but then won’t get indexed.
Hopefully, that will have answered some of those questions that you were too embarrassed to ask.
