Ten Tips to the Top of Google

Ten years ago, creating a website and getting found in Google wasn't hard to do. Choose a domain. Learn some basic HTML code. Do some keyword research. Create some title tags and meta tags. Write about 250 words. And for the most part, you were done.
With Google's more recent quest for quality, authenticity, authority, and usability, however, many of of the tips that could help get your site to the top of Google 10 years ago might not produce the same results today.
Here are 10 top tips on how to optimize your site for Google's algorithm today and beyond.

1. Learn & Implement Marketing Basics

Start with a plan, not a prayer.
No matter how many buzzwords, new paradigms, disruptive technologies, or innovative inventions are introduced, search engine optimization (SEO) at its most fundamental is marketing. Marketing on the web, with efforts, outcomes, metrics that matter and competition for marketing dollars.
It doesn't matter if it's SEO for a mom and pop store, or a national online retailer. Attacking SEO without a plan is like trying to row a boat with no oars – you might eventually get somewhere, but it won't be where or when you wanted to arrive.
When I hired my first employee at my agency in 2002, the first thing I did was have them read the excellent "Marketing for Dummies" book, that lays out some basic principles. (they have a great marketing cheat sheet for reference)
Answer (at least) these questions:

• What is your expertise?
• What is your differentiation?
• Why should users care?
• Which users (age, locations, interests etc.) should care?
• What is the message and / or media that is going to connect with them?
• Who is your likely competition?
• Why should Google rank you higher than your competition?

Conduct research. Segment your audience. Set realistic goals for your SEO efforts, and then ensure tracking is in place to measure your efforts versus results.
Plan a strategy for your content, including; topics, timelines/editorial calendars, distribution (don't forget PR), and schedules and frequency. The goal is to exist with a "sizzle"; a reason to rank and/or some expertise worthy of interaction.

2. How to Structure Your Site

Plan your site for topical expertise, organized in a well-siloed, easy to navigate structure.
Although the initial plan sounds like a lot (and it can be!) the goal isn't to overwhelm and under-deliver on your marketing plan. There are, though, fundamentals in strategically building and/or organizing your site. Leveraging research into your audience, define the topics where you have expertise and/or differentiation (remember, this is marketing 101).
Research your keywords! Read this article on keyword research.
Structure your site around intent-based topics, ensuring content is siloed and distinct (cross-link to relevant and related topics only). Dividing up your site into relevant content topics gives both users and search engines an easy way to identify your expertise, and relevant topics to rank for.
Unless you're Amazon.com, it's difficult to be an expert at everything. Better to dominate a niche than try to be everything to everyone – at the beginning at least!
BONUS TIP: If you're always fighting with designers developers and marketing managers over how SEO ruins usability, don't despair! Demonstrating successes in SEO often quash the naysayers, so save some gray hair and first shoot for the "least imperfect" site feasible, and then work toward the perfection you desire once you've convinced your detractors of SEO value!

3.Build a Digital Footprint

It's not just about search engines. Embrace traditional marketing, outreach, partnerships, social, guest blogging, inspired mentions, and good old-fashioned relationships.
Apart from SEO is dead (again) chat, the next most popular SEO discussions is always on what SEO should actually be called. "Inbound marketing", "IMS", "Search Science," I've probably heard them all, but few terms capture the essence of what SEO should be doing.
With that in mind, I took it on myself to relabel SEO as "Search Everywhere Optimization" because as SEO folks we are hoping to affect the visibility of our clients sites in many venues on the web, which then creates better visibility in the search results, and more search clicks organically.
With the Search Everywhere mantra, SEO practitioners can finally expand beyond just traditional SEO responsibilities and dabble or partner with PR, social, partnerships, sponsorships and other traditional offline opportunities that get people talking online about brands and their expertise. This includes great events like SES Conference, working with nonprofits and in-store promotions, all of which can fuel the content machine and distribute content and create connections organically: a Digital Footprint.
The goal of a Search Everywhere strategy isn't to replace traditional marketing agencies, however. It's about SEO professionals working with them to ensure that every marketing initiative considers the opportunity of creating share-worthy content that can be placed and amplified online via outreach, social and/or PR channels.
The Digital Footprint you create isn't just for inbound marketing though. Google, as a massive "connections engine," uses connected entities to assess the trust and authority of sites, companies, individuals, and brands (which really encapsulates all three), leading to the earning of greater topic visibility (i.e., relevant rankings/traffic).
NOTE: It's not just about links, it's about citations, connections, mentions and associations. Who you're 'seen' with online matters!

4. Design for Multiple Screens

Create a user-friendly site design that works well and fast across all devices – especially mobile and tablet.
With so much focus on usability, the demise of the desktop browser dominance, and the prevalence of mobile devices, Google's made it very clear that no mobile experience, no love from Google!
What's often forgotten in the race to comply with a scary (for some) Google mandate, is that Google isn't saying every site should be using the same technology, solutions or share the same usability elements. Google understands that some sites need to have a mobile version (this is a site that has it's own URL structure - normally hosted on an m. sub-domain or within a mobile sub-directory or a main site) and some need a responsive website design (RWD) that adapts to the device used to access it.
NOTE: Responsive design isn't a brand new idea, but having (almost) ubiquitous browser support is!
There are various resources that provide the hows and how tos, (even Google gives some good details) but the process must begin with a site review on different devices to see if:

• Different screen sizes present obvious and usable interfaces
• Mobile or tablet users see views customized to their devices
• Interface changes based on platform or device are logical and maintain *some* consistency across platforms
• From an SEO standpoint, best practices are followed so that Google / Bing recognized the difference between device specific sites (if different sites exist) and this mitigates potential duplicate content issues

The Search Agency (full disclosure that I work there!) recently published a Responsive Web Design whitepaper that goes in depth into the pros and cons of the technical aspect of RWD.

5. Conduct Keyword Query Research

Research keyword queries leveraging social, web stats, paid media and industry research to help understand user goals, purchasing cycles, and needs.
As noted in the keyword research article above, traditional keyword research needs to evolved to focus more on the Consumer Decision Journey and less on search volume.
What does this mean?
Search engines are interpreting each search through a lens of intent and context.

• Intent: What does the user mean based on previous searches, their search behavior?
• Context: Where are they? What device are they using?
• Both:
• Machine learning: What do I know about this and similar users who have searched for this term (e.g., click behavior, engagement signals)?
• Connections: If I can identify this user, what information from his connections would help or influence click and / or search behavior?

SEO professionals must understand how these factors influence search results and present the most relevant content for each of the intents and contexts that a user in a specific mindset is experiencing.
For example, a user searching using the query "price of tea" might be looking for an online tea purveyor, spot price in the commodities markets, Starbucks price list, or, if they're standing outside a Teavana store, a comparison of their prices. If you're Teavana, you want to make sure that a "price of tea" pages is optimized around comparisons – mentioning advantages over Starbucks, value proposition of loose leaf tea, and details of how to purchase online (or in the local store), and not commodities!
At the same time search engines improve their abilities to understand search query intent based on behavior and context, users are becoming more sophisticated and expect answers to the search queries they enter.
Google and Bing are both trying serve up the best answers feasible, and to present a quick path-to-answer improved "direct answers" with those answer appearing within the search results themselves.
Keyword query research is a fundamental need for any SEO campaign. Thinking through the lens of a user query, as opposed to just focusing on keyword volume, can help drive more valuable organic traffic.
By connecting user intent to website content, SEO practitioners can enjoy – potentially – a higher level of relevant search engine traffic that both engages and converts more efficiently.

6. Write Just Enough Content

There are no "ideal lengths" of content, only enough to satisfy user intent and the context in which they're querying.
I remember when everyone had their favorite best practice of word count. It was a time of keyword density and keywords meta tag stuffing. They were good days, but they had to come to an end (though some still live in that dismal past!).
Here's the real truth about word counts:
Write just enough and not too much!
There really is no ideal length, but there isan ideal question: "Should this page exist?"
The answer should consider primarily:

• The page's uniqueness (based on other pages on the site).
• Its uniqueness (based on other pages on the web).
• Its value to users (does it answer a question they may have? FYI, analytics is your friend for engagement metrics!).
• Its accessibility from a site's homepage (via clicks).
• The content's ability to provide value with the correct media (image / video / text) so users are potentially inspired to share it!

Nowhere in these criteria does it mention the number of words, the ideal type of media, the density of keywords, or any of the other traditional optimization tactics.
Also, with Google's launch of "long form" modules in the results page, the need not to count words, keywords, paragraphs, and characters is underscored!

7. Tag Your Content (Standard, Social, Schema)

Standard tags such a meta description, title, and header tags are still important for user engagement and core SEO optimization. New and necessary tags, OG for Facebook, Twitter Cards, and schema.org microdata formats are no-brainers.
In the late '90s when I was getting my feet wet in online marketing, there were few techniques and far fewer websites, leading to an ease and confidence in getting almost anything to rank for almost anything. Tags we swore by were titles tags, meta description tag, H tags and, of course, the meta keywords tag. The tools of a trade with few tools.
Fast forward to today and there are many more tags, markup and necessities to enable better crawling, indexing and viability to rank. Through all this, the title tag has remained above most of the bickering, continuing to be the primary clickable link in the search results and (by all consensus) an important part of search engine ranking algorithms.
These "oldies but goodies" - with the exception of the black sheep keywords tag - are still important from a blocking and tackling standpoint, but alone won't fundamentally rocket you to the top 10 of Google. These are the "Standards" which every SEO should understand, and also understand that Google may or may not decide to consider when presenting a result in the SERP.
Social tags are often overlooked, but Open Graph (OG) tags have gained importance (and will continue to) as Facebook's Graph Search continues to build and improve to a usable state (sorry Facebook). Other social tags that look to materially help SEO from a visibility standpoint are the Twitter Cardsthat "gives users greater context and insight into the URLs shared on Twitter, which in turn allows Twitter to send more engaged traffic to your site or app." (*love* social organic traffic!)
Schema Markup is probably the most exciting development over the past few years, and one gaining traction slowly, despite the protocols being backed by the major (and minor) search engines. At its core, schema markup allows search engines to better identify the structure of data, to facilitate more efficient crawling, indexing and presentation of search results. Google offers an excellent Schema Q&A – far more than even this article can contain – and the Schema website gives even more detail to assist in definitions and implementation.

8. Don't Over-Optimize

Overdoing internal anchor text, linking, and excessive footer links. "Too much of a good thing" can end up being a bad thing. Keep it simple and user-focused, especially in-content anchor text links.
Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of SEO folk are also terrible online marketers, still living in the past. It doesn't take much to see the efforts Google is putting into mitigating webspam, meaning many of the tactics we used to love and use are now obsolete.
It still pains my colleagues and I when we come upon a newly updated site that displays many SEO tactics that belong in the same era as Webkinz and High School Musical (the original movie), not least of which is over-optimization and massive challenges around internal linking.
Today's optimization should be much more around creating a user-friendly experience, with internal linking and content that benefits users first and the most discerning of users, Google, second.
Footers with massive link counts aren't always beneficial on every page if top or in-page navigation provides a better experience, and definitely spammy-looking keyword rich anchor text all over a page looks... well spammy.

9. Optimize the User Experience

Post-click engagement sends the signals that your site rocks, not only do users provide metrics through trackable usage, also through social signals - shares, likes and +1s
We used to look at site traffic, cheer when it went up and cry when it went down. We used to treat users as faceless entities that proved our worth as SEOs and when we boosted the key metric of "organic site visits" we expected our clients to bow down before us and call us geniuses.
The user was a metric to a means, rather than a real "metric that mattered" and for this SEOs suffered. They suffered because the rest of the marketing world scoffed and eventually asked us to justify our existance. our fees and the time it took to get nominal results.
And then "eureka" some savvy SEOs realized we weren't all that difeferent from paid search, and display, and email marketing, we could leverage data to better understand the user and to ensure they did what we wanted them to do once they arrived at our sites, and we made sure we attracted not just more, but "more better" traffic.
And then we became user-cetric in our marketing approach. And so did Google.
Now... we need to look at what people do once they get to our site, and we need to optimize their experience, not just because Google demands a speedy site, user-friendly layouts, less 'dead end' 404s and onsite engagement, but because both Bing and Google say the users experience, their bounce back to the SERPs, their consistent times of engagement, and – for those trackable users – their behavior during a site session matter!
SEO doesn't stop at the visit any longer, thinking beyond the click has become the norm, inspiring shares, mentions, interaction and satisfaction *is* a new (and welcome) paradigm of recent SEO strategies.

10. Keep Link Building Practices Natural

Create and seed great content in venues where it makes sense. If it is truly great, and you bolster its discoverability and visibility through social media mentions, you may just inspire links, and more importantly relevant traffic!

"The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change." – Heraclitus

Savvy SEO practitioners know change will come, the challenge is both in planning for when and for what!
With the recent changes to link strategies, e.g. links from guest blogs, widget links and press release linking, SEOs are going to have to adapt to less rich anchor text, user focused linking, and nofollows in many cases.
"Natural" link building doesn't appear just a Google recommendation anymore, with the introduction of Penguin penalties and frequent manual reviews, Google the 'link police' is a 2013 reality.
Though the best advice often repeated by Google's Matt Cutt's is "create great content", SEO still needs to rely on outreach to introduce brands to relevant websites in the hope of negotiating content placements, partnerships, sponsorships or story mentions to expand digital footprints and potential traffic sources.
In this sense, the question becomes "should I still include links as part of content distribution or partnerships" and the answer is probably "sure", as long as links or anchor text traditionally designed to manipulate PageRank are nofollowed.

3 Bonus Tips

11. Build a Brand

Do this online and offline through associations, connections, citations, and engagement. And most of all... be special!
Since Google's Vince update, Google's preoccupation with brands has them flying higher in the SERP
What is an online brand?
An entity that inspires, creates or demonstrates an expertise in certain topics so that other trust entities quote them, link to them, discuss them, interact with them, and show trust in their topic expertise.
A brand online can even be "created" by Google itself, through the association created by results in the top three positions on Google's paid and organic results.

12. Use Authorship to Build Your Personal Brand (Authority)

Claim and master Google+ through their relatively easy process and correct markup of your site.
Brands are not unique just to companies, just as expertise is not unique to a few industry figureheads.
Personal brands – individuals that demonstrate expertise, trust and interaction – are also favored by search engines, with Google especially looking at the web as a web of people, connected and interacting with brands (which could be other people) they trust.
The connections created between brands, their expert content, and their 'trusters,' is really key to both providing relevant trusted results, and personalizing those results so that individuals see additional trust signals in the search results specific to them.
Authorship, Google's content verification and content association methodology ensures that connections are recognized, organized and associated with authored articles, comments, opinions (+1s), and other content attributed to specific writers(s).
Why bother? Authorship manifests in author's photos appearing alongside content results in the search results – improving click-through rates significantly!

13. Be Social

Claim your social profiles, connect on networks relevant to your audience, and remember no platform is, or should be, an island!
Your social footprint consists of a few components:

• Claiming your relevant social profiles
• Optimizing your profiles for your topic expertise / location expertise
• Posting interesting content or relevant information, content and form factor for each platform / audience
• Connecting with your optimal audience
• Interacting with your audience
• Amplifying interactions (ensuring no platform is an island)

Social interaction and amplification has progressively become more important for SEO given the ability to deploy or promote shareable content to both "connected" and "potential" audiences, empowering both groups to engage and generate trust and topic association signals, links, citations and mentions that search engines can recognize, catalog and leverage to improve both the personalization and relevance of results.
Recent patents and experience alludes to sentiment being a factor search engines are considering as additional indicators of trust and brand... ensuring positive mentions, reviews and interactions are available, crawlable and indexable may eventually be a key component of trust signals for ranking! Engage!

Final Thoughts

There's probably another 50+ tips to get yourself to the top of the Google search results, but we'll stop here. But don't let that stop you commenting below if there's some important tips that you feel are obviously missing. Check back on Search Engine Watch where I and others will be expanding on this list of SEO tips to the top!


source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066301/Ten-Tips-to-the-Top-of-Google

What is 'Pure Spam'? 10 Examples From Google

Like a hot dog, one does not often associate the word "pure" with "spam". In fact, one is generally best not to think of what it's made of – unless you're Google, of course.
Since 0 AG (After Google), Google has had to contend with pesky webmasters and SEO practitioners looking for ways to rank sites as highly as possible as quickly as possible, often regardless of what that actually did to the search results.
Any decade-plus veteran of SEO will remember the "Wild West" days of SEO and, if they were trying to stick to pure white hat strategies, their frustration.
For years Google told the SEO community that buying links was bad, content scraping and spinning was trouble, blatant link schemes would get you penalized, and that you should focus on good content that people will want to link to naturally.
The problem? The algorithm they had couldn't compete with what are now deemed "unethical practices". Webmasters and SEO professionals who "cheated the system" tended to do well.
Fortunately, for those who want to actually create a good user experience (including Google), they've figured a lot out over the past few years.
To illustrate the point they launched a page earlier this year on fighting spam that actually shows real-time examples of pages they're kicking from the index for being "pure spam". I've got to admit, the first time I heard about this manual Google spam action I half chuckled and thought, "Well that's a pretty bold explanation."
The question then becomes, "What does this mean?" The this end let's take a look at a few of the real-time examples of pure spam that Google was displaying (as of the writing of this article) and think about what they might have seen there that qualified it as "pure spam".

10 Examples Of 'Pure Spam'

On the page Google notes of those listed, "These pages are examples of 'pure spam.' They appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites."
Remember, this is a manual action and so a human actually looked at the following pages and deemed them to fit this criteria. Here is what they're seeing:
Example 1: NorthCarolinaPhoneLookup.com

This page, with a copyright date of 2008, is a brief blurb of repetitive content at the top with a simple list of numbers below in hopes of ranking for queries for those numbers. For anyone who's ever looked up a phone number you'll know the frustration caused by such sites and why Google wants them gone.
The service isn't unique to this site and the site itself is a duplication of other sites that are likely to be hit soon. Simply substitute the words "north carolina" in the into text for any other state and run a search for it and you'll see what I mean.
Example 2: Cuzb.com

One need only read the content to understand why this page was marked as "pure spam". The site is English but the writer clearly is not. In looking for other pages from the site in the index, this penalty extended across the whole domain. Thanks, Google.
Example 3: QuickPayDay.Tripod.co.uk

I had to include this one simply because it was a bit of a head scratcher. The question isn't whether it's spam or not (one can't argue that it's thin on content) but rather how it even got to the point of a manual review. Sure it's got some spammy links but even the archives couldn't find content so one might think basic SEO factors would take care of it.
Example 4: DMMmovie.biz

To determine why this site was classified as "pure spam" simply read the following sentence with me:

"Gru is a modified man. No more a super-villain who needs to be the baddest of the bad people, he's now trained, with his three lovely children, his very funny gobbledygook discussing, Tic-Tac-looking minions, a creepy dog and an wicked researcher associate (Russell Brand) whose concentrate is now creating jellies and jellies."

Enough said.
Example 5: AntiquesHeaven.info

Aside from the only purpose of this site being to act as an affiliate site generating revenue by pushing people to eBay and Amazon, the content near the bottom of the page is copied word-for-word from Yahoo Answers.
Oh, and useless keyword stuffing such as:

"great north western telegraph company glass insulatororiental fish bowl tablesdresden lampsgeneral fireproofing co wood file cabinetart nouveau alabaster bustprimitive folk".

Example 6: PacificRimWatch.MetroBlog.com

I'm not sure what's in the water they drink while building sites that sell illegal copies of movies or maybe more, what the people who would purchase from this site sprinkled on their morning oatmeal but let's read the following sentence together:

"Brendon has been displaying Off-shore Rim upset love on this computing machine relating to weeks currently. It's safe to mention this individual desires it."

Clearly not human written and if auto-translated and not spun, they're using the worst translation tool on the planet.
And it doesn't help their case that the site language setting is Spanish as is most of the navigation.
Example 7: DC.CCJ.in.ua

There are two very clear reasons why this page has been deemed "pure spam" and we're going to even ignore the fact that all the images are broken:

• They've taken content directly from Facebook – and right in the first paragraph as well. 
• The horrible spun content (for example: "Facebook password finder.The Stages of the of the certain stage. It is the smell rumour.").

"Pure spam"? Definitely.
Example 8: CouponCentral101.com

Ah, coupon sites. Admittedly, my first instinct as I saw this site was that the "pure spam" classification was due tot he fact that pretty much every link on the page is an external link to an ad site.
But then I realized that the copy on the page was taken directly from an Ezine article. How do we know it wasn't duplicated on Ezine after? The archives show us that on May 29, 2012 the site had different content and the article was posted on February 20, 2012.
So – thin, no value content, and even the content that is there is duplicated.
Example 9: HowWeightManagement.com

First look it seems that, while a little heavy-handed with the ads and footer links, not "pure spam". That is, until you read the content which contains such gems as:

"the benefits calorie burning is the only benefit of Pure Barre. According to Pure Barre, the technology to protect your joints, because it does not involve any rebound or jump. Each followed by stretching create long bulk, muscle exercise intensity part."

Thank you Google for removing this rubbish.
Example 10: RkwVik43.biz

The note I've had to add to the picture probably says enough. Google isn't a fan of content that's difficult to read. And if you read the text you'll see it varies from Minecraft to pay stubs to pubic hair. Not exactly tied together by relevancy.
There is a full litany of issues ranging from missing images (and by images I mean all of them), text such as:

"... Minecraft Force Op 1.5.2 which is finally released today and using that you can. O maior servidor de Minecraft online do mundo.Mais de 15 servidores download media de 4 mil jogadores ..."

Switching from English to Portuguese mid-paragraph isn't particularly helpful outside of a language site.
On top of that the site's content is extremely poor quality (even outside of the mix of language) and there is no focus. In short, the site would be a disaster for users.

So What is "Pure Spam"?

We all have our own definition of "pure spam" but what's more important is understanding what Google means by it. At this time and after reviewing literally hundreds of example of what they consider it to be, the focus of this penalty seems to rest on content.
There doesn't appear to be a crossover into links in what they define "pure spam" to be. Websites with this penalty should focus their attention on their content and user experience.
With that said, websites prone to a penalty such as this one likely have serious issues in their backlink profiles as well. I'm not suggesting that webmasters ignore reviewing their links in the event of this penalty, simply that links don't appear to be a major tying factor in the sites receiving it or even how Google themselves define the penalty. Best not to wait for an "unnatural links" warning however.

Additional Reading

I pondered writing a section of this article on what to do if you receive this penalty. Heck, on the same page they list the sites being penalized they also list a number of spam strategies they're going after so it's pretty clear what's covered.
That said, I couldn't cover the subject better that fellow SEW writer Kristine Schachinger did in her article Pure Spam: What Are Google Penalties & What to Do to Recover. Well written and covers the recovery subject point-by-point.

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Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2286153/What-is-Pure-Spam-10-Examples-From-Google

Link Building A-Z Guide – Definitions & Terms

When those of us in search marketing talk and write about link building, we tend to use terms that we think are very commonly understood. We bandy around phrases like "CTR on page 1 of the SERPs is better than on page 2" and "god help me if my content gets deindexed."
However, for the new guys and gals out there (and that includes people who are both learning about building links and clients who seek link services) this link building guide will help define and explain some of the more common link building terms, from A to Z.

A – AC Rank, Actual PageRank, Anchor Text

AC Rank [A Citation Rank]
Majestic SEO's measure of a page's importance, on a scale of 0 to 10. It can be considered an alternative to Google's PageRank and is used in various link tool programs. The AC Rank stands for A Citation Rank.
The Actual PageRank
Google's value for your page, and it's not what you see on a tool or your toolbar, as that isn't updated frequently enough to reflect the true value.
Anchor text
The content inside of the anchor element ( < a>anchor text < /a>) and is designed to give you an idea of what the content you are pointing to is about. The anchor element contains an href attribute where the target of the link is designated. The anchor element is, many times, called an anchor tag.

B – Backlink Profile, Bait, Bing, Blekko, Blog Network, Broken Links

Backlink profile
A term used to describe the links coming into a site from sources other than the site itself.
Bait [link bait]
Content that is specifically designed in order to naturally attract links.
Bing
The most popular alternative to Google's search engine at the current time, owned by Microsoft.
Blekko
Also a great alternative to Google and prides itself on being a spam-free search engine. It has some great features that can help you when link building.
Blog networks
Exactly what they sound like: networked blogs. Their importance in link building has recently been compromised as several high-profile and large networks (e.g., BuildMyRank) have been devalued.
Broken link building
The process of finding links that hit 404 pages on other sites, contacting the sites with those links, and asking to have the link pointed to your own resource.

C – Content, Conversion, CTR

Content
The subject matter, in text and images, of your site and its pages. Content is also used to describe anything that your brand produces, whether it's a guest post on another site, an article that you distribute, a press release, or an infographic.
Conversion
A term used to describe an event where a user performs a certain action that is valuable to you as a site owner. Some webmasters view a contact email as a conversion, for example, while others simply view an actual sale as one.
CTR [click through rate]
A term associated with PPC but becoming more popular in the general SEO vernacular as some speculate that it may become more important in ranking. Your CTR is the number of times your listing is shown (triggered by a search and referred to as impressions with PPC) divided by the number of times it's clicked upon, calculated as a percentage.

D – Deep Link Ratio, Deindexed, Directories, Drain Rank, Disavow Links

Deep link ratio
The percentage of links that go to your subpages vs. just your home page. Many different views abound about what number is ideal.
Deindexed
Refers to being thrown out of a search engine and removed from their database.
Directories
One of the most consistent ways that people have built links throughout the years. There are paid and free versions, directories that accept all submissions and many that are quite picky about what they'll accept, and while they have fallen out of fashion somewhat recently, they are still a valid source of traffic.
Disavow Links Tool
Use this to tell Google or Bing which links you want them to ignore in your backlink profile. This tool came about after an outcry from webmasters who were punished for incoming links that hurt them but that they could not control.
Drain rank
This refers to the idea that linking out to other sites drains your PageRank.

E – Equity, External Link

Equity
The group of links pointing to your site at a point in time.
External links
Links that go from your site to someone else's site. Some people nofollow them in order to prevent them from receiving any link juice.

F – Followed Link, Footer Link, Footprint

Followed links
Links that are allowed to send link juice to their targets. For ranking purposes, these are the kind of links that you want. A link without a rel=nofollow is a followed link.
Footer links
Links that appear in the footer of a site, generally on every page. These were originally so abused that many SEOs now consider a footer link to be very poor. However, there are still legitimate footer links.
Footprints
Ways of identifying patterns that you're using to build links. For example, if 75 percent of your links come from non-U.S.-hosted sites and are all on blogrolls, that's a big footprint. A "natural" backlink profile should not have many obvious footprints due to its organic nature, therefore having easily identifiable footprints is a potential bad sign for your site. However, you can have a good footprint too (such as if you had a lot of great and authoritative links from respected news sources because your site was constantly being cited there.)

G – Google, Guest Posting, Graph

Google
So powerful, it's now a verb. No matter what anyone says, almost all of us market to what Google wants.
Graph [link graph]
Generally speaking, the link graph is a representation of links for sites. It can be thought of as being the "normal" for a niche of sites but may also refer to links for a certain market sector/keyword/locality/etc. You can use a link graph for competitive research to define what everyone else is doing and see where you stand in relation to that. A complicated thing to define, as it's not a discrete concept.
Guest posting
A popular way of building links and creating new content. Many sites actively recruit for new guest posters and some are amenable to the idea when contacted. The whole idea of a guest post is to raise exposure for a brand on another site, but it's quickly becoming a spammy and abused method. However, when done correctly, guest posts can bring you some fantastic traffic.

H – Hashtag, Hidden Link, Href

Hashtags
Widely used on social network platforms in order to associate a tweet/comment with something. They begin with #. On Twitter, hashtags are used to help trend certain ideas. For link building purposes, hashtag searches on Twitter are useful for finding good potential link targets.
Hidden link
A link that is intentionally coded in order to not appear as a link. It can be hidden using a text color that is the same as the background, placed inside an irrelevant image, font size 0, etc. These are viewed as manipulative and deceptive and can cause Google to remove your site from their index.
href
An HTML attribute that lists the target of a link. An example is <a href="http://www.w3schools.com">Visit W3Schools </a>.

I – Image Link, Internal Link, Inbound Link

Image link
An image that is linked to a target. Image links are part of a natural link profile and can pass link juice, but they do not include anchor text as regular text links do. Instead, they use an alt text (which is also used by screenreaders) to give information about the link target.
Inbound links
Links coming to your site from a site other than your own. The anchor text of an inbound link supposedly tells the search engines what your page is about, thus helping you rank for that term.
Internal Link
A link from one page of your site to another page on your site.

J – Juice

Juice
A term used to describe the benefit received from a link, also referred to as link juice.

K – Keyword

Keywords
Words or phrases for which you want to rank in the search engines. They should be present in your copy and in links pointing to your site.

L – Link Profile

Link profile
The collective group of sites that link to you.

M – MozRank

MozRank
A method of measuring the link popularity of a webpage by SEO software provider Moz. Becoming a more important metric by the day, almost akin to PageRank.

N – Nofollowed Link

nofollowed link
These are indicated by placing a rel="nofollow" into the link code. A nofollow is designed to tell Google that the link should not pass value to the target. Nofollows are also used internally for PageRank sculpting and to indicate that a link is sponsored/paid. Nofollow links are not good for ranking purposes but they can be good for traffic.

O – Outbound Linking

Outbound linking
The practice of linking from your site to another. Many people nofollow these links in an effort to conserve link juice, but that practice is becoming a bit more frowned upon recently.

P – PageRank, Paid Links, Panda, Penguin

PageRank
Google's measure of a page's importance. There's a difference in what you can see as your PageRank and what Google thinks it is.
Paid links
Refers to links that are bought and placed on a website, with the intention of helping the buyer's website rank better. When not indicated as such, are a violation of Google's guidelines and are a risky tactic. Paid links can be problematic both for the site selling them and for the webmaster buying them as both practices can get you penalized. If a link has been purchased, it should be indicated as such with a nofollow according to Google.
Panda
A Google algorithm update that can make grown men cry. It first struck fear into our hearts in February 2011 and was an effort to force higher quality sites higher up in the SERPs. After the first update, we've seen several more. There's way, way too much to go into here but you can read all the SEW articles about it here.
Penguin
A new search algorithm designed to detect, and boot out, spam. Like Panda, it made us cry and several sites were "accidentally" affected by it, so badly that there's actually a form to fill out if you think you're one of those accidental cases. Again, there's too much to go into so read about it here.

Q – Query

Query
Simply a question that you ask a search engine or a database, whether or not it's in the form of a question. We refer to queries in terms of how many times someone searches for a keyphrase, and in manners related to seeing where you rank in an engine.

R – Rank, Reciprocal Links, Referrer, Rel, Robots, Rot

Rank
Where you show up on the SERPs.
Reciprocal linking
The process of linking to someone who links to you. It's a common way of requesting a link (i.e., I'll link to you if you will link to me).
Referrer
In link terms, a referrer is something that sent a visitor to your site. That could be a search engine or a link from a website. It's the previous place a user was before they hit your site.
Rel
An element that gives the role of a link. Current uses critical for link building are to say whether a link should be followed (the default) or nofollowed (rel=nofollow).
Robots
Search engine bots, but robots can be slang for the robots.txt file, which gives instructions to engines about what to do with your site. If you don't want certain pages to be indexed, you block them in the robots file. There are also meta robots tags ( < META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">) A robots.txt file is also found at url.com/robots.txt.
Rot
A term used to describe what happens when there are links pointing to pages that are no longer available and not properly redirected or handled.

S – SERPs, Sitewides, Social Signals, Spam

SERPs [search engine results pages]
The pages Google, Bing, and others show you after you've performed a search.
Sitewide links
Links that are on every page of a site. You commonly see them in sidebars and footers, and while they once were a pretty easy way to get good rankings quickly, they're no longer viewed so positively. You do tend to find them in almost any backlink profile though, as they are part of a natural profile.
Social signals
Signs that your site/post/article is doing well socially, on the main social network platforms. Social signals are thought to be an ever-increasing method of measuring importance in the search engines and may become a bigger part of algorithms.
Spam
Jokingly referred to as being "sites positioned above mine", but is defined as being anything that clutters the web and makes for a poor user experience. Spam links are considered to be links that are irrelevant and low-quality but pursued simply to improve rankings.

T – Toolbar Pagerank, Twitter

Toolbar PageRank [TBPR]
The number from 0 to 10 that you can see that reflects the most recently updated idea of how important your site is to Google. It is not Google's true value of your site.
Twitter
A social media platform where users communicate through 140 characters or less. It's becoming more and more useful for finding good information as it happens.

U - Underline, Unnatural Links, URL

Underline
To signify most links, the linked keywords will be underlined. Links are commonly coded with underlining; style manipulations that do not underline a link can be considered to be a hidden link.
Unnatural link warnings 
Like lice, nobody wants to see them. They are messages received in Google's Webmaster Tools that indicate that some potentially unnatural links have been detected for your site.
URL [Uniform Resource Locator]
URLs have several elements that are important for SEO purposes. The domain name can give clues about the theme of your site and your brand and should be chosen carefully, as overly-optimized domain names were supposedly downgraded in the EMD update. File names should also be named carefully so that your URLs are SEO-friendly.

V – Velocity

Velocity
Your link growth speed. It can be measured with Link Research Tools.

W – Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools
Top search engines Google and Bing offer a free platform that you can use to keep an eye on your site. It can be a first line of defense when you notice any negative changes with rankings and traffic.

X – Xenu

Xenu's Link Sleuth
One of those old-school things that anyone who's been involved in SEO for more than a few years probably loves. Xenu's Link Sleuth identifies broken links on sites.

Y – Yahoo

Yahoo
The other search engine. Many link builders will refer to being listed in the Yahoo Directory, which used to be one of those things that we all recommended. Today, Bing provides the search results you see on Yahoo.

Z – Zzzzz

Zzzzz
Sleep, which you definitely need if you're going to link build. It's tiring work!

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Source :  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172916/Link-Building-A-Z-Guide-Definitions-Terms

Google Webmaster Tools: An Overview

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is the primary mechanism for Google to communicate with webmasters. Google Webmaster Tools helps you to identify issues with your site and can even let you know if it's been infected with malware (not something you ever want to see, but if you haven't spotted it yourself, or had one of your users tweet at you to let you know, it's invaluable).
And the best part? It's absolutely free. If you don't have a GWT account, then you need to go get one now.
This guide to Google Webmaster Tools will walk you through the various features of this tool, and give you insight into what actionable data can be found within. (For more in depth help, go to Google's Webmaster Help.)

Verification

Before you can access any data on your site, you have to prove that you're an authorized representative of the site. This is done through a process of verification.
There are five main methods of verification currently in place for GWT. There's no real preference as to which method you use, although the first two tend to be the most commonly used as they've been around for longer.

• The HTML file upload. Google provides you with a blank, specially named file that you just have to drop in the root directory of your site. Once you've done that, you just click on the verify button and you'll have access to your GWT data for this site.
• HTML tag. Clicking on this option will provide you with a metatag that you can insert into the head of your home page. Once it's there click on the verify button to view your GWT data. One item to note about using this method of verification is that it's possible for the tag to be accidentally removed during an update to the home page, which would lead to a revocation of the verification, but reinserting the tag and clicking verify again will fix that.
• Domain Name Provider. Select your Domain Name provider from the drop down list and Google will give you a step by step guide for verification along with a unique security token for you to use.
• Google Analytics. If the Google account you're using for GWT is the same account as for GA (assuming you're using GA as your analytics solution), is an admin on the GA account, and you're using the asynchronous tracking code (with the code being in the head of your home page), then you can verify the site this way.
• Google Tag Manager. This option allows you to use the Google Tag Manager to verify your site.

The Dashboard

Now that you're verified, you can log in and start to examine the data for your site.

The first screen you'll see is the dashboard. This gives you a quick view into some of the more pertinent information for your site, along with any new messages from Google. We'll cover each of the widgets shown here in their own sections.

Site Messages

When Google wants to communicate with a webmaster, this is the place they'll do so. There may be messages that inform you that you have pages infected with malware, that they've detected a large number of pages on your site, which may be an indication of other problems, or even just an informational message that your WordPress installation really needs to be updated to remove the possibility of anyone exploiting already known security holes in that platform.
Not all messages are bad. There's also the possibility that you'll get one that congratulates you on an increase in traffic to one or more of your pages.

Settings

Clicking on the gear icon in the top right gives you access to the tools that formerly resided in the Configuration menu item.

Webmaster Tools Preferences

Here you can specify whether you'd like to receive a daily digest of your messages or not, and the email account you'd like them sent to.

Site Settings

Here you can tell Google some things about your site if you're not able to tell them in other ways.
For example, if you have a .com site, hosted in Duluth, but it's targeted to the UK, there aren't too many signals to the search engines that that's your intention. In this tab you can set your geographic target to the UK, which informs Google of your intentions for this site.
You can also set your preferred domain – whether you want the site to show up in the search results with the www or without the www. Most sites will redirect from one to the other, or contain canonical tags, which will preclude the need for setting this here, but if you don't have that capability, this is your way to tell Google.
The crawl rate option allows you to slow down the rate of Google's spider's crawl. You'd only really do this if you witnessed server issues due to Google's crawling, for the most part you're going to let Google figure out what the correct crawl rate is for your site based on how frequently you add and update content.

Change of Address

If, on the rare occasion that you would do so, you decide to migrate your entire site to a new domain, this is where you let Google know.
Once you've set up your new site, permanently redirected the content from your old site to your new using a 301 redirect, added and verified your new site on GWT, then you come to this option and inform Google of the move.
This should help the index to be updated slightly more quickly than if Google were to just self detect and follow the 301s.

Google Analytics Property

If you'd like to be able to see your GWT data in Google Analytics (GA), you can use this tool to associate a site with a GA account. Simply select any currently linked GA account to associate it with this site. Should you not have a GA account, you have the option to create one here.

Users & Site Owners

Here you can see a list of all authorized users on the account, and their level of authorization. A new user can be added here if needs be.
Owners have permission to access every item on the site.
Users with "Full" permission can do everything except add users, link a GA account and inform Google of a change of address.
Users with "Restricted" permission have the same restrictions as those with "Full" permission plus the following: they only have viewing capabilities on configuration data, cannot submit sitemaps or request URL removals, cannot submit URLs, cannot submit reconsideration requests, and only have the capability to view crawl errors and malware notifications (they can't mark any of them as fixed).

Verification Details

This lets you see any verification issues / successes.

Associates

This section allows you to associate different Google accounts with your GWT account, so that they can be designated as officially connected to the account/site. They can't see any data in GWT, but they can perform actions on behalf of your site (e.g., creating an official YouTube account for the site, or posting to Google+ on behalf of the site through an associated account).
To add an associate user, simply:

• Click on the "Add a new User" button.
• Enter the email address that's associated with the account you're associating.
• Select the type of association you want.
• Click "Add".

To associate a Google+ page, if it's the same account on GWT and Google+, you're done. If you're using different accounts:

• Navigate to the Google+ page.
• Click on the profile button on the left.
• Click "About", in the links section.
• Add a link to the site.

Search Appearance

Clicking on the ? icon to the right of this menu option delivers a nice breakdown of the various elements of a search engine results page (SERP).

Structured Data

Here you can see information about all structured data elements that Google's located on your site, whether they're from schema.org or older microformats.

Data Highlighter

The data highlighter allows you to help Google identify some types of structured data on the pages without the need for the code to actually be implemented.

HTML Improvements

Here is where GWT will inform you of issues with your title and description tags. As titles and descriptions should be unique for each page and should be within certain character length ranges, this section points out where you have issues that can and should be corrected.
For example, if all of your tag pages have the same description, then you aren't telling the search engines much about what is on those pages.
Clicking through on any of these errors will give you a more descriptive overview of the error and will also give you a list of pages where the error was detected.

Sitelinks

Whenever Google determines that your site is an authority for a particular keyword they'll show a collection of links below the main link, pointing to what they believe to be the most important links on that page. From time to time they'll show a link that you don't particularly want to be surfaced, and this is where you'll correct that issue.

While you can't specify the actual pages that you want to display in the sitelinks (that would be far too open to abuse), you can specify which pages you want removed. Simply enter the URL of the page with the sitelinks (not always just the homepage), and then type in the URL of the sitelink that you want to be removed.
Note that the erroneous URL may then precluded from displaying in the sitelinks for a certain period of time, but may return at some point in the future (any time after 90 days from your last visit to the sitelinks page) if it still appears to be an important link on that page, so you may want to periodically review your sitelinks. Also note that Google has now placed a limit of 100 on the number of demotions you can have active for a particular site.

Search Traffic

Search Queries

Here you can get an overview of the top keywords that returned a page from your site in the search results. Note the data shown here is collected in a slightly different way from your analytics platform, including GA, so don't expect the number to exactly tally.

What this does is give you an idea of the top traffic driving keywords for your site, the number of impressions and clicks, and therefore the click through rate (CTR), and the average position that your page was ranking for that particular query.

You can also view the same data by page rather than by keyword. This shows you the top traffic generating pages on your site, and perhaps helps you identify those that you should concentrate on optimizing, as a high traffic generator in 11th position would be a much higher traffic generator in 8th.

Links to Your Site

This section identifies the domains that link to you the most, along with your most linked to content. While you most likely won't see every link that Google's found for your site, you will see more than if you went to google.com and performed a search for "link:yoursite.com".

Internal Links

Here you can see the top 1,000 pages on your site sorted by the number of internal links to those pages. If you have a small number of pages on your site, you can reverse the sort order by clicking on the Links header.
Any pages that show 0 internal links have been orphaned and should either be linked to from somewhere on your site, or redirected to an appropriate page if they're old legacy pages.

Google Index

Index Status

The Index Status allows you to track the status of your site within the Google index. How many pages are they showing as being indexed? Are there any worrying trends? Have you accidentally blocked large sections of your site from Googlebot? This is a great place to get the answers to those questions and more.

Content Keywords

This section displays the most common keywords found by the Google crawler as it navigated your site. One thing to keep an eye on here is if you see unexpected, unrelated keywords showing up, that's usually an indication that your site may have been hacked and hidden keywords have been injected into your pages.

Remove URLs

If you receive a cease and desist letter from an attorney demanding that you remove a page from your site, if you accidentally break a news embargo, or release an obituary while the person is still breathing, you'll most likely want to get that page out of Google as soon as possible.
The first step is to either remove the page itself or 301 it elsewhere so that it can't be crawled and indexed. This prevents users and crawlers from getting to it, but the URL will still be in the index, and the page can still be found in the cache. That's where this tool comes in.
Enter the URL that you want to remove, click continue, then select whether you want it removed from the search results and the cache, just from the cache or if you want an entire directory removed. Clicking Submit Request adds it to the removal queue. Typically this request will be processed in 2-12 hours.

Crawl

Crawl Errors

Here's where you find out about the errors that Google has detected when crawling your site over the past 90 days. This is an invaluable tool as it can absolutely help you identify a variety of issues on your site, from server errors to missing pages, and errors in between.
GWT shows you the number of errors, lists the pages and shows a graph of your count over time for that particular error so you can see whether it's been a gradual change or a more sudden occurrence (perhaps a code push caused unforeseen errors with a section of the site that no one noticed).
This section should be a frequent port of call, as you keep an eye out for any new issues that could be impacting the crawling of your site. If your site has either a mobile presence or is in Google News, you will see tabs dedicated to any crawl errors specific to those products.

Crawl Stats

The crawl stats section gives you an idea of how fast the crawlers are able to read pages on your site. Spikes are to be expected here, but is you see a sustained drop in pages crawled, or a sustained spike in time spent downloading a page, or in the size of a page, then that's an indication that you should take a look and see what's changed on your site – perhaps you added a new partner module that's created a bigger than expected addition to the footprint on your site.

Fetch as Google

Here is where you can basically view your pages as Google sees them. They'll return the HTTP response, the date and time, and the HTML code, including the first 100kb of visible text on the page.
This is a great way of verifying that the Google crawler sees the page as you expect it to (remember the crawler is supposed to see the same page as the user would see), and that there are no externally injected hidden links on the page. If the page looks how you expect it to, then you can submit it to the index. You are allowed 500 fetches / submissions a week, and 10 linked page submissions per week (submitting a page and all pages linked from it at the same time).

Blocked URLs

This section is the place to test out your current robots.txt against any pages on your site to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You can also test out modifications to your robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you anticipate against various pages on your site.

Sitemaps

Here's where you can access all of the information about the sitemaps that GWT has been informed of. To test a sitemap, click the add/test sitemap button, and GWT will inform you if the sitemap appears to be valid. If it is then simply add the sitemap using the same procedure, except clicking the add sitemap button.
Note that the default view here is to only show the sitemaps that you have added. To view those that have been added by other authorized users on the account click the "all" tab.
The page shows you the sitemaps that you've submitted, the number of pages they found in each, and the number of those pages that they've indexed. You can also see quite clearly if there are any issues that they've detected within your sitemaps. Simply click on the warnings hyperlink to view them all.

URL Parameters

With the introduction and use of canonical tags, this feature isn't used as much as it used to be. What it does is that it allows you to specify URL query string parameters that shouldn't be considered when examining URLs on the site to determine unique URLs.
For example, if you had a tracking parameter that you use for a particular campaign, then the page is obviously the exact same page as when it's reached without the tracking parameter. Entering the tracking parameter in here tells Google that they should ignore the tracking parameter when looking at the URL.

Malware

If Google has detected any malware on your site, this is where they'll list it out (it will also appear in the messages section). If you see a page here you'll want to get it fixed as soon as possible and click on the "Request a Review" button that will be displayed here.

Additional Tools

This section contains links to tools that are outside of GWT, but are of interest to webmasters, such as the Structured Data Testing tool, which enables webmasters to test their schema implementations, the Structured Data Markup Helper, and others.

Labs

The labs section contains functionality that's in testing mode. When it's deemed to be "ready for prime time" it will be promoted to the regular sections of GWT, or it may just vanish if it's determined to not be useful.

Author Stats

With the big push to tie up bylines to Google+ accounts, this tool allows you to see data for pages which you are the author for, so you'd need to be logged into an account in GWT that you've previously set up as an author.

Custom Search

This allows you to set up Google customized search for your own site.

Instant Previews

This tool allows you to see how your site looks using Google's Instant Preview feature (the view of your site that can be seen in the search results when you mouse over the double arrows that show up next to a result). However, Google removed Instant Previews in April, so this feature isn't of any value to webmasters.

Site Performance

This section of Labs has been shut down and links off to alternative resources.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Now that you're up to speed on Google Webmaster Tools, don't forget about another search engine offering a free toolset to webmasters that you should also be using: Bing. See "Bing Webmaster Tools: An Overview" for a complete guide.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2191991/Google-Webmaster-Tools-An-Overview