There’s quite a few words and abbreviations kicking around the internet and more often than not, they’re all unnecessarily confusing. I was thinking of these the other day, so decided to write a full post with the hopes that it helps some of you. It’ll be a mix of PR lingo and general tech terms, so keep awwwn reading this hella long post if you want a bit of an idiots guide to it all.
No Follow | This is a little option to stop Google indexing that particular link. So, when Google sends its crawlers out, it has a little note to tell it not to bother looking at and indexing that link with those keywords. In short: it’s good to know if you’re asked to do sponsored posts or product reviews, as some will request for them to be no follow so Google doesn’t think they’re being sneaky by trying to rank higher through placing their links everywhere. You can add this easily by ticking a box on blogger or adding it in your link, ie <a href=”LINK” rel=”nofollow”>keywords</a>
DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) | DA is basically a measure of how powerful your domain name/blog is and gives you a score based on how likely you are to appear in search engine results. It takes into account three factors: age, popularity and size and is scored from 0-100. A lot more PR’s are asking for certain DA numbers for collaborations these days, so check out what yours is (look at your spam score too!). Anyway, briefly, Page Authority is similar, but measures the strength of an individual page instead of an entire site.
PageRank | PageRank is the algorithm that Google uses to rank websites in their search results. So, the higher the pagerank, the closer you’ll be to the top of the search results. It used to be really big, but it’s not as important as it once was as people are looking to other factors now.
No Skim | This is only for those who use Skimlinks, but sometimes when you’re doing a sponsored post or other collaborative content. PR’s etc will ask for it to be No Skim so it doesn’t pick up words and (often) highlight a competitors items, as that’s the opposite of what they want. If something comes up with an affiliate link, add the no skim code to the link, ie. <a href=”LINK” rel=”noskim”>keywords</a>
Keywords | Keywords are rather important if you want to rank higher on Google. I know it seems so obvious, but a keyword is a phrase you use when you want Google to look for it and index your website as being a good source for that particular thing. Keyword density is the number of times you have to mention that particular phrase to be ranked in the above way. Ideally, you need to mention it once in about every paragraph for Google to pick it up.
Impressions and Twitter Analytics | Twitter has it’s own Analytics now and it’s really handy to know. I’ve included a small part of mine over the past 28 days just as a snapshot, but it shows you lots of details such as followers gained, mentions etc. Impressions is how many times someone would have seen your tweets, so if you’ve shared a tweet and have 12.2k followers and someone with 10k followers RT’s it, then it adds it all up and so on and so forth. Just realised I tweet quite a lot…
Traffic: Pageviews, Unique Pageviews and Visits | First of all, I hope you all have Google analytics installed because we all know Blogger stats are an inflated lie, as they pretty much double your actual views and PR’s won’t be best pleased if you claim you get more than what you actually do!
Pageviews – the total number of pages visited on your website (ranging from landing on your homepage to clicking through 6 blog posts – repeated pages included).
Unique Pageviews (or users) – the number of individual people (by their IP) who have clicked onto your blog, no matter how many times they visit – within a certain period – it’s all counted as one thing.
Visits (or sessions) – so let’s say someone clicked on your blog and viewed 10 pages, that would be 1 session/visit as only 1 person has been on your website. If they clicked off and clicked back on and viewed 10 more, you would have had 2 sessions/visits.
Backlinks | To put it super simple, a backlink is an external link on another site that links back to your blog. The more backlinks you have (in a non-suspicious way) typically the more credible Google thinks you are, and you’ll rank higher. Getting a backlink from a really big website is really valuable and the anchor texts plays a part in it too. It’s basically an SEO thang, but read up on it as it doesn’t mean spamming blog links everywhere is the way forward.
SEO | Search Engine Optimisation. That scary term you always hear, but no one really knows what it is until you properly look into it. It’s basically doing certain things to rank higher on Google searches. I’ll not go into it but including keywords, search descriptions, permalinks, alt tags and clever links all play a part.
Image Title and Alt Tags | Important to remember if you want to appear more on Google images. On blogger when you click on an image, you can add an image title and an alt tag under the ‘properties’ section, so basically describe what the image shows ie. ‘Benefit Porefessional review and swatches’ and it should help!
Permalink | A permalink is basically a URL, but one you create yourself. I mentioned this briefly before, but basically if you’re reviewing a product, change the URL (in the post settings in Blogger) to say what you’re showcasing. Make sure it isn’t too long but something like: https://www.thelovecatsinc.com/2015/04/beauty-benefit-porefessional-review-swatches if you get me!
Hope this all helps! Check out my beauty blog sale while you’re here too!
Helen x
Check out these: blogs Kerralina and Laura Hadley, and clothing store Red Lomond!