Glossary: Content Marketing

Co-citation

SEO cocitation refers to the symbiosis that occurs when websites discuss interrelated themes, concepts and mention each other. An important aspect of cocitation is the significance (for Google) of the words that surround links. Cocitation first prompted discussion years ago when Google’s anti-spam updates prevented low-quality blog networks from impacting on search rankings.

Syndication Source Tag

In 2010, Google introduced two new meta tags for news articles: syndication-source and original-source. These tags were designed to enable news curators to publish another site’s article on their own site, without risking a Google penalty for duplicate content or plagiarism. The canonical tag now performs this function.

Keywords And Keyword Research

From the earliest stages of your SEO campaign, you’ll be aware of keywords. These are single words or phrases which you want search engines to associate with your website, so that when those keywords are entered in search by a user, your site is visible. These phrases should be central to your business, and highly relevant to the service and information provided by your website.

Link Building

A crucial part of any SEO campaign, link building is the process of obtaining links from an external source which points to your own website. These links, or hyperlinks’ provide clear pathways across the rambling maze of the world wide web, enabling both search engines and users to visit your website and get it on the search results map.

Content Optimisation

Perhaps the single most important factor in SEO is content. Good SEO agencies optimise content by producing information that both Google and users love. This process, known as content optimisation, will help make your site more visible in search.

JavaScript, Java, AJAX & Flash

For a long time, search engines found it very difficult to read any information and links which do not appear in HTML format within a page’s source code. This applied predominantly to interactive or multimedia content. The continuing development of Google Image Search, has improved this somewhat.

Website Navigation

Website navigation is one of the most important factors to both SEO and user experience (UX). A well-organised, well-designed website with straightforward navigation will not only improve your site’s UX, but will also help the search engine bots crawl a website by helping them find all the site’s content and making more efficient use of their crawl budgets.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are important to a page’s rankings and to user experience. For a visitor, a heading tag changes the look of a heading or subheading, usually making it bigger and bolder. For a search engine, heading tags reveal the hierarchy of a page. A H1 tag is considered the main heading, followed by H2, H3, H4, and so on.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are text snippets in the code of a web page. Site users cannot always see meta tags and heading tags. But these invisible pieces of code have a huge effect on the way a page looks, on whether users choose to visit a page, and, crucially, on how a page performs in search engines.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the descriptive text of an outbound link. It is clickable, and it’s readable to both the user and to search engines. How this link is described in the anchor text is considered to be one of the top three ranking factors, and remains an integral part of any content marketing or SEO campaign.

Alt Attributes, Alt Text & Alt Tags

The alt attribute is designed to provide alternative text in the case that the image cannot not be seen. An alt tag is placed in the code surrounding an image and is usually only visible when the image does not or cannot load. The main audience for this was, and still is, the visually impaired.