If you are interested in search engine optimisation, are curious about how search engines work and want your website to be ranked highly, then our information will be helpful for you. As they say, knowledge is power. That’s why we have decided to clarify some common SEO questions and SEO terms that you have heard but might be confused about, as well as eliminating some common misconceptions. Also, we mentioned what you should do to avoid content marketing mistakes and optimise your content for search engines to improve SEO.
Basic SEO questions answered:
What is the difference between indexing and crawling?
Crawling is a process when search engine bots (aka crawlers, spiders) crawl the web in order to discover all publicly available web pages. Indexing is a process, also done by search engine bots, but they save a copy of the information found while crawling to show relevant search results later in response to users’ queries.
What is important for you to remember about this SEO question is that after your website’s content was crawled, it is not always necessarily indexed. If search engine spiders look through your web content and don’t consider it to be worthy enough, they just ignore it, don’t index it and don’t show it on the search engine result page. That’s the reason why you should provide high quality and unique content.
What is the optimal keyword density?
In fact, the frequency of keyword appearance compared to the total number of words on the page isn’t an ultimate measure for content relevancy with search queries. Moreover, using too many keywords leads to the danger of over-optimisation and keyword stuffing, which is bad for both user experience and rankings.
Instead of keyword density, it is better to focus on proper keyword distribution. Placing your main keyword(s) once in the H1, H2, title tag, and URL-address will be more valuaable than spreading them out in the content body.
What is the difference between internal links and inbound links?
Internal links are links that lead users from the current page to other web pages of the same web resource. Inbound links (aka backlinks) are links that lead users to the current page from other web resources. In short, internal links interlink pages within one website, while inbound links link different websites with each other.
When implementing effective strategies for link building you should pay attention to both types of hyperlinks, as they are both important for SEO. Internal links help search engines understand the relationship and estimate relevance among your content, as well as to divide link value, while inbound links help measure your website's credibility and authoritativeness.
What are co-citation and co-occurrence?
Co-occurrence shows the relationship between words that occur on a page, namely, the proximity of links and mentions of brands to keywords that surround them, the context they occur in.
When your website or company name is mentioned along with the same keyword or phrase within the content of many different websites, then Google starts associating you with that keyword. So when users type this keyword in their search query, Google, taking into account co-occurrence, shows your website high on the SERP even if your page doesn’t contain this keyword at all.
Co-citation takes place when two or more independent web resources cite to (link to or just mention) the same website, brand or piece of content. For example, if a site A has backlinks from sites B and C, then these B and C websites, although have no direct references with each other, are connectected through co-citation as they are linked to the same website.
To take advantage of co-citation, create quality content on viral topics to make users cite your site more regularly. Take the initiative and be active on forums and discussion boards.
We hope we have shed light on some of your questions. Look here for more SEO answers to SEO questions or leave a comment below. If you need more information and want the professional help of SEO experts to execute SEO audit and optimise your website for search engines, then our SEO specialists are always at your service.
