hal9000.ie

The ‘long-tail‘ in ‘long-tail  SEO’ refers to optimising a page (or site) for lesser searched for keywords, in order to target the less competitive terms more effectively.

Targeting the common, or obvious, search terms can be difficult if you’re operating in a competitive market. Getting onto page 1 of the search results pages and subsequently getting traffic is more valuable than never getting to page 1.

So, the idea is to target the less common terms because this is easier to do, due to lower competition.

And, if you target enough ‘long-tail’ keywords, you can increase your traffic significantly.

The Deep Web is a bit like deep space, in that it takes a bit more effort to get there!

It refers to content on the internet which may not be available for search engines to crawl, and therefore index. It’s a term often used to refer to content held in databases rather than html pages, or dynamically created content. These are pages that are created dynamically, or on the fly, as a visitor requests them. In the past, these have not been crawled by search engines, but now they are.

The page of this blog post for example is held in an SQL database, and the page is created dynamically by php scripts as required by a visitor. Google crawls these pages.

The deep web also refers to the following types of content which are hidden from search bots:

• pages restricted by robots.txt files
• password protected or login pages
• content held in file formats not accessible to bots
• pages that exist but are not linked to by other pages
• pages that are linked to by links created by JavaScript

When a website links to your website and uses words, or text, other than the URL of your website as the hyperlink then this is called anchor text. 

For example, the following html:

<a href=http://www.hal9000.ie/blog/>SEO Blog</a>

will display on the web page as ‘SEO Blog’.

Anchor text is valuable from an SEO perspective as it allows you to place keywords in the anchor text, making the link all the more valuable. You have probably seen links like ‘…to read our blog click here …’ This is a wasted opportunity. The goal of search engines is to provide relevant results and keyword-enriched anchor text is picked up by the search engines algorithm and goes into the mix delivering better ranking.