hal9000.ie

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.

Tweeple are Twitter People.

Twitter users and members are referred to as ‘tweeple and their favourite form of communication are ‘tweets‘.

Retweets are tweets that have been re-sent, so that your followers can see them.

Read more about Twitter in our Guide to Business Tweeting.

The Google ‘sandbox‘ is not a fun place. In fact, it’s probably not even a real place. Rather, it is a perceived place where Google sticks your website until it feels it is mature enough to come out and play on it’s own on the web!

Today, it is generally felt in the SEO community that it does not exist. But you still come across the term and the idea that a new website will not rank well for some time still holds water. Google relies heavily on inlinks to determine ranking and it seems to favour those that appear to occur naturally (or organically). And this takes time with a new website.

There has been much conjecture on the subject and Google have not indicated that the dreaded ‘sandbox’ exists. Instead, they reiterate the goal of having quality, relevant, content on your site as the way to naturally get traffic, get links and, ultimately, to get Google’s attention!

It’s getting closer to real-time. Google now has a real-time feed from Twitter showing a scrolling feed as people are tweeting on the given search term.

Even Blog postings are indexed practially straight away. Our post on ‘deep links’ was indexed within an hour and displayed in Google’s search results:

How fast is your new content being indexed?

Deep links

‘Deep links’ are not links of a philosophical nature! Rather they are hyperlinks (a link you can click on) from one website to another website, where the link is to a page on the destination website other than the Home page (or main page).

Inlinks (or inbound links) are key to a good page ranking with Google and deep links can target specific products or keywords, bringing visitors to the most relevant page for them, rather than having them navigate from the Home page.

A Gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar.

And what’s an Avatar? Well, you’ve probably seen James Cameron’s Avatar, the movie, so you probably have an idea already (though you don’t have to be blue and sporty!).  In Hinduism, it refers to the descent of a deity from heaven to earth. But on the web, it simply means a persona. The virtual online personae became popular with Second Life and gaming.

Here’s how a Gravatar works:

1. You choose a small picture or image that you want to use to represent yourself.
2. Go to www.gravatar.com and upload the image and associate it with the email address that you use to blog and comment.
3. Then, whenever you blog or comment on a gravatar supported site, and use this email address as the contact, your own personal gravatar will be displayed!

     Here’s mine

     ( just the logo until I get   photoshopped!)

Being owned by Automattic, the company that own WordPress, Gravatars work seamlessly with WordPress blogs. 

And it’s free!