SEO Terms for Internal Vs External
-
Hey there!
I am writing up an SEO plan for our company and wanted to get the groups input on the use of some SEO terms. I need to organize and explain these efforts to nonSEO people.
I usually talk about, SEO in terms of "Internal" vs "External" efforts.
Internal SEO efforts being things like
Title Tags, Description Tags, Page Speed, Minimizing errors, proper 301 redirect, content development for the site, internal linking and anchor, etc.
External SEO efforts being things like
Link building, social media profile setups and posts (FB Twitter Pinterest, YouTube), PR work.
-
How do you split these out? What terms do you use?
-
Do you subdivide these tasks? What terms do you use?
For example, with Internal, I sometimes talk about "Technical SEO" that has do to with making sure that site speed is working well, 301s are setup correctly, noindex tag etc are all used properly. These are things that different versus "On Page" efforts to use keywords properly etc.
I will also use the term "Site Visibility" for non SEOs to explain the technical impact. For example, if your site has the wrong robots.txt, if you have 500 errors everywhere and a slow site, if you are sending spiders down a daisy chain of 301s, it is difficult for the key parts of your site to be found and so your "Visibility" to the engines are poor. You have to get your visibility up, before you begin to then worry about if you have the right keywords on a page etc.
Any input or references would be appreciated.
-
-
Aw, thanks. Glad you found some value in my comments. And, thanks for raising an interesting point for discussion
Good luck!
-
Thanks everyone, especially Andrea.
Andrea, you are right, the issue here is about how best to talk to the rest of the company, from developers to marketers to editors to executives. I like the points about how developers tend to be very literal and specific so the wrong choice of words can throw them off. #semantics is key when you deal with the rest of the group.
I had been thinking about this for the past day and ran across Rand's excellent whiteboard friday on the SEO pyramid
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid
He set this up as a hierarchy of needs (a la Maslow) and I liked it. I think it helps me to organize and also talk about these items. He gives the following levels from the bottom up.
-
Accessible, Quality Content (Unique Text, Bot Accessibility, URL Structure, etc)
-
Keyword Research and Targeting (Keyword research, on page targeting of tags, h1s, text)
-
Link Building (Link requests and content link strategies)
-
Social (on site user engagement, social media, viral)
It is setup so if you do not do 1 and 2 right, you will not be able to really benefit from 3 and 4.
This got me thinking. I am going to talk about this to my team in terms of a pyramid slightly tweaked from Rand's order above, but still bottom up.
Is your website:
-
Crawlable? Can the search engines find and crawl your website optimally? When the search engine bots and users come to your site does your server respond like a Ferrari or a Yugo?
-
Rankable? Have you selected the right keywords that your users are search for and that convert on your goals. Did you optimize for these keywords within your HTML and page content? To a search engine and to your users, does your site read like Shakespeare or more like a 3rd grade essay on "What I did on my summer vacation"?
-
Linkable / Likeable / Tweetable / Pinable? - Is the quality of your content good enough that people want to talk about it, share it, link to it, tell others to visit it. Is it so compelling to your audience that when you ask them to link to your site, they do it happily and then ask others to do the same?
-
Useable? When you spend all this time making your site fast, highly ranked on the optimal key words and highly regarded by others, do people get to your site and then become confused? All the traffic in the world is useless if they can't figure out how to convert into an action on your site. Is your messaging clear to the user?
Generally, here is why I put this in these types of groups / names
Crawlable - IT folks get the concept of optimized coding. They are already interested in that and understand not wanting to waste the bot's time. When I mention bloated slow spaghetti code, they get it. Nobody likes to look at that, why would a bot want the equivalent of that with crummy HTML code and slow server response? They also tend to think of steps 2 and 3 as too much art and so do not want to get into that part.
Rankable and Linkable - Editors and marketing gets this. They can see how using the right key word makes a difference and also appreciate quality, interesting stuff. When I show them how the title and description are used within a SERP result, they get that too, more so that how it impacts ranking per se.
Useable - I wanted to change the top of the pyramid a little bit as we are working to include the designers and marketing as a part of this process internally. Want to leverage how they fit into this process and so it makes sense to them if you do not have a clear message (like with any marketing item) you do not get conversions. Having the useable step built on top of the others, explains why I need to have certain phrases worked in to the copy etc.
Cheers!
-
-
Or on-site / off-site
#semantics
-
Ah, the fun of semantics! It's amazing what a difference it can make, though, when trying to convey messages to a non-SEO or Web group.
I traditionally use "on site" and "on page" SEO for the "internal" items you have. That's partly driven by the fact we have some people working on internal search on our site so people get confused with those projects if I use the term "internal."
I do use the term "external" or "site SEO" for the projects you list as "external." I try to differentiate what' specific to a page and what's specific to the overall site to help people understand there's different layers. And to help educate that because you optimize one page doesn't mean you've done SEO
I also like to educate on "technical" SEO so my team understands it's not just about keywords, but site performance and other things that can mean developer and IT resources. I learned fast that there was a perception that if you just put the keywords in the right place, revenue would come.
As for more social related information, I use buckets for social sharing but also make sure I hammer home the need for "in bound" marketing. There's a difference between those as you need the content to drive in bound but you use social to help give it visibility. And I think it's a more comprehensive element of marketing.
I would argue though that visibility isn't segregated by how you mentioned in. The technical build as well as the keywords selected can both play into visibility. You may not have any 500/404 problems, but if you picked keywords only a small audience cares about, you also limit your visibility.
For me, part of my terminology is dictated by our own internal jargon and how to map back to it so more people "get" it...while I talk about complicated things out of their wheelhouse that can end up confusing them anyway!
-
onpage / offpage
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Need help related to SEO ?
Hi, Hope you guys are doing well! I need help from experts, I have a query that "Does google allows SEO for websites related to crypto currency ?" If yes, what is best way to do SEO for crypto currency website ?
Technical SEO | | JessicaThompson0 -
Schema for Banks and SEO
I'm researching Schema opportunities for a bank, but besides the shema markup available today (like bankorcreditunion) and developments with FIBO, I can find no answer as to the effect of tagging interest rates and such in terms of SERP/CTR performance or visibility. Does anyone have a case study to share or some insight on the matter?
Technical SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Using Web Applications for SEO
I am in the sign/banner business, for years I have had a flash based web application that I developed which allows customers to design their own signs/banners online. With the demise of flash i am prompted to begin developing an HTML5 based application to take it's place. Developing this software is a rather expensive endeavor so many local sign shops, which don't sell on the web, don't bother to develop such an application, but what if i gave it to them? I assume a fair amount would find great value in such an application thereby allowing their clients to communicate a design idea without having to drive to the store front. The application would actually run embedded on my site thus earning me a link back to my site. Question is this: Is this a bad idea. If dozens of sign shops are running my application embedded on their sites will the help or hurt me? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RocketBanner0 -
Why my external links are zero
What could be the possibility that my Moz crawler showing zero external link for my website http://ultimatecharter.com, i have build many links from different website and when i click them it goes to the website. My website is multi language and the landing page is http://ultimatecharter.com/en/home can this be a possible issue? regards Aqeel
Technical SEO | | Aqeel0 -
Internal Link Analysis Tool
I want to get a better handle on what internal link text (and co-occurance if possible) my site currently has. We have a lot of old blog articles that provide link juice back to the main site, but with thousands of pages, we never kept track of when we internally link to a page. Are there any tools that will provide an analysis of this? OpenSiteExplorer seems like a very tedious way to do it and it didn't appear to be 100% accurate. Also, are there any tools that will provide analysis and recommendations based on keywords targeted?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Optimising multiple pages for the same search term
We were having a discussion on title tags and optimising multiple pages for the same term. We rank well for the phrase 'chanel glasses' which points to our Chanel brand page. The Chanel brand page is optimised for this term, and has the phrase 'Chanel glasses' at the front of its title tag. Previously, the title tag on our home page had the words 'Chanel glasses' at the start in an attempt to rank twice for the term (as one of our competitors has managed). This never worked (though at the time, our DA/PA was lower than it is now). For this reason I switched the title tag on the homepage to try and rank for 'designer glasses'. My belief is, given we already rank highly for the term on a more relevant landing page, trying to rank for it again on the home page is not the best use of a title tag on our highest PA page. We may as well use it for something more generic like 'designer glasses' (though this term does not convert nearly as well, nor does it currently rank as well for us as we've not been attempting to get 'designer glasses' as anchor text. Plus it's more competitive. Another generic term maybe be preferable). My colleague's view is we should attempt to do what our competitor has done and try and rank twice on page one for this term. I like the idea of dominating the top results, but I feel that since attempting to get double-listed hasn't worked for us so far, we should use the homepage for optimising for a different term ( ideally something that we don't already rank for elsewhere on the site). I see his point of view - if we were ranking nowhere for the search term then, yes we should concentrate on getting one page to rank, not two. But since we already rank well for the term, perhaps his strategy is preferable? Just for clarity, the title tags are not duplicate, but the idea was to share many of the same keywords between the two title tags. What are your thoughts SEOmoz?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Absolute of Relative Internal Website Links
Hi, I am not sure what is considered best practice when linking between pages on the same site - absolute or relative: Link Or Link I notice a lot of CMS systems (WordPress) use the absolute method - is there a reason? Any help much appreciated. Barney.
Technical SEO | | barnst0