Search engine optimization is not particularly hard, but it can be a daunting task for beginners. That is because SEO is full of technical terms and phrases, similar to any other profession.
If you have been reading up on how to do SEO on your own, you may have come across a number of these terms, such as backlinks, deep linking and linkbaits. Unfortunately, most SEO experts don’t take the time to properly explain and define all the terms.
Their main audience are other SEO professionals, and most of these terms are common knowledge for them. They’re everyday words and phrases for marketing experts. However, lawyers and other non-marketing professionals rarely use SEO terms.
So, if you’ve ever been baffled by a term while reading on search engine optimization strategies, you’re not alone. In fact, almost everyone who has ever done any SEO has gone through the same troubles.
Now, we want to help lawyers and law firms acquaint themselves with the digital marketing terminology. Hopefully, this post will allow you to better understand and perform SEO on your own, by explaining the most commonly used terms and phrases about linking – one of the main concepts of search engine optimization.
Let’s begin with the simplest terms and work our way up.
A backlink is a link pointing to your website from another site. Backlinks are crucial for search engine optimization and the entire field of SEO dealing with backlinks is often called off-page optimization.
Generally speaking, the more backlinks your website has, the higher it will rank on Google.
Synonymous terms: inbound link, inlink.
Internal links are all links that point from one page to another on the same website.
The process of collecting backlinks to increase your ranking on search engines is usually called link building. You can read more about link building for law firms here.
Natural links represent all backlinks that your content receives on its own, without any link building strategies or promotional outreach. For example, viral posts are often shared on social media and receive hundreds of natural links.
Deep links are a special type of backlinks that point to an inner page or content on your website. They are incredibly valuable and they’re the main factor that will determine how high your web pages will rank on Google.
Link juice represents the power of a backlink. It depends on a number of factors, including the link attribute, the URL rating, the domain authority, etc.
Synonymous terms: link love, link power.
All backlinks can be divided into do-follow (DF) and no-follow (NF) links. We will not be getting too technical here and explaining the HTML basis of these link attributes.
However, you should keep in mind that DF links are considerably more valuable than NF links. Still, if you’re building backlinks for your website, you should aim to have approximately the same number of DF and NF links. This is often called a natural link balance.
The easiest way to find out if links on a specific website are DF or NF is to install Moz’s free browser add-on called NoFollow. This add-on automatically places the no-follow links in a red rectangle.
The concept of link sculpting is closely related to the link attributes that we just described. Link sculpting is a practice in which an SEO expert combines the do-follow and no-follow attributes to pass link juice between website pages.
In other words, link sculpting allows you to boost specific pages on your website at the cost of others. It’s often done to boost the landing pages that sell products and services.
Link farms represent groups of websites that link to each other. This is done to quickly increase the domain authority and URL rating of websites.
Link farming might not work well with a handful of websites, but a link farm can consist of hundreds of websites. With the combined powers of each website, they can have a strong impact on the target site’s ranking.
However, keep in mind that link farming is considered a black-hat technique, which means Google regularly penalizes websites that use them.
Similar to link farms, free for alls are link directories and repositories that host a large number of links and almost no valuable content. They’re used to quickly boost a website’s ranking, but their effect is now virtually non-existent, thanks to the latest Google updates.
A link exchange is the practice of reciprocal linking and it’s usually facilitated through website directories. In a link exchange, two websites link to each other to increase their respective ranking.
Analogous to clickbaits, linkbaits are pieces of content that are designed to attract links. In simpler terms, a linkbait is a piece of viral content.
Of course, linkbaits are incredibly powerful and they can quickly improve your SEO score. However, they’re also very hard to create.
Linkerati are the primary targets of linkbait content. A linkerati can be a popular forum poster, a social media influencer, a blogger or a content creator. Essentially, anyone that can help you spread content and get backlinks.
We will end this blog post with linkerati, but if you have any SEO terms or phrases that you’re unsure about, feel free to share them in the comments below. We are more than happy to help you better understand search engine optimization.
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