200 – The HTTP status code 200 (specifically 200 OK) indicates that the client request was successfully processed by the server. Essentially, this means a successful HTTP response in which the requested resource was delivered to the client.
A glossary of key terms from the areas of search engine optimization, artificial intelligence and data-driven marketing. This SEO and AI glossary will help you better understand technical terms, concepts and tools and use them effectively in your everyday digital life.
200 – The HTTP status code 200 (specifically 200 OK) indicates that the client request was successfully processed by the server. Essentially, this means a successful HTTP response in which the requested resource was delivered to the client.
301 – The HTTP redirect status code “301 Moved Permanently” indicates that the requested resource has been permanently moved to the URL specified in the Location headers.
302 – The HTTP 302 status code (Redirect response status code) indicates that the requested resource has been temporarily redirected to the URL in the Location header.
404 – The HTTP status code 404 means “Page Not Found”. This means that the request was received by the server, but the requested page could not be found. If you find many 404 errors on your domain during an on-page SEO check, then you should definitely check the incorrect URLs. According to Google, the 404 errors are not harmful, but they can lead to the page appearing neglected and the content no longer perceived as reliable.
500 – An HTTP 500 status code “Internal Server Error” indicates that an unexpected condition occurred on the server that prevented the request from being fulfilled.
AIDA Principle – With good SEO onpage optimization, the meta descriptions are created on the basis of the AIDA principle. The abbreviation AIDA stands for (Attention) attracting attention, (Interest) arousing interest, (Desire) triggering desire, and (Action) initiating action/purchase.
It is important to mention here that the meta descriptions according to the AIDA principle should always contain the information from the side described. A meta tag created improvisedly, e.g. B. with important USPs, which are not on the described page, is mostly not accepted by Google. Therefore, you should reproduce the information from the page and use unique content for the meta tags.
Backlinks – The outgoing links (links that refer to another website) or so-called backlinks are decisive for PageRank and the TrustRank. It is recommended that you check the number and quality of your backlinks at regular intervals. The fee-based tool ahrefs.com can provide you with a good overview of your backlinks.
Browser caching – The implementation of browser caching helps you to control the caching mechanisms. The maximum duration setting with the help of the directives (max-age = <seconds>) helps you minimize repeated requests to the server and make your site faster. You can use giftofspeed.com to check your browser cache settings.
Canonical Tag – The canonical tag <canonical> is located in the <head> area and not in the <body> area of an HTML page. This tag is used to avoid so-called duplicate content. If for whatever reason you want to create multiple pages with the same text, you can use the canonical tag to refer to the original text. This procedure is important to let the search engines know where the original text is and which page should be displayed in the search results.
Core Web Vitals – It is recommended that you use the Core Web Vitals report in the Google Search Console to help you identify any problems. The following three matrices are measured for the Core Web Vitals:
You can test these three Web Vitals metrics and the page performance of your website with various tools, such as B. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights.
The Page Experience Update was rolled out in June 2021 and from then the so-called Google Core Web Vitals will be among the ranking factors. This update is aimed at page performance and usability on the web. In addition to the Core Web Vitals, the following criteria include mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, safe browsing, and the avoidance of annoying interstitials.
Competition analysis – The next step in detailed keyword research would be to analyze the competition in organic search results. SEO tools like Ahref or Sumrash can help you to identify your competitors more easily. SEO analysis of your competitors can help you to close keyword gaps and improve your website ranking.
The SEO competitor analysis allows you to get a better overview of the main competitor and at the same time to make your site even more competitive. The decisive strategy in a competition analysis is to “match” your keyword set with the first three SERPs competitors.
An SEO competition analysis should answer the following questions:
In order to be able to answer these questions well, you should thoroughly plan an SEO competition analysis:
Duplicate content – You should avoid duplicate content and use unique texts. Any duplicated content causes a big problem for search engines because they don’t know which of the pages should be displayed with the same content. The consequence of duplicate content are Google penalties and a lowering in the ranking.
E-E-A-T – E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It’s not a direct ranking factor, but Google uses it as a rating system to better assess the quality and trustworthiness of content. Experience means the author brings their own experience to the topic. Expertise refers to subject-specific knowledge, while Authoritativeness indicates whether the source or person is recognized as an authority in their field. Trustworthiness is the most important factor and describes whether the content is reliable, trustworthy and accurate.
Generative AI – Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is a branch of artificial intelligence that specializes in generating new content rather than simply analyzing existing data or making decisions. It is typically based on machine learning models, particularly deep learning and neural networks, which learn from large amounts of data.
H1 heading – The H1 heading is the most important indicator of what content or information is on the pages and an important on-page optimization factor. It is essential that there is only one H1 on every page and therefore under every URL. In this main heading, the focus keyword should be placed at the beginning or even first so that the search engines can easily see what topic the page is about.
In the HTML coding, headings with the tags from <h2> to <h4> are provided. It is important to mention that you should use the headings <h2> to <h4> as often as necessary and of course pay attention to the correct order and semantics. The margin columns or the content areas can be created with the tags <h5> and <h6>.
“One Page, One H1” – One page or a URL, just one H1 heading
Hreflang attribute – The hreflang attribute helps with multilingualism and tells Google which content for which language or which country version of the website should be displayed on SERPs. In international SEO, you cannot achieve success without correctly using the hreflang attribute. If you have multiple languages on your website, it is recommended that you use a hreflang attribute for all languages.
HTTPS – It is recommended that each domain has an SSL certificate and that HTTPS is used as the standard. You can decide for yourself whether your domain can be accessed with or without www. Most of the time, the www prefix cannot directly affect your page rankings. It would be important that you redirect the other three combinations to your domain.
Example: Your domain is: https://www.your-domain.de, then it is recommended to set up a 301 redirect for the following three prefixes of your domain:
• http://your-domain.de
• http://www.your-domain.de
• https://your-domain.de
A website that uses HTTPS also sends positive signals to users and signals a secure connection. This will make your website appear trustworthy and avoid the error message “This is not a secure connection” on your domain.
Internal links – The Internal links are recommended if you dive deeper into the topic and want to offer additional information on your website.
It is recommended that you use the focus keyword or main keyword of the landing pages as the anchor text of the link.
You can check the internal links (links that point to the same website) in different ways. One possibility would be to use the free Google Chrome extension “Check My Links”. Before you start “Check My Links”, you have to open each individual page, then start Check My Links and manually check each page.
Keyword cannibalism – Keyword cannibalism is often used in onpage SEO. This term means that two of your pages (2 URLs) are optimized for the same keyword. The search engines and the algorithm cannot decide which of your pages is more relevant. If you have optimized several pages for the same keyword, it can happen that all pages suffer under a loss of visibility.
A good indicator of keyword cannibalism is that your site has large fluctuations in its SERP ranking. The solution is to optimize the affected pages for keywords with similar meaning and to use different long-tail keywords on the pages.
Keyword planner – Nowadays, a keyword planner is indispensable for extensive keyword research. This free Google tool can help you discover new keywords. The keyword search volume (number of Google search queries by users for the relevant keyword) is shown in the keyword planner as a monthly search query average and is an important parameter when discovering new keywords.
A money keyword hypothesis could be: The higher the competition for this keyword, the more expensive the paid keywords in Google Ads are. For organic search, this means hypothetically that heavily advertised ads keywords are also highly competitive in organic results. A good keyword strategy also includes an analysis of the money keywords, taking into account important organic keywords on your website.
Keyword research – Professional search engine optimization is unfortunately not possible without extensive keyword research. In practice, keyword research is repeatedly skipped with the argument: “We already know which terms or keywords our customers are looking for”. This leads to unused potential due to unused and unknown keywords on your page.
The search engine optimization of a website does not only mean optimization of the technical SEO area, but also thorough keyword research. The keywords found to play a decisive role for your company and are the “key” of your web page. It is important to emphasize here that there are no right or wrong keywords.
The choice of keywords between informational, navigational, and transactional keywords depends on various factors:
Meta description or meta tag – The meta description or meta tag is a summary of the page content. The meta tag only describes a single page, so you should create an individual meta description for each page. A well-designed meta description could stimulate a click in the SERPs, but the meta tag is not a ranking factor.
With the meta tag length, it is important that you differentiate between desktop and mobile view. Google no longer measures the length in terms of characters, but in terms of the pixel width of the characters: for the desktop view 990 pixels and mobile view 1300 pixels, which corresponds to around 15-20 words. The free SISRTIX SERP snippet generator is very often used for a meta tag check.
To get more attention, you should use simple symbols in your meta descriptions, such as checkmarks, arrows, or stars. Your meta descriptions should be unique!
Pagination – The Pagination is used to distribute longer and similar content over several pages. This is usually a challenge for an SEO manager and requires a good SEO strategy. The first page of the paginated pages is often indexed, and the others are provided with the meta-robots tag <noindex, follow>. It is important to mention here that with this method (<noindex, follow> from 2 pages), the canonical tag should be not used parallel on the same URL.
Robots.txt file – The Robots.txt file is a file used to control the web crawlers. It is a plain text file that contains the rules and instructions for certain crawlers. The basic Google guidelines for robots.txt files, you can find in the full syntax of robotx.txt files. The txt file can be tested with the robots.txt tester file from Google. It is important that in addition to the web crawler instructions, the sitemap URL is also included in the txt file in order to let the web crawlers know which important indexed URLs your website has.
SEO analysis – An SEO analysis makes it possible to determine the status quo of your website and helps to identify technical errors or page structure more easily. Common SEO tools are used, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs or SEMrush. The fixes and every small change to your website could lead to significant improvements in the organic search results. During an SEO analysis, the HTML coding of your site is checked, a backlink portfolio is created and an SEO strategy is proposed.
Make your site user-friendly or optimize it for search engines? The answer is very simple: you have to pay attention to both. A slow page on which not all page elements appear at the same time results in a poor user experience (UX) and a higher bounce rate. The user experience is further explained on the SEO seminar page. Good website optimization is a big challenge for every SEO manager. The Google algorithm is constantly changing and has become more and more complex due to many updates over the past 15 years. In the summer of 2021, Google announced the new ranking factor, the Core Web Vitals.
Sitemap – The sitemap is one of the basic SEO measures and is essential for every domain. A sitemap is a list of important URLs of a domain and shows the web crawler what the structural overview and the structure of a website look like. You can create the sitemap with the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO or with the online sitemap generator. A generated XML sitemap is uploaded to the main directory (root) and can be called up under your own domain: http://www.Ihr-domain.de/sitemap.xml. It is recommended to enter the XML sitemap URL in the Robots.txt directory, but more about that in the next few lines.
Structured data – Schema.org helps you to include structured data in your pages and to manage them. With structured data, you could help the Googlebot to better understand the information on your pages. You can create these markups or codings in different data formats: RDFa, microdata and JSON-LD.
Titel Tag or Titel Link – The title link <title> is one of the most important optimization parameter of a website. It is prominently displayed by search engines and requires precise language from the web author. You should describe the page content with the title link as clearly as possible and pay attention to the line width of the title. It is good to know that Google displays different title lengths on SERPs, namely 580 pixels in the desktop view and 920 pixels in the mobile view.
The title length is very important, but it is even more important than the title conveys the right information and signals to the searcher at first glance what is behind it. A missing or not optimized title link can have a significant impact on the CTR (click-through-rate).
In the title link, the most important keyword on the page should come first. It should match the H1 heading on the relevant page. In this way, the important information title link and H1 heading are matched or, better said, linked, thereby increasing the page relevance at the same time. The title links optimized by means of onpage SEO are perceived positively by both the user and the Google crawler. Here you can find more information about the title link.
URL structure – The URL structure is of great importance for the user and the crawler. It is recommended that you set up the page structure hierarchically and logically well. It would be an advantage if SEF URLs (search engine friendly URLs) are used. You could include the right keyword in SEF URLs, but please without umlauts, everything in lower case and the long-tail keywords should be combined with hyphens (“-“).
The page depth can be measured very well with Google Analytics. Among other things, your average visited pages for certain periods of time can be displayed. This helps to better understand and analyze the user behavior on your website.
User intention – Before you start doing keyword research, it makes sense to define a goal and analyze the target group. It is advisable to put yourself in the perspective of the searcher and act as your target group for Google searches. A brainstorming session with many keyword suggestions that are relevant to your company is also part of professional keyword research.
An analysis of the searcher intention (user intention) of your well-ranking pages helps you to understand how you can be found in the SERPs. Do your target keywords have an i-want-to-know, i-want-to-go, i-want-to-do, or i-want-to-buy search intention? The search intention cannot always be clearly classified, there are also mixed forms. This classification of the keywords will help you to better understand the user intentions and to adapt your websites accordingly.
Website compression – It is recommended that you compress the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and minimize the data transfer. Smaller amounts of data shorten the loading time of your website. The free compression program or file format “gzip” can help you with good onpage optimization.
Yoast SEO plugin – The WordPress plugin Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO tool worldwide and allows you to have many individual settings on your websites. With this plugin, you can control and adjust the title tags and meta descriptions that appear in search results. This plugin helps you with the creation of a sitemap, a canonical tag, breadcrumbs and much more. If you use a WP-CMS (WordPress Customer Management System), then you can install the Yoast SEO plugin for free.
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