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Here at Ditch your Desk, I use a lot of terminologies and I acknowledge that some of these terms might get confusing! So I’ve created the Ultimate Jargon-Buster (Glossary) to help you get to grips with the terms in use on this website and in other top-notch SEO resources around the web.
Check out my favorite tools as well to really take your game to the next level!
Affiliate Marketing
One of the most popular ways to earn money online in which an online retailer, such as Amazon, pays a commission for sales generated through traffic which you send to the retailer.
Affiliate marketing effectively allows you to be a middleman in the sales process and to get a sweet, tasty kickback from Amazon (or another retailer) whenever someone purchases after visiting the retailer through your links. While Amazon is the most popular affiliate program, there are countless numbers of affiliate opportunities.
Further reading: Affiliate Marketing 101
Dropshipping is where you sell products to customers without ever handling the actual products. The customer order is passed on to a third party who handles shipping and delivery and the merchant, i.e. you, makes a profit by marking up the value of the product.
The most popular dropshipping method in which you arrange for your products to be shipped en-masse to an Amazon warehouse, you then sell the products on Amazon. Amazon handles packaging and delivery of your products, for a fee.
A digital product is a product that is delivered and consumed online, for example an ebook or video course. Digital products cost nothing to deliver and once they are set up are an excellent passive income source.
An income stream which you will earn without having to do anything – for example, once you have set up a digital product and this product is being sold through a landing page and delivered by email, you will earn a passive income from this product without having to take any further action.
Further reading – Affiliate Marketing 101
A landing page is a page on a website that has a single goal. The goal can vary from having a user make a purchase, give their email address, fill out a form, or anything in between.
A lead-mag is a free resource which you give away, e.g. a PDF, checklist, infographic, or some top tips delivered by email, in exchange for an email signup or other action.
Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process of optimizing your website to ensure it performs better in search engines (mainly Google).
The most important part of any online business is traffic. The more traffic you have, the more money you can make. SEO refers to following a strategy to ensure that your content ranks higher in the SERPS so that you receive more traffic.
Further reading: SEO 101 (The Ultimate Guide)
On-page SEO refers to how your content is laid out on an individual page on your site and making sure you have laid out your content correctly.
By doing this, Google will reward you with higher rankings, which results in more traffic. There are lots of different steps you can take to improve your on-page SEO.
On-Site SEO refers to the steps on your site to improve it’s rankability, for example improving the website load time, web map, mobile responsiveness, and many other things.
Strategies that are NOT on your website that will help improve your site’s rankings. This usually refers to building backlinks to your website from other sites.
A backlink is a hyperlink from one site to another. Backlinks are one of the most crucial aspects of SEO as they act as votes of authenticity for your website and the more votes (links) your site has, the easier it will rank in search results.
Backlinks are not all created equal. A backlink from a website with a high DA will be exponentially more valuable than a backlink from a domain with a low DA.
Further reading – The ABSOLUTE Best Ways to Build Backlinks
Backlinks are Google’s system of reliability. The more backlinks a website gets, the more trustworthy Google will find that website, the more likely that website is to rank in Google’s search results and therefore the more likely that site is to accrue organic backlinks…. thus making this beautiful circle go round and round.
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz to estimate how easy a site will be able to rank content. 1 is the lowest DA score, and 100 is the highest. While the score is not extremely important, it can offer a quick insight into the ranking power of a website.
Further reading: Is DA Even Important?
SERPS stands for search engine results pages. If I was to say to you ‘where are you showing up in the SERPS man’, I’m basically asking you where your content is ranking on Google, it is on the first page or the second? What position?
SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases in your content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines.
Keywords are, in a nutshell, the phrases that users are plugging into Google searches to bring them to content. The more keywords you rank for, the more traffic your site will receive. A keyword may be a single word (e.g. Peru), a few words (e.g. best ceviche Peru) or it could be a long tail keyword.
A search query is a keyword that is actually typed into Google. While there is some discrepancy between the two, the terms ‘search query’ and ‘keywords’ basically mean the same thing.
A Long-tail keyword is a phrase that contains at least three words. Long-tail keywords make up the majority of Google’s traffic and are used by marketers to target specific niches and interests, as opposed to more generic, and more competitive, keyword terms.
Searchers want specific answers to specific questions, and are less likely to type in “New York Pizza” and more likely to type in “best Pepperoni Pizza in south Brooklyn”. Long-tail keywords offer some of the best opportunities to rank content quickly and easily and there are millions of untapped long-tail keywords out there.
Keyword Research refers to the process of SEO-research. Keyword Research allows you to analyze the SERPs and gauge whether you can rank for terms you want to rank for.
You can also discover alternative search terms that people enter into Google while looking for a similar subject. Keyword research is the foundation of SEO as it allows for you to evaluate the competition and discover keywords that you can rank for.
The domain name (or simply the ‘domain’) is the address of a site. Our domain is Ditchyourdesk.com
If you want space on the internet, you have to pay rent – this is the gist of hosting. A host acts as a landlord, giving you a place to live in the world wide web, enabling anyone in the world to visit your website. If you are looking for hosting, we highly recommend BlueHost.
Further reading – 7 Simple Steps to Start Your First Website
A free blogging platform. WordPress comes SEO ready right out the box and doesn’t require any technical or coding knowledge. If you are starting a website, WordPress should be your ONLY choice (do not use Weebly, Wix or Square Space).
An authority site focusses on becoming an authority in a space, rather than just focussing on a niche. For example, a niche site may focus on ultralight camping tents whereas an authority site would focus on the entire camping and outdoor space.
Niche sites focus on locking down long-tail keywords and catering to a specific niche of people. Often, niche sites are built around just one or two high-value long-tail keywords. Niche sites usually follow a churn and burn model and are losing ground against more popular authority sites in the SERPS.
Every year, millions of websites fail to renew their hosting. When this happens the domain name itself goes up for auction to the highest bidder. Domains maintain their link profiles and it’s possible to pick up a domain with a high DA and a good backlink profile in these auctions.
A PBN is a network of sites which you control and can use to rapidly build links to your money sites.
Typically, PBN sites are made up of expired domains which have been bought on the cheap and had a new cookie cutter site with some basic content dropped onto the domain. This is black hat SEO and used to be a very popular technique but is losing ground against white hat techniques on account of PBNs being hit with increasing accuracy by Google.
Black hat SEO is any link building technique which goes against Googles rules – for example, using PBNs to build links or buying links through sponsored posts.
White hat SEO is any link building technique which does not go against Googles rules – for example, free/natural guest posting.
The SEO title is the title of your post as it will appear in the SERPS (not necessarily the same as the title of your post as it appears on your site). You can test different Seo title’s to see which gives you the best CTR (click through rate).
The meta description is the 150-300 characters of content found in the search results that is displayed underneath the SEO title giving a preview of what the post is about. Well-Written meta descriptions can result in lots more clicks.
Coined and measured by Majestic (a Goliath company in SEO), the Citation Flow is the prediction of the total number of backlinks a website has.
Trust Flow indicates the quality of backlinks pointing to a website. If two websites both have 100 backlinks, but website A’s backlinks were from reputable sources, and website B’s backlinks were spammy, website A would have a significantly higher TF.
The practise of selling a link, usually in a post, to improve the buyer’s offsite SEO.
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Ditch Your Desk participates in several affiliate programs, like many other online resources. At times, I may suggest a product or service; if you like one of these and purchase it, I receive a small portion of the sale. Using these affiliate links are like using any other link, and, honestly, the proceeds help me keep the site going. So thank you for your support in advance.
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