Today, many businesses are moving to an Internet-based business model. As this shift takes place, having strong Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will become increasingly more important. How easily you can be found using search engines like Google and Bing may be the difference between success and failure.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Put simply, search engine optimization is all about appeasing the search engine gods. After-all, worldwide 2,000,000,000,000 searches were made every single day in 2019 on Google alone. As a business, that number represents quite an opportunity. Now, let’s introduce you to the ABCs of SEO.
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SEO Terms Defined
A
Algorithm – The calculations about various issues that search engines use to find the most relevant search results for a search query.
Alt tags – Short code snippets that allow you to link each image on your page to a short piece of informative text.
Anchor text – Text in your web page content that is linked to another page.
Authority – The amount of trust a site is given for a search query. Authority comes from incoming links to your page from trusted sites.
B
Black hat SEO – A dubious SEO approach involving manipulative measures to influence rankings. Search engines prohibit black hat SEO.
Bounce Rate – The percentage of users who enter your site and immediately leave without click on additional pages.
C
CTR – Click-through rate. Refers to the ratio of the search result displayed and the clicks actually made on the search result.
H
Headline tags – HTML code tag that are written with “<h1>Headline</h1> and show text bigger in relation to the rest of the text.
HTML – Stands for Hypertext Markup Language, a standard code for tagging text files and formatting the font, color, graphics, and hyperlinks, and for creating web pages.
I
Inbound links – Links from external websites that lead to your site and do not originate from your domain. The terms “external links” and “backlinks” are synonyms.
Indexing – The operation used by search engines to crawl the web, to scan web pages and to store information about them.
K
Keyword density – How often a keyword is mentioned on a page.
Keyword cannibalization – When the same keyword is used excessively on many different pages on your site. This can cause search engines to get confused on which page is most relevant for the keyword.
L
Link building – The process by which inbound links are generated from other websites.
Link juice – The boost to the authority of a website that is given by inbound links from other websites with authority.
Long-tail terms – Keyword phrases with normally three or more keywords that attract a lower volume of search traffic, but are more valuable because they attract more qualified traffic than head terms.
M
Meta description – used to describe the page. While meta descriptions do not have any effect on rankings, they can help increase click-through rates since they do show up in the search results.
N
Nofollow – A tag that is placed in the HTML code to tell search engines that the link is a paid link for which no link juice will be calculated. Penalty – A ‘punishment’ by search engine providers when a webmaster contravenes search engine guidelines. The penalty can mean temporary ranking losses or, in the worst case, lead to the website being excluded from search results.
O
On-page SEO – All activities you do on your website to improve your ranking, such as internal linking and adding ALT tags.
Off-page SEO – Activities you do outside of your website that help improve your ranking, such as link building.
S
Search query – The term used to describe the actual keywords or phrases that a search engine user enters when searching.
Short-tail keywords – Generic phrases (typically 1-2 keywords long) that attract a significant volume of traffic but achieve little income.
SEM (search engine marketing) – Refers to all aspects of search queries, including organic and paid listings.
SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) – A search engine’s organic search results.
T
TF*IDF (Term frequency-Inverse document frequency) – This formula is used to calculate how often certain words appear in relation to a key term in the top 15 websites in the SERPs. This enables the potential relevance of a website to a search query to be calculated and the content to be optimized in response.
W
White hat SEO – This is the type of SEO measure which complies with search engine providers’ guidelines and focuses on the searching users’ needs.
With this knowledge, you can now start optimizing your website to bring in more traffic from search engines.