Basic SEO terms and their meanings

 

In this blog, I will be going to explain to you all the basic terms of Search Engine Optimisation [SEO], which is very important to know for the beginners, because without knowing SEO terms properly you can't understand it well. Like without learning the English alphabets, you can't write or make a sentence.

So Let's Begin it.

Alt tags: These are the text used in the images because Google robots are not able to read the images. We use alt tags in our images so that Google crawlers can read and understand what the image is about.

Anchor text: We use anchor text in our content or blog words in order to link it with the same website page or another website page. We can use anchor text in images as well.

Backlinks: It is a kind of link which comes from another website to our website. It is basically part of off-page SEO.

Black Hat SEO: To rank one website fast in the search engine result top page, this technique is used, but it is not safe, search engine may penalize that site or block it forever.

Bot/Spider/Crawlers/Robots/Google bots: Search engines sent their bots to various sites so that they can read the content of your site and save it to the search engine database. It is an automated process.

Blog commenting: Blog commenting is a very popular technique of off-page SEO i.e link building where you find a blog article that is relevant to your niche and leaves a comment with a link.

Bounce Rate: A metric that shows how many visitors came to your website and then left immediately after without performing any actions or browsing any of your other pages. A rule of thumb is the lower the bounce rate the better.

If your website's bounce rate is over 70%, it can be caused by different issues like slow page load, low-quality content, unresponsive landing page, using too many ads, your visitors not finding your page relevant for the keywords they used, etc.

Breadcrumb navigation (Breadcrumb trail): A type of secondary navigation helps the user figure out their location on your website.

Example: Home>ladies>Kurti>designer

Broken link (Dead link): Basically, a link that doesn’t work. This can be due to an improper URL or a deleted linked page and commonly happens when a page is moved or renamed. It can negatively impact your SEO and reduce your search engine rankings as it can stop crawlers from indexing your website.

Call to action (CTA): An SEO term that refers to a website trigger (usually a button) designed to get an immediate response from a website visitor.

We use Call to Action button in our website to allow visitor to do some activity in our website. This may engage the visitor in the website for a long time.

Canonical URL (Canonical tag): It is an HTML link that helps webmasters to prevent duplicate content issues.

Churn and burn SEO (Rank n’ bank): A Black hat SEO strategy where you mass spam a website with unnatural links getting it to rank high in a very short time.

Click-through rate (CTR): A metric showing the percentage of people clicking on your ad or website after it has been displayed in the Search Engine Result Page(SERPs). It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.

Competitor analysis: Competitor analysis basically is a part of On-page SEO. Evaluating the competitors that rank for the same keywords you do or belong to the same niche. A competitor analysis will help you find out which tactics work in your niche and which areas you should prioritize.

It is a very useful method for:

a) discovering keywords that you could use

b) discovering new backlink opportunities

c) getting content ideas

d) getting ideas for optimizing your search result title and description

Content: Content is all the information available on a website. It includes text, images, videos, and animations. In SEO ranking of a website moreover depends on its content. Therefore it is called the King, i.e Content is King of SEO.

The Content of your website should be relevant, fresh, not copied, and must be easy to understand.

Content Management System (CMS): A CMS is a dynamic website where multiple users can edit, update and maintain the content. One of the most popular examples of CMS is WordPress.

Conversion: An act of getting the user to perform the desired action. 

Conversion rate: A percentage of users that completed the desired goal (made a conversion) out of all the users that have seen your ad/website/e-mail/CTA 

Do-Follow links: By default, all links are Do-Follow unless they are modified to be No Follow. It is instruction for search engine robots/crawlers, that they can crawl our webpages.

Doorway page: Created to manipulate the search engine and rank high for particular phrases and keywords while actually having low-quality content.

Geotargeting: A method of targeting users based on their geographical location.

Grey hat SEO: SEO practices that are technically allowed, but ethically questionable. One of these practices is link buying/selling.

HTML sitemap: An HTML sitemap is intended for visitors (unlike the XML sitemap made for search engines).  Made in the form of a bulleted list, it displays links to all the pages on the website. It shows its hierarchy and helps visitors with navigation.

Hyperlink (Link): A link is a clickable (or tappable) text or an image that provides direct access to another page or section of a page, providing easy navigation through the web. It is also called Anchor text.

Internal link: Internal links connect your website pages and make it easier for the visitor and search bot to navigate through it.

Keywords: It is a phrase or sentence, which people search in Search engines. It is also known as Search queries. Keywords are basically of two types a) short tail b) long tail. 

a) Short tail: A keyword consist of 1-3 word is called Short tail keyword

b) Long tail: A keyword that consists of more than 4 words is called long-tail keywords.

A webpage or blog must contain a minimum of 2 keywords in its content for better SEO results.

Keyword density: Keyword density is the percentage of the keyword being used on a page compared to the total number of words. 

Keyword rank: This is your position in the SERP listings for a specific keyword.

Keyword research (Keyword optimization): The process of discovering new keywords that are relevant to your business and suitable in terms of search volume and competition.

Landing page: A specific page that appears after the visitor clicks on a link. These pages are optimized for promotion and conversion and are usually connected to a marketing campaign.

In SEO each landing page can have different keywords and are optimized accordingly.

Latent semantic indexing keyword (LSI keyword): LSI keywords are words and phrases that are semantically related to your primary keyword. As an example, the LSI keywords of “SEO” are SEO tools, SEO agencies, SEO audits, etc.

Link building: It is the part of off-page SEO. It is a process of increasing the quality and number of backlinks to your website. It affects 40% of your SEO Process.

Link Juice: Link juice is the term used in the SEO world refer to the value passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks.

Local SEO: Local SEO is a process of optimizing customer traffic based on a geographical location.

Metadata: Metadata is used to give descriptive information on a website.

Meta Title: It is the title of your blog or article which is used to describe the content.

Meta description: An important tag describing the content of the website used by the search engine in the search result snippet.

Meta keywords: A metadata element that was used to inform search engine spiders about the relevant keywords of a webpage.

Mobile-friendly website: A website optimized for viewing on a mobile device. This can be done in one of two ways, either by having a mobile version of your website or making the website responsive (the website scales down or changes its layout based on device screen size).

No follow link: No follow tag is basically a notice sign for search engine crawlers saying "Don't count this".

Negative SEO (Negative SEO attack): Negative SEO refers to using black hat SEO methods to lower the rank of a competitor.

On-Page SEO: In on-page SEO we optimize our webpages in order to rank higher and more relevant traffic in Search engine.

Off-Page SEO: In off-page SEO, we making the world aware about our website and services through link building, link exchange, business listing, blog comment, social share any many other techniques.

Organic traffic: Organic traffic is the “free traffic” you get when a visitor finds your website through Google searches.

Outbound link (outgoing link): Outgoing links are those links that are going direct you to other webpages or websites. It improves the trustworthiness and quality of your content.

Page Authority: Page Authority [PA] is a metric developed by MOZ to predict the ability for a specific page to rank in Search Engine. Page Authority uses a 0 to 100 logarithm scale. A high page authority score means your page has the potential to rank well in SERPs.

How do you increase page authority?

1. Make sure your content is interesting

2. Make sure your content is expanded accordingly

3. Make sure you update your content regularly

4. Make sure your content is useful and relevant

5. Make sure your content is easy to read

Page speed: Page load speed is a measurement of how much time it takes for your entire web page content to be displayed in the browser window.

The loading speed affects both your rank and user experience. The visitor bounce rate tends to be higher on slower web pages.

PageRank (PR): Page Rank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their SERPs. In other words, Page Rank is a Google ranking system [0-10]

Page title (Title tag): A page title is a clickable headline that appears in the SERPs for a specific page on your website. It is the most visible part of the SERP snippet and has a big impact on your CTR, SEO, and social sharing.

Paid links (Link buying): The process of purchasing backlinks that pass link equity. This includes any type of payment like exchanging products or services in exchange for links or giving free products to reviewers etc.

Primary keyword (Main keyword, Head keyword): The most used keyword on a web page, with the most potential to drive traffic.

Reputation management: Reputation management (sometimes referred to as rep management or ORM) is the practice of attempting to shape public perception of a person or organization by influencing information about that entity, primarily online.

How SEO practices are used in this process to:

• Increase the rank of pages that portrait the brand/person/ organization in a positive light.
• Take ownership of branded keywords and make sure the results in the SERPs reinforce your brand

Rich Snippet: Rich Snippet. Rich snippets are snippets that have a higher click-through rate. People just prefer to click on the results that give them more information. If the click-through rate of a snippet increases, you'll get more traffic from that search result.

Robot.txt: Robot.txt is a text file, webmaster create to instruct web robot [SE robots], how to crawl pages on their websites.

"OR"

The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a text

file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl. It also tells

web robots which pages not to crawl. The slash after “Disallow” tells the robot to not visit any pages on the site.

Search Engine  Algorithms [Google Algorithms]: Google’s algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking signals to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned bythe search engine in response to a keyword query, although the pages may also contain other resultssuch as an advertisement.

Search query: The word or phrase a user writes into a search box of the search engine in order to get information that matches. It is also known as search terms.

Search volume: The total number of search queries a certain keyword or phrase gets in a certain period of time.

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPs): An encrypted, secure version of the HTTP protocol that keeps the information that is being sent and received safe from hackers. The S after HTTPs denotes that the website is secured and safe from the hackers.

SEO Audit: An SEO Audit is the analysis of your website based on factors that are important to the search engines in terms of organic search results. It dives into the technical infrastructure, on-page, and off-page elements in order to determine issues, opportunities, and recommended fixes. 

"OR‟ 

An SEO audit is a process for evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas.

SEO-friendly URL: An SEO-friendly URL structure is the following things: 

Easy to read: Users and search engines should be able to understand what is on each page just by looking at the URL.

Keyword-rich: Keywords still matter and your target queries should be within URLs.

Static URL (Static link): A web address of a web page that has content that is always the same. The URL never changes.

Status code 301 (301 redirects): A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website

Status code 302 (302 redirects): A status code indicating that a URL has been temporarily redirected.

Status code 404: Page not found. Happens when the web page has been deleted, but links to it still exist.

Status code 410: Setting this status code for a permanently removed web page indicates to the crawlers to remove it from their index.

Site Map: A site map is a visual or textually organized model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world.

Technical SEO: This is the part of SEO that deals with making it as easy as possible for the search engine bot to crawl and index your website and focuses on improving its rendering phase.

10 Actionable Technical SEO Tips

i. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

ii. Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap

iii. Speed Up Your Website

iv. Fix Your Site Errors by Performing Weekly Technical SEO Site Audits

v. Optimize Internal Links

vi. Include Your Main Keywords in Image Alt Text  

vii. Use Canonical URLs to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

viii. Install an SSL Certificate for Your Website

ix. Check and Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console

x. Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Site

Traffic: It is a term of SEO, which refers to visitors arriving on your website. 

Generally, when someone talks about traffic we make an imaginary picture in our mind of a huge row of cars and vehicles in the traffic signals. Which is not good and acceptable. Nobody like road traffic, including me also.

But In the case of website traffic, every digital marketer and SEO professionals want that their website get huge traffic i.e No. of Visitor. It is because traffic one of the major factor which affects ranking in SERPs.

Types of traffic include:

i. direct

ii. organic

iii. paid

iv. referral

Uniform Resource Locator (URL, Web address): A unique piece of text a user types into the browser to reach your website (www.yourwebsite.com).

The URL consists of three basic parts: the protocol, the domain name, and the path.

There are two types of URLs – dynamic and static. The search engines prefer the static one as it is easier to determine its contents.

For SEO Friendly URL: 

i. make sure your URL is descriptive and readable

ii. use hyphens instead of underscores

iii. keep it as short and simple as possible so it is easy to remember

iv. make it accurate – have the name describe the content

v. add targeted keywords

Ex: Like my website based on digital marketing so I choose "digitalmarketerlife"

User experience: User experience is a search engine ranking factor, that describes how easy or pleasant it is to use a product (such as a website) or service.

User-friendly: Easy to use and not difficult to learn or understand.

User interface (UI): Everything displayed on your website that the user can interact with.

The user interface needs to be:

i.  simple (avoid unnecessary elements)

ii.clear (use colors, sizes, and layout to create hierarchy and increase scanability)

Video optimization: A process of increasing the search visibility of a video, usually on YouTube

Website (Site): A collection of web pages and multimedia content all sharing the same domain.

White hat SEO: Good SEO practices focused on optimizing content, so it caters to the human audience instead of the search engines.

XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is a type of list marked up with XMLso that search engines can easily consume information about the URLs that make up a site. ... Search engines and other crawlers are the only consumers of XML sitemaps. For SEO, an XML sitemap is an invitation to crawl the URLs listed.

Thanks for Visit My Site. Still if you some queries related to SEO and its terms.

Please tell me in Comment Section

I would love to answer your question and satisfy your all queries.