10 SEO Terms You Need To Know
If your day job is related to the Internet or you run a website, you need to know a bit more about SEO, which is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
A great way to do that is to familiarize yourself with the major terminologies used in the trade. Below, we’ll tackle a few of them and what they mean.
1. SEM [Search Engine Marketing]: This refers to marketing products or services using search engines. SEM has two basic pillars:
- PPC: means Pay-Per-Click and refers to buying clicks on search engines which come from sponsored listings for search results.
- SEO: means Search Engine Optimization and refers to optimizing your site to make it appear in search results
2. PageRank: This refers to the algorithm used by search engines to estimate the importance of web pages. The basic idea here is that a link from page D to page E is considered as a vote of trust from page D to E. This means the higher the number of links, the higher the probability of that page being important.
3. Backlink [Inlink]: This refers to a hyperlink on another site that points back to yours. Backlinks directly affect the PageRank of any web page and this influences search rankings.
4. SERPs: Refers to Search Engine Results Pages and these are the results or series of result pages that are returned to a user after they have searched for a query online. These results presented are usually answers related to the queries or certain keywords the user typed into the search engines.
5. Anchor text: Refers to backlink text which users click on your web page. Keyword rich anchor texts are important to SEO since search engines associate them with your website’s content. For instance, if you host a fashion blog, it helps your search rankings if there are words such as “fashion” used as anchor texts to return the links back to your site (backlinks).
6. Link farm: Refers to a group of websites where each links to the other in order to increase the page ranking for them all. This practice may have been effective years ago but today, they’re considered to be a spamming technique that could get you penalized. Avoid at all cost.
7. Meta Tags: Refers to the tags search engines use to gather more information about your web pages’ content. Meta tags are placed within the HEAD section of your scripting code so they aren’t visible to your users.
8. Search Algorithm: Refers to the algorithms which locate the most relevant web pages during a search query. These algorithms peruse more hundreds of factors some of which include Title Tags, Meta Tags, Page Rank Value, Website Content and other factors as well not listed here.
9. Cloaking: Refers to the practice of making web pages show content that’s different from what the users were earlier shown. This is done so that the webpage can be ranked for specific keywords but then the site owner redirects the incoming visitor or user of the site to another site, in order to promote services or products which are unrelated. This is against Google’s guidelines and terms of service, as it does not provide any good user experience to the visitors of the site doing it and should be avoided at all cost. One is likely going to get penalized or even banned on SERPS [search engines results pages] for doing this.
10. Web Crawler: Refers to the bots or spiders [basically computer software] which browse the internet continually on behalf of search engines in order to reference existing web pages as well as discover new pages and links.
Hope you found these useful. Feel free to grab a FREE SEO Report of your website…Here!
