With 93% of all online experiences starting with a search engine, SEO is extremely important for businesses.
But how many SEO terms do you know the meaning of? If someone told you that you need more backlinks and long tail keywords to get your website on the front page, would you understand what they are talking about? By learning these SEO terms, you’ll better understand how SEO works and b equipped to start using it for your business.
ALT Text
A description of an image on your website’s source code. Search engines use a number of factors to rank your website in search results, and image alt text is one of them.
Anchor Text
The words that a link is “anchored” to, for example search engine optimisation.
Back Link
A link from another site to your site. Backlinks are a huge part of SEO and successful SEO strategy.
Content
The words and images on your website, blog and social media, which describes your product or service and communicates to your audience.
Content marketing
The practice of creating and publishing content for marketing and SEO purposes.
Indexing
The process a search engine undertakes to add pages to search results. Indexed pages will appear in search results.
Keyword
A word or phrase that corresponds with a search term and is used by content marketers and search engines to index and rank webpages, for example ‘refurbished mobile phones’. Keywords are used in on page and off page SEO practices, and while important, it’s never good to have too many of them.
Link Building
The activity and process of getting more backlinks to your website for improved search engine rankings.
Long Tail Keyword
A less commonly searched keyword, typically with two or more words in the phrase. Long tail keywords are often better than ordinary keywords for SEO purposes because they’re easier to rank for and have greater relevance to your business. Ranking for too broad a keyword could earn you a lot of clicks, but could lead to just as many users ‘bouncing’ from your site due to lack of relevance. If an average keyword is ‘buy mobile phone,’ a long tail keyword might be ‘buy refurbished samsung’
Metadata
Data that tells search engines what your website is about. This is the text that appears underneath the heading/link on the results page, and should include relevant descriptions and keywords about your site.
No follow
When a link from one site does not pass SEO credit to another.
Off-page
Everything that is done away from the website to improve SEO, including building backlinks and creating advertising.
On-page
Everything that is done on a webpage itself to improve SEO, such as incorporating keywords into content, writing meta descriptions and image alt text.
Page Rank
A number from 0-10, assigned by Google, indicating how good your overall SEO is.
Query
The act of entering keywords into a search engine.
301 Redirect
A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new one.
Sitemap
A map of all the pages on a website which makes it easier for a search engine to index that website. The sitemap can be special document created by a webmaster or a piece of software.
Search terms
The words a user enters into a search engine when they type their search query.
Traffic
The amount of people coming to a website, whether that be through entering the URL directly, typing a query into google or clicking through to the site from social media or other places on the web.
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