What is SEO anyways?
And 10 more important SEO terms explained.
Have you ever been talking to someone about their job and had to stop them to say, “Hey buddy, could you explain that in English”? It happens to me all the time.
Unfortunately, I realized that I am guilty of the same thing. I’ve been talking in my blogs and on the site about SEO and I haven’t even explained what it is. So here I go!
SEO
According to Wikipedia, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic, increasing visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. The term refers to the improvement of unpaid results (known as "natural" or "organic" results), and excludes the purchase of paid placement.”
What does that mean exactly?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization about improving (or optimizing) your website so that search engines (such as Google and Bing) will send the right people (quality) to your website. This means attracting people who are interested in your product or service rather than just a general audience. You also want to be able to attract more (quantity) of your target audience. Finally, the goal of SEO is to get more of the right audience through “organic traffic” which, unlike paid ads (such as Google AdWords) is unpaid traffic to your website.
More essential SEO terms & definitions:
Alt text
Search engines are currently unable to see images, so they don’t know what is in them. Alt text is a tag that provides information to search engines about what is pictured. The text of your alt text is also seen when your image can’t be loaded.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable word or words that is used to link to a different page or website. It provides information for people and search engines about the content of the linked webpage or website.
Heading tags
From H1-H6, heading tags help to separate your content with headlines and titles. They also describe your site’s hierarchy to search engines with H1 being the most important to the least important H6.
Indexed Pages
Website pages that are stored in a search engine database ready to be retrieved during searches are said to be “indexed”.
How to help Google index your website.
Keywords
Keywords or keyword phrases are word or sets of words that your clients would enter into a search query to find your website. These words are generally used in your content to help search engines determine the relevance to the search.
Meta descriptions
These are descriptions of a webpage that are sometimes displayed in search engines results. These tags are written in the source code (HTML) and are not visible on your website.
SEM
SEM or Search Engine Marketing comprises all marketing or promotion activities via search engines. So, it encompasses both SEO, which is optimizing your site for increased free search traffic, and paid advertising.
SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This page displays the results of a search query.
Sitemap
This is a list of all the pages on your website. It helps search engines to index your pages.
Title Tag
The title tag is another tag written in the source code (HTML). This shows up in a browser tab and in the headline of a search result. It’s important to create unique, relevant titles for every page.
Are there other SEO terms?
Yes, this is just a short glossary of SEO terminology to cover some of the most common terms! I’ll be explaining more as I talk about ways to improve your SEO in future blogs.
Have questions? Contact me!
