SEO Words And Terminology You Need To Know
Online marketing is constantly evolving. I read about other marketers that have been online for quite a few years. In the early years you could just throw up a site and rank well relitivly easy. If only it was that way now! Things just aren’t the same anymore and online marketing just isn’t as easy as it used to be. But, not everyone can be on top. Anyway, SEO is constantly changing. If you are new to SEO here are some terms that will help you understand what the heck the experts you may learn from are talking about. It’s important to know these terms right off the bat so you can learn and apply what you learn. Or you won’t have a clue what people are talking about when they talk about SEO. So here’s a list of the top 20 SEO terms you absolutely must know:
Blog – A part of your website where you should regularly publish content (e.g. commentary on industry/company topics, descriptions of events, photos, video etc.). Each blog post on your website is a new page that a search engine sees, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online.
SERP – SERP stands for search engine results page. It’s used by a lot of marketers all over the place. A search engine results page is basically a page you’re brought to right after searching a keyword on Google or any other search engine. You’ll hear a lot of marketers using this term saying things like “you can use method X to boost your site in the SERPS”.
Backlinks – This is the most well known term of all; you’d be stupid not to already know this one. A backlink is essentially a hyperlink on another website that links to yours. In super newb terms, clickable text that links to a website. Backlinks are everything in SEO. The more you have, the better you’ll rank in the SERPS.
Inbound Link – A link from one site into another.
Keyword – A word that a user enters in search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.
Long tail keyword – An uncommon or rarely used keyword. Small businesses should consider targeting long tail keywords. Common keywords such as ‘software’ are more competitive, making it harder to rank high for them in a search.
Anchor Text – Anchor text is the clickable text of a backlink. Anchor text will dictate where Google ranks you for certain search terms. It’s vital that you use your keyword as anchor text. Whatever you want to rank your site for, you must use as anchor text when building backlinks. Say I wanted to rank this blog for “MLM secrets”, the anchor text would be:
<a href=”http://www.stevesmlmsecrets.com”>MLM secrets</a>
That would then become a backlink to my site if posted it elsewhere and… It should give me a small boost in the SERPS for “MLM Training”.
Page Rank – Page Rank is something Google gives to every page indexed in its search engine. PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.
Internal Link Hub – This is a relatively new term that was recently discovered. An Internal link hub is a page on your site that has a ton of backlinks that you use as a hub. From those hub pages you link to other pages on your site. This helps balance out the authority and Page Rank of your entire site. You can read about them here.
Indexed Pages- The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.
Linkbait – This one’s a classic; it really is one of the oldest terms in the book. Linkbait is essentially a really nice piece of content or page on your site that is used to “naturally” attract lots of backlinks. I honestly think Linkbait is dead, but it sometimes works. When creating blog posts with lists, “The Top 5 Internet Entrepreneurs”, stuff like that… it can get syndicated like crazy across social networks and bookmarking sites. That post would get referred to as linkbait.
Google Algorithm – This is another famous term you’ll hear all the time in the SEO world. You must have heard it at one time or another. You know… “Oh shit, the Google algorithm is changing”. Fundamentally, Google uses an algorithm to rank webs pages for different keywords. The algorithm has hundreds of different factors and at the core… is backlinks, on-page optimization and site authority. Also stuff like Page Rank, number of external links and so on.
Link Farm – In the early days of the search engines and SEO, marketers would use link farms to artificially boost site Page Rank and literally dominate the search engines. Now… not so much. Link farming barely works and is seen as spamming. It’s basically where you build a load of websites and link them together. In the hope that they all boost each other’s Page Rank and rankings. They’re also used as link building networks. Marketers would create a single piece of content, spin it and submit it to their entire farm linking to other sites.
Money Site – This isn’t necessarily an SEO term, but you’ll still here it a lot. A money site is your own website which you use for the purpose of making money. Not for linking to other sites or any SEO stuff, just to build an email list, convert CPA offers or sell general products. The term is pretty self explanatory.
Sandbox – The notorious sandbox is known for swooping in and tossing websites to the bottom of the SERPS. Holding them in an imaginary “sandbox”. When Google sees some unnatural link building going on, your site can be tossed into the Google sandbox meaning to the bottom of the SERPS. It can happen and while some marketers say there’s no such thing, I have over 4 sites in the sandbox right now. Not to worry, they always come out and usually stronger than ever before.
No-Follow – Nofollow is a link attribute used by marketers to inform Google that they don’t want to “endorse” the site they’re linking to. It basically tells Google not to use that link in its algorithm to rank the site or give away Page Rank. It’s really useful as it lets you control who you actually link to. As every external link on your site gives away Page Rank.
301 Redirect – 301 redirects are ways of redirecting pages to new locations. You can do some real sneaky stuff with 301 redirects. If a page on your site has tens of thousands of backlinks, you can use a 301 redirect to channel all that link juice to a new location. A sneaky trick: You can buy a domain and build tens of thousands of links to it in a matter of weeks. Using some sneaky black hat SEO tools… Like Scrapebox and Xrumer. Then after a few weeks and 100,000+ links later, you redirect the URL to one of your money sites and kazam… your money site will instantly get boosted in the SERPS resulting in top rankings for crazy competition keywords. But only for a short while. Days or even hours. Keep that one quite. Shhh….
SEM – Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.
Page title – The name you give your page, which is seen at the top your browser window. Page titles should contain keywords related to your business. Words at the beginning of your page title are more highly weighted than words at the end.
Title Tag – The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.
Meta Tags – Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.
Metadata- Data that tells search engines what your website is about.
RSS Feed - RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication.’ It is a subscription-based way to get updates on new content from a web source. Set up an RSS feed on your website or blog to help your followers stay updated when you release new content.
Social Media – Online media created by and shared among individuals. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are popular social media websites. Links from many social media sites now appear in searches. It’s important to have links to your site spread through social media.
Spider – A computer program that browses the internet and collects information about websites.
Indexed Pages - The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.
Traffic Rank – The ranking of how much traffic your site gets compared to all other sites on the internet. You can check your traffic rank on Alexa
Content farm – A content farm is a site, often a huge one, that produces large amounts of keyword laden, low quality content to flood the search engines. Blekko and Google consider them to be almost as bad as webspam.
Content marketing – Content marketing is a new term describing all the means to promote your site online, be it text, images, video or other “rich media”. Content marketing replaces, to some extent, simple copywriting.
CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short, is sometimes referred to as conversion optimization, and is the art and science of streamlining traffic once it reaches your site. In other words, it’s a set of techniques to make the user do what you want them to do on your site, e.g. clicking ads, subscribing, buying.
Deep link ratio – Any site with a natural link profile has at least some links leading to its content that is not the homepage itself. Back in the days, overzealous SEO practicioners would build hundreds or thousands of links to a website’s homepage, leading to a very low deep link ratio and thus being obviously “over optimized”.
Editorial links – Editorial links are not links in the editorial but links set by site owners, bloggers or content creators within a text itself. Also, editorial links are mostly natural in that they are given voluntarily (in contrast to paid links). While many people talk about paid links even years after they have been discounted by Google, most SEO pundits still rarely use the term ‘editorial links’.
Jaamit – A jaamit is a very strong link, a human bond that results in a link on a website. A jaamit is a link that outlasts the link building efforts or even the link builder. A jaamit link reflects trust, friendship, mutual respect and overall appreciation.
LDA – As far as I understand, LDA or “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” refers to the way a search engine might analyze word combinations or context on a page. Example: a page about the sky would also contain the words “blue”, “limit”, “high”, “reaching”, “scraper”. So Google might expect these terms to appear, while on a low quality page they wouldn’t. I’d be glad to find a better definition somewhere though.
Link decay – Link decay is the process of a link losing its value over time.
Natural links – Natural links are links by people whom you haven’t asked for a link. If somebody decides to link to you out of the blue without being asked to do so, the link is natural.
QDF – QDF stands for the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm by Google, which determines the ranking for newly important queries. Breaking news is a good example. In many cases, a blog or news site can outrank old authority sites for a keyphrase because the QDF algo determines that they are the most current source on that subject at that moment.
Relevant links – Relevant links are – in theory – links which have a topical connection to your site, e.g. a link from a travel site to a hotel. While the concept of relevant links is controversial in the SEO industry, it’s important to know that some links are more relevant than others.
Rich snippets – Rich snippets are based on the RDF format or microformats mentioned above. They are machine readable codes and provide additional information that is displayed in Google search results.
Sales funnel – While the idea of a sales funnel is not new, it has entered the SEO arena quite recently. The sales funnel can be tracked and influenced on websites. I can’t explain it in one sentence though; you have to see it to understand the idea/metaphor.
Semantic – Semantic means “dealing with meaning”. Semantic search and SEO has been around for a while but it’s still nascent. Bing uses some semantic technologies from the semantic search engine Powerset which it acquired. Google, in contrast, doesn’t understand the meaning of a web document yet. It just analyzes the keywords contained in it. A semantic search engine can, for example, distinguish between spears and Britney Spears, while one that doesn’t will offer you both results.
Wonder wheel – The Google wonder wheel is an excellent Google search tool which allows you to overview keyword clusters which are related to a particular query. It has been around for almost two years now, but many people still don’t use or even know it.
