A beginner’s guide to common SEO terms
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of determining the visibility of a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results.
Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated over time, they can’t understand a website the way a human can.
When used well, SEO can help the search engines decide what each page is and how useful it is to users. In short, SEO provides signals that Google and the rest can use to understand your content, and rank it accordingly.
Why is it important?
When you perform a search on Google, the order of the results displayed is based on complex algorithms (don’t worry, this will be in the glossary) which consider a number of factors to decide which site should be shown first.
So here, Google decides which results are most helpful if you’re looking for a lasagna recipe:
Optimising your site for this process will give you an advantage over sites which haven’t considered SEO, and therefore increase your ranking.
In other words: without SEO knowledge, your website may be invisible the search engines that are serving millions of users a day, looking for answers to their questions or solutions to problems.
These users are more likely to choose one of the top 5 suggestions in the results page, so ranking highly is extremely valuable.
A study from Advanced Web Ranking last year confirms this. Pages two and three of Google pick up just 5.59% of click-throughs, whereas the number one spot hoovers up 31.24%.
It’s not just about appearing on search engines though. SEO practices, more generally, improve user experience and put you ahead of competition. For example, mobile SEO now requires sites to improve their load speed.
Adwords
Google’s own ad service, offering PPC and CPM advertising. Using adwords means appearing on Google’s search and/or display network.
Algorithm
An algorithm is a set of rules used by search engines to determine which pages are the most relevant to a certain term. Google’s algorithms are frequently updated, and are often named after animals – most recently ‘Hummingbird’ (previous animal algorithm names include Panda and Penguin).
Anchor text
Words that have been hyperlinked. In terms of good SEO, the anchor text needs to be relevant to the page you’re linking to. Hyperlinking “here” or “next” is not good SEO practice for internal linking, because the terms provide no information about their destination and so a visitor isn’t likely to click.
Alt Tags
The text description of an image (you’ll see it when you hover over an image).
All images should have meaningful and keyword optimised alt tags – it’s how search engines recognise the contents of your images and determine which are relevant.
Backlinks
Links on other websites that hyperlink to your site. Search engines interpret a backlink as a recommendation for it, depending on the authority and relevance of the linking site.
The more high-quality and relevant backlinks your site has, the higher it will appear in search results.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
A high bounce rate means visitors don’t find your site to be interesting or relevant to their queries (content could be poor). Google could interpret this as a negative signal about your site.
Black hat SEO
Aggressive SEO strategies that focus only on search engines and not a human audience.
These tactics (including cloaking, artificial growth hacking, keyword stuffing) do not obey search engine guidelines and are likely to result in a penalty or ban from results pages. Don’t do it…
Crawler
A program that acquires information from new and updated web pages and stores it in a databank in order to create entries for a particular search engine index.
Known as a “spider” or a “bot”, the crawler program is an automated process and happens regularly.
Defective links
A link that has doesn’t lead to anything. This could be because of programming errors, or temporarily unavailable websites. Defective links make the job of the crawler more difficult, so could mean your site will appear lower down in search results.
Internal links
Linking to relevant content within your own site (and using accurate anchor text for that link) is good for SEO, because it indicates to search engines that this content has value.
Effective use of internal linking enables you to direct Google to what you consider the important pages on your site and improve their ranking.
Keyword stuffing
This is bad practice and is very much old school SEO. It’s when a site attempts to manipulate its position in search engine results by concentrating on keywords. Lots of them.
Thing is, search engines are pretty clever, and can normally detect abnormal distribution of keywords in text or in a website’s meta tags – and will downgrade the site to appear lower down in search results.
Meta description
The two or three lines of text providing a description under each page’s title in search results. It’s what will determine a searcher’s decision to click-through to a site – so needs to be brief and relevant.
For example, here’s the meta description for CreateMyMobileWebsite:
Meta tags
Information in HTML code that contains information about a website, which cannot be seen on the website itself.
Search engines access access meta tags so they can display a page title and description in search results.
Nofollow attributes
A command (rel=”nofollow”) that you can insert into HTML that will instruct a Googlebot not no take a link into account. It would be used in situations where a link is paid-for and may be untrusted content.
Offpage optimisation
The measures taken outside of the actual website in order to improve its position in search rankings, for example: social media. These measures create high-quality backlinks.
Onpage optimisation
The measures taken directly within your website in order to improve its position in search rankings, for example good internal linking and clear, logical navigation.
Organic search results
The free/unpaid/natural results that appear when you type a search phrase into a search engine. They appear below the paid-for ads.
The organic results that appear at the top of the search engine results page should be the pages that have been optimised the best for that particular search query.
Paid search results
You can pay a search engine to place your web page at the top of a results page. This placement is not within the natural search results – instead the listing appears in the sponsored results.
This type of advertising can be useful for a new website, or if there’s loads of competition for the search term used.
Here, a competitive term like home insurance attracts a lot of PPC spend:
Search term
The keyword(s) users type into a search engine when trying to find something specific.
Sitemap.xml
A documented hosted on your website’s server containing a list of every page. It’s a file that helps search engines to learn more about the structure of your site, and also speeds up the crawling process. WordPress automatically generated Sitemap.
White hat SEO
SEO best practice: optimising your site for a human audience, making it more valuable and accessible for visitors.