SEO Terms: The Beginner’s Guide
So, you want to invest your time and energy into search engine optimization, or SEO, but you can’t make heads or tails of some of the terminology on the Internet?
You’ve come to the right place.
SEO isn’t known for its accessibility or user-friendliness to business owners, primarily because of its technical complexity.
To help you get started, we created a guide to SEO terminology for beginners.
The Basics
Keywords: These are the words and phrases that users type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. Knowing the right keywords to target is a *key* (pun intended) part of building an effective SEO strategy.
Backlinks: These are links from one website to another. Google views these links as votes of confidence, sort of like the Internet’s version of a recommendation from a peer you trust. The more quality backlinks your site has, the higher it tends to rank.
Internal Links: These are hyperlinks that connect one page of a website to another page within the same website. They help users navigate and are also valuable for spreading link equity throughout your site.
Search Traffic: This refers to the visitors that reach your website through a search engine, which can be categorized into organic and paid traffic.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This is the page you see after conducting a search. It lists all the web results for your query, including both organic search results and paid advertisements.
Content Marketing: Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract a clearly-defined audience to drive customer action.
Featured Snippets: These are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google search results to quickly answer a searcher's query.
Organic: Refers to search results that are not paid for, typically achieved through SEO best practices.
Query: This is the term or phrase that a user types into a search engine.
Domain Authority: A score (ranging from 1 to 100) that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERP).
Search Engines
Crawling: This is the process by which search engines discover updated content on the web, such as new sites or pages, changes to existing sites, and dead links.
Indexing: This refers to the process of adding web pages into Google's or other search engines' databases.
Ranking: The process by which search engines order search results based on relevance to the query and other factors.
Sitemap: A file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.
Pillars of SEO
On-page SEO: This refers to all the measures you can take directly within your website to improve its position in the search rankings. This includes optimizing your content, meta descriptions, and HTML tags.
Off-page SEO: This involves all the actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages. It’s largely focused on building high-quality backlinks.
Technical SEO: The process of optimizing the technical aspects of a website to enhance its ranking in search engines. This pillar of SEO focuses on elements including site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawlability, and site architecture, important for making sure that search engines effectively access, crawl and index the pages of a website.
On-Site SEO
Alt Text: Text description for images on a website, which helps search engines understand the content of the image.
Headings: HTML elements used to designate headings and subheadings on a webpage, typically structured as H1, H2, H3, etc.
Duplicate content: Content that appears on the Internet in more than one place, which can negatively affect a site's SEO if not properly managed.
Meta Title: The title of a webpage, which appears in the search engine results and is important for building SEO.
Meta Description: A brief description of a webpage's content, displayed underneath the Meta Title in search results, used to summarize the page's content for search users. Meta titles should be 155 characters or less.
With any questions about the terminology above, feel free to get in touch. Or, sign up for one of our free SEO for Beginners workshops, held every other month.
