Understanding SEO terminologies and basics are important to generate the right results. By creating this SEO glossary for business owners and entrepreneurs, our goal is to create awareness about the crucial aspects of SEO and help them make the right online marketing investment.
Let’s kick off our SEO basics blog with the definition of SEO!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization & means generating business mileage from search engines in the form of website traffic. Generally, SEO consists of techniques and strategies that can improve your website ranking in Google search results if implemented correctly.
If you are a beginner and do not know about the SEO basics, then learning SEO terminologies is the correct first step for you. SEO terminology is vast but let’s focus on the most important ones.
Have a look at Upreports’ SEO glossary!
#1Keyword- Keyword is a word or group of words that is used by the user to search for a particular piece of information, products, or service providers on the web. The keyword is the core of SEO. Marketers work on specific keywords to rank web pages on Google’s first page.
#2 Search Volume- Search volume is the average number of monthly searches for a particular keyword. It helps marketers estimate the competition and popularity of the keyword. Focusing on keywords with less search volume is recommended in highly competitive markets.
#3 Backlink- Backlink is a link on a third-party website that points to your website. It is of two types: Do-follow and No-follow. Do-follow links with anchor text on industry-relevant websites are a highly valuable way of improving your search engine ranking. No-follow backlinks are important too but not a lot.
#4 Anchor text – It is basically the text on which the link to a particular page is hyperlinked. Whenever you’re trying to get a link back to your website, it’s good to have a relevant keyword as the anchor text. One of the most important SEO terminologies this is!
#5 Content – Content is any piece of information sought by people. Blogs, videos, infographics, PDFs, images, gifs, and website content are popular types of content formats. It has to be planned & created to solve user queries. Videos are the most popular content format right now.
#6Offpage SEO – Offpage SEO is the practice of getting SEO mileage to your website from third-party websites. Promotion of your content on social media platforms, business listings, building backlinks, and publishing content on third party sites are some popular techniques under off-page SEO.
#7 Onpage SEO – The practices we use to improve our website ranking by doing work on our own website collectively make on-page SEO. Meta planning, description writing, content optimization, keywords segregation, and internal linking are some popular on-page SEO practices.
#8 Meta Title: It is the main title of a web page that appears in the SERPs and educates Google bots about your page’s nature. The length of the meta title should be around 65 characters. Keep meta title user-focused and of optimal length for better search ranking.
#9 Meta Description: It is a short summary of the web page which is used by Google bots to make sense of the page’s nature. The length of the meta description should be between 160-170 characters. In the last couple of years, the importance of Meta description has declined since Google has become better at indexing the whole page to allocate relevance.
#10 Alt-text: It is a relevant keyword assigned to an image and read by Google to find out the image’s meaning & rank it accordingly. Also known as Alt Attribute, it plays a crucial role in pushing images to the top of the Google Images search results.
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#11 URL: It is the address of your webpage and plays an important role in search ranking. Best SEO practices say that the main keyword should be present in the URL. Besides being keyword-rich, a URL should also be self-explanatory and not too long.
#12 Redirection: It is a method of redirecting the broken link to some other link. While there are many types of redirections, 301 and 302 redirection are the most popular ones. We don’t vouch for any SEO glossary that misses this!
#13 Canonical tag: A tag that allows site owners to tell Google which version of a web page is the original and which are the duplicates. An important SEO terminology to save your website from the Google penalty due to duplication.
#14 Robot.txt: It is an HTML tag that is generally used to notify the search engines about which areas of your website are restricted. It is widely used by programmers to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate content.
#15 XML sitemap: It is an XML file to be fetched from the Search Console. It allows the search engines correctly crawl all the different URLs of your website (all pages, posts, archives, etc) and make sense of its architecture.
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#16 Search Console: It is a free tool from Google that tells how search engines are interacting with your website. By signing in, you can see keywords for which it is performing, most promising pages, and a lot of other valuable data points. Must-know in the list of SEO basics!
#17 Organic traffic: It is the traffic that came to your website through the search engine. Meaning, the total number of visitors that clicked your site links in the SERPs and reached your website.
#18 Direct traffic: The traffic which reaches your website after typing your domain name or URL directly. This also includes traffic from bookmarks, PDF, and sometimes also emails.
#19 Referral traffic: It is the traffic that reaches your website through backlinks present on third-party websites. Referral literally means referred by someone (websites in our case).
#20 Link Building- Link building is the practice of getting quality backlinks to your website. The practice of link building increases your site’s authority and improves your ranking on Google.
#21 SERPs – SERPs is short for Search Engine Results pages. Still didn’t get it? It refers to the search result pages of a search engine. The term often appears is performance reports shared by marketing teams and DIY marketing blogs!
SEO terminologies – The endgame
Above are the basic terms and SEO terminologies that every marketer should know. That said, this is just the surface of SEO. Modern SEO is highly complex and requires comprehensive planning, research, content efforts, and strategic tweaks to generate results.
Want to get on the first page of Google? Email us at hello@upreports.com to discuss your online marketing goals. We promise to give the best SEO strategy and advice at affordable pricing.
We will try our best to expand this SEO glossary from time to time to make it more comprehensive.
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