SEO Glossary – Terms Business Owners Need to know

SEO is a vast subject, and if you are new to the world of SEOs, here are some of the basic SEO terms that you ought to get familiarized to:

1. Anchor Text – The text that links to a webpage is called an Anchor Text. If you enter a keyword in the search engine, the text (link) underlined in blue is called the Anchor Text (it’s purple if you have visited the page earlier).
2. ALT Text – Description of an image in an HTML format that search engines can easily read.
3. AdWords –Google’s advertising programme (PPC or Pay per Click) to create ads and get paid.
4. Algorithm – Formula used by search engines to rank webpages according to relevance or importance for a particular set of keywords.
5. Analytics – A tool that tracks or monitors user behaviour is called Analytics and the iteration of its data is called Insights. Example: Google Analytics.
6. Blog –A section of your website where you can post original content and generate opportunities through SEO techniques for your business to rank higher on a search engine result. Example of a blog platform: WordPress.
7. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – The language or a website code that helps in creating the look and format of website.
8. Citation – It is a web based reference of your business and its related information such as business name, phone number, address and other core information. Use Google My Business as a structured citation for local business listing.
9. Click Through Rate (CTR) – CTR is an important tool to measure how successful your online campaigns are. It is the rate at which users click on a link or an advertisement.
10. Content Management System – CMS is a platform where you can easily manage and edit your website even without the knowledge of coding. Examples: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla.
11. Conversion – The process of successfully turning a visitor into a customer through the points of a transaction. Conversion rate is the percentage of users which convert into customers.
12. Crawler – Also called as a bot or a spider, crawler is a program that moves through the worldwide web to gather data through the link structure and helps in page ranking.
13. Geotargeting – Based on the location info, search engines ranks user content based on where the user is. This is done by determining IP address, Zip Code etc.
14. Header Tags – Text on a website that is showcased in large and bold fonts to give insights of the page content. They serve as titles as well as hyperlinks.
15. Inbound Link – An important factor of search engine’s organic algorithms, which connects another website to your website. Link Building is a marketing practice that helps in collecting more inbound links for attracting more visitors.
16. Indexed Pages – Indexing is the method by which search engines store your webpages to optimize the speed with which a searcher can get relevant search results.
17. Internal Links – A link of a page on another webpage of the same website.
18. Keywords – An important SEO tool for your business that comprises of set of words that target to draw users to your website.
19. Long Tail Keywords – Longer and more specific keywords that are searched more infrequently, containing two or more words in a phrase.
20. Meta Description – A snippet of text, 160 characters in length, that informs the search engine about the webpage content. It is often displayed below the search engine page title.
21. Meta Tags – Hidden and special structure codes at the top of each webpage that provides more information to search engines about the website content.
22. Organic SEO – A natural website ranking that is free from paid contents and advertisements.
23. PageRank – Google’s Algorithm that determines the popularity of your page based on quality and relevance on a scale of 0-10.
24. Pay Per Click (PPC) – Here a business or an advertiser pays each time a searcher clicks on an advertisement.
25. Rich Snippets – Micro data or Micro formats that appear as ingredients of a search engine result. Examples: texts, star ratings, prices etc.
26. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds – Computer codes produced by content management systems to allow users to receive pings when content is updated on the subscribed website.
27. Search Engine Ranking Page (SERPs) – A page that contains a list of websites in response to a search engine query that best matches the entered keywords.
28. Social Media Marketing – Brand, business or website promotion with the help of social media platforms.
29. Traffic – Amount of visitors to a website which depends on number of visitors and also on number of page clicks.
30. Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – Address of a specific webpage. For example: www.predictadigital.com.