The abbreviation “SEO” is thrown around with abandon, and some parties scream that it’s irrelevant or a scam, while others try to sell you an expensive program without being very clear. Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a website by improving its search engine ranking. Most users will click on a result in the first page or two of results, so if it’s done properly, it’s a valuable endeavor. But SEO activity should be undertaken with a firm understanding of what’s valuable to search engine algorithms, and it requires continuing education about what works and what doesn’t. Our refrain is that there’s no shortcut to SEO. You need good content that users (and therefore search engines) will find relevant, and you need to get it out there. To learn more about SEO—and avoid wasting money on useless measures—read on.
AdWords: AdWords is a program by Google that displays ads when people search for terms via Google. As an advertiser, you are charged by Google only when users click on your ads. They tend to be a fairly expensive way to advertise, but can be extremely effective.
Algorithm: the complex criteria used by search engines to determine where a website falls in its search results. You can track the current Google algorithm releases here.
Alt Text: alt text is code that is associated with an image on the web. Technically, it’s supposed to be used when the image is undeliverable or is using a browser that doesn’t display graphics—for example, a blind person would know that your photo depicts the Grand Canyon.. But in practice, it’s been used by search engines to understand what an image is and better categorize your page.
Analytics: analytics are data gathered and analyzed about your website. In particular, Google Analytics is an excellent, feature-rich web application that allows you to see information about the visitors coming to your website and how they interact with it.
Backlinks: backlinks are just links from other websites back to your own. On blogs, these can also be called “trackbacks.” Backlinks, particularly from high-profile websites, are an extremely valuable vote of confidence for your website, and they do considerable work to improve your search engine rankings.
Black Hat: black hat refers to spammy or deceptive techniques used to increase search engine ranking. Generally, these only work for a short time, if they do at all.
Blog: a blog is a sort of diary that can be used on your website to regularly increase the amount of content, and thereby attract more search engine traffic.
Bounce Rate: your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave the site from the same page they entered the site, without clicking to any other pages. A high bounce rate can be an indicator that your content isn’t appealing, but it may not be a problem. Sometimes a high bounce rate just indicates that users were able to immediately find what they were looking for—customers looking for the menu on a restaurant website, for example. Learn more about high bounce rates.
Bot (aka Robot, or Spider, or Crawler): these are programs that examine the code of websites to perform specific tasks, like finding content for search engine results or collect email addresses.
Clickbait: Internet content that is sensational or provocative, whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular webpage.
Conversion: conversion refers to the achievement of a quantifiable goal on your website, such as gathering signups for your email newsletter or making a sale. Google Analytics can be used to track conversions.
CPC (Cost Per Click): this refers to the cost of one click on an online ad or web banner. For example, it might cost you $1 any time a user clicks your Google Ad.
Crawling: programs created by search engines look at the code of your website to determine your search engine ranking, and this is referred to as “crawling.”
Impression: when a user views a webpage or an ad one time, this is known as an impression.
Inbound Link: this is another word for a backlink.
Keyword (or Key Phrase): these are the words or phrases that a user would enter into a search engine to find your website.
Keyword Cannibalization: excessively using the same keyword in your website can make it difficult for both users and search engines to determine which page is most relevant for that keyword.
Keyword Density: this is the percentage of keywords on a webpage. These days, Google is smart enough to figure out what your web page is about without resorting to “keyword stuffing,” so keyword density is not as important a consideration as it used to be.
Keyword Research: the process of using tools to determine the best keywords to target for your website. It’s not as simple or straightforward as you might think!
Keyword Stuffing: using keywords over and over in an unnatural way is considered a black hat technique that doesn’t work.
Landing Page: a landing page is the page where a visitor first enters a website. Sometimes people will create landing pages to drive a specific action from the new visitor: buy this ebook, contact us for a consultation, etc.
Link Building: this is a (usually) white hat technique for actively cultivating the number of incoming links to a website. If using “link farms,” it veers into black hat territory.
Link Farm: link farms are fairly disreputable websites that are set up to increase the link popularity of other websites by generating backlinks. Search engines generally recognize these sketchy techniques, and they often remove link farms from their directories and/or penalize the sites linking to and from them.
Long Tail Keywords: three- and four-keyword phrases that are very, very specific to whatever you are selling. Whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. A large percentage of searches are long tail searches.
Meta Tag: meta tags are code used in your website to add keywords or other information about your website. It used to be the case that people would stuff their meta tags with keywords, and as search engines get smarter, this has become a much less useful technique for improving search engine ranking.
Nofollow: sometimes it’s useful to tell robots not to follow a certain link on your webpage, to avoid giving your endorsement (and therefore increase the PageRank) of a website you’re linking to. In that case, you add a bit of code called “nofollow” to your link.
Noindex: this is a bit of code that tells search engines to ignore that page. Sometimes you may want to noindex a page if its content is poor or a duplication of other pages.
Organic Results: when a user finds you by searching for a keyword on a search engine, that’s an organic result—and it’s a very good thing!
PageRank: this is a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm that is used to determine where your website appears in search engine results.
PPC (Pay Per Click): a form of advertising where the advertiser pays when a user clicks on his ad. Google AdWords is a popular channel for PPC advertising. Pay Per Action, or PPA, is a similar idea, but in that case the advertiser pays when a conversion is achieved.
Scrape: this refers to taking content from websites, often in an automated way. Spammers can use this to create duplicate websites, or someone developing a new website may legitimately scrape content from similar or competitive websites to determine what content would be best to add to their new site (without plagiarizing others’ original content).
SEM: an abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing, which includes all activities associated with researching, submitting, and positioning a website in search engine results to achieve maximum exposure.
SERP: this just stands for Search Engine Results Page.
Sitemap: a sitemap is page (or pages) that link to all the pages of your website. It can also be a .XML file that is used specifically by search engines to help them understand the data structure of your website.
White Hat: these are techniques used to improve search engine results without gaming or trying to trick the search engine algorithm.
Do you feel ready to tackle some SEO or SEM? We’re here to help; give us a call or schedule a consultation.
