Some SEO Terms You Should Know
If
you have a website or blog, or if you work with anything related to the
Internet, you’ll certainly need to know a bit about search engine
optimization (SEO). A good way to get started is to familiarize yourself
with the most common terms of the trade, and below you’ll find 20 of
them. (For those who already know SEO, consider this post as a
refresher!).
SEM:
Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves
marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into
two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine
Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make
their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for
Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search
engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.
Backlink:
Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another
website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for
SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page,
influencing its search rankings.
PageRank:
PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative
important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm
is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of
trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to
their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such
page is important.
Linkbait:
A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog
with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to
improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can
also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example
of linkbait are the “Top 10″ lists that tend to become popular on social
bookmarking sites.
Link farm:
A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every
other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank
of all the sites in the farm. This practice was effective in the early
days of search engines, but today they are seeing as a spamming
technique (and thus can get you penalized).
Anchor text:
The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web
page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will
associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a
weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if
some of your backlinks had “weight loss” as their anchor texts.
NoFollow:
The nofollow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to
Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can
happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g.,
blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and
advertisers). When Google sees the nofollow attribute it will basically
not count that link for the PageRank and search algorithms.
Link Sculpting:
By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to
channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the
search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective
as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.
Title Tag:
The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the
most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your
title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page.
You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while
navigating it.
Meta Tags:
Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more
information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are
placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not
visible to human visitors.
Search Algorithm:
Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages
for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors
(according to Google itself), including the PageRank value, the title
tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain
and so on.
SERP:
Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll
get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search
engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends
on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.
Sandbox:
Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all
newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t
appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google
verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the
sandbox and into the main index.
Keyword Density:
To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to
divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of
words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor,
as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the
case anymore.
Keyword Stuffing:
Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search
algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially
inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called
keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can
also get you penalized.
Cloaking:
This technique involves making the same web page show different content
to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page
ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to
promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering
spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search
engines.
Web Crawler:
Also called search bot or spider, it’s a computer program that browses
the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and
new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.
Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content
within or across domains that either completely match other content or
are appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on
your website because it can get you penalized.
Canonical URL:
Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than
one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A
canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific
page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your
domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.
Robots.txt:
This is nothing more than a file, placed in the root of the domain,
that is used to inform search bots about the structure of the website.
For instance, via the robots.txt file it’s possible to block specific
search robots and to restrict the access to specific folders of section
inside the website.
