SEO Glossary of Terms
“If you want to rank on the SERPS you will need to either perform SEM, like PPC, or improve your SEO, probably best to focus on organic. Just make sure it is white hat and not black hat because there have been some updates in the algo bots that are severe for ranking, especially with canonical issues.”
What the heck did I just read?
Not to worry. Online marketing comes with a whole bunch of new terms and phrases that can quickly make any small business owner feel confused. Every now and then, we at LinkNow Media like to pull back the reins to make sure no one gets lost in the sauce. Here is a glossary of terms that might be helpful:
Algo or Algorithm: a type of program that search engines use to direct users to the websites that best answer their needs. Algorithms are directly related to what place a website is listed in a search e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd position etc.
Backlinks: links on a website that direct to other websites. This is used as a way to gain traffic outside of using search engines.
Black hat: Search Engine Optimization practices that are contrary to how search engines wish for a website to increase traffic to its site.
Bot: sometimes referred to as robot, crawler or spider. A bot is a program that searches through a website to relay information back to search engines, indicating where and for what it should be indexed on a search engine results page.
Canonical issues: canonical refers to an original/ legitimate / official website or content on a page (the canon). Issues often happen with canonical text when a search engine has registered a site with different URLs but sees them as sites of duplicate content due to incorrect redirecting within the website itself.
Keywords: key terms or phrases on a website that match or are related to search engine focused user intent. For example, if you want people who are looking for cedar decks to find your website, you should have the keyword “cedar deck” on your website.
Organic SEO: using methods that follow a search engine algorithm’s parameters to increase rank naturally and without paid advertising.
PPC: Pay Per Click. A form of internet advertising where the advertiser pays an advertising agency only when a user clicks on the advertisement, which brings them to a page.
Ranking: where a website is placed on a search engine page for a particular search term. This is often mentioned for improvement purposes. For example, if your website if found on the fifth page of a google search, then it ranks on the fifth page. If after improving the website it is then found on the fourth page, it has improved its ranking.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing. Internet marketing focused on increasing visibility to a website or page. Most of the time this takes the form of paid advertising.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Techniques and methods used to increase the amount of traffic to a website. As it is focused on search engines, the main goals of SEO is to increase the page rank of a website so that it shows up in the top results for a particular search.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page that come on screen once you have entered a query into a search engine.
White hat: Search Engine Optimization practices that are encouraged by search engine algorithms. Also referred to as search engine optimization best practices.
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