Search Engine Optimization: Beginner SEO Terms
6 min read
6 min read
by Krisiana Kostadinova
As you probably already know, SEO is an important term in marketing. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, which comes down to following industry best practices to optimize your website’s ranking on various search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Let me be very blunt upfront; there’s no shortcut to mastering SEO. To develop a deep and thorough understanding of SEO, you’ll need to invest time and effort, just like you would when exploring any other subject area.
As part of our 2023 content planning, we launched a series dedicated to SEO entirely. I’m excited to officially get this going with an introduction to the world of SEO, where I will provide you with a list of beginner-friendly SEO terms and their definitions. If this is a topic of particular interest to you, keep coming back because I’ll be expanding on this topic in the form of an annual blog article series, doing a deep dive into the world of Search Engine Optimization.
Ready to get started?! Keep reading to get acquainted with the terms you need to know to join me on this exciting journey.
Search engine
This one is easy, and there’s no chance you’ve never used one! A search engine is every program, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, where you search for something by typing in specific phrases or keywords to find results matching your query.
Keywords
SEO keywords (also known as “keywords” or “keyphrases”) are terms added to online content to improve search engine rankings for those terms. You can discover relevant keywords for your business using the keyword research process, which will list them based on search volume, competition, and commercial intent. For instance, say your run kitchenware e-commerce; keywords relevant to your website would be “online kitchenware shop,” “bread knife,” “cheese grater,” “wooden cutting board,” “kitchen utensils online shop,” etc.
Query
A query can be defined as a piece of phrase or a whole one you type into the search bar to find what you’re looking for. If we keep using the same example of kitchenware e-commerce, your consumers will likely search for “high-quality kitchen knives,” which is a perfect example of a query.
SERP
SERP stands for “search engine results page,” or the page containing all the results of your query. For example, if you type in “furniture” on Google, the SERP will show you a list of paid and organic websites relevant to your search.
Organic search results
Organic search results are all the results you see when you type in a query that is not paid for or sponsored.
Traffic
One more in the easy bucket – online traffic is just like regular traffic; simply replace the number of vehicles on the road with the number of users visiting a website.
You’re doing great! Keep it up!
Page rank
Page rank translates to the relevance of a website, which search engine algorithms determine via crawling and indexing, which we will expand on in one of the upcoming articles in the series. For now, remember that when a website is ranking high, it means it’s at one of the top positions on the SERP.
Off-page & On-page SEO
Off-page SEO actions taken outside of your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages, such as having social media accounts, encouraging and promoting customer feedback, and building brand awareness. On-page SEO, on the other hand, is all you do on your website to improve your ranking. For instance, running a company blog, including meta descriptions, and placing ALT text on images are some of many on-page SEO practices.
Link building
Link building is the process of getting links that lead to your website. Having many links to your website tells the search engine algorithm that your site is relevant and trustworthy, ranking it higher and increasing traffic. You can have links to your website both on and off the website.
Backlinking
Links that point to your website from other sites are called backlinks—also known as inbound links. So, for example, if there’s an online article about the best kitchenware packages that includes a link to your e-commerce, that would be considered a backlink.
Internal & External Links
A website can contain internal links—pointing to other pages on the site—or external links—leading to content on other sites.
Sounds interesting? Check out our article about how Google can help boost your business using SEO techniques. See what I did here?
Bear with me – only four terms to go!
Featured snippets
As you already read, these are the summarized answers you see on the top of the SERP when you ask Google a specific question. Being the first top result on the results page can strongly influence your website traffic. If your website content type allows it, you should use this feature by providing the nicely structured and correct information about some potential search queries.
Meta Title and Description
These are the title and the brief description of the page you see on the SERP. It gives the user an idea of what the website consists of and how it relates to their search query. If written well and catchy, meta titles and descriptions can increase Click-Through-Rate, website ranking, and traffic overall.
Mobile friendly
A webpage designed to load quickly and render well on a phone screen is considered mobile-friendly. Other elements, such as buttons and links, should be clickable and easy to find. Moreover, all the content should have fast load times, making the user experience as smooth as it is on the desktop version of the webpage.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file included in the source file of most websites, which consists of instructions meant for the “good bots” or crawlers that inspect the website and index them, so it can be shown in the SERP. This file can help the search engine differentiate the pages that should or should not be shown to the public eye.
All done! Now you know the most used beginner SEO terms!
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed going through the beginner-friendly SEO terms I picked for this first article in our new SEO-inspired article series. These terms are the base you will keep building on as you continue your learning experience in this subject area. So save this article and come back any time you need a refresher!
Resources:
SEO Terms for Beginners (A Glossary) – A Fearless Venture
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