20 SEO Terms You Should Know

20 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!).
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.