SEO Glossary - The Search Engine Optimisation Terms Small Business Owners Need To Know
Published on 23rd February 2017
Search engine optimisation is essential for getting your website found by potential customers and generating more leads for your business, but understanding even the most basic of SEO practices can often be a challenge due to the large amount of technical jargon that’s involved.
To clear things up, we’ve compiled an SEO glossary of the most important technical terms for small business owners, so that turning your website into a powerful online marketing tool is as simple as possible:
SEO Glossary
A
Algorithm – The set of rules used to determine a website’s ranking in search results.
E.g. the Google Search Algorithm.
Alt Text – Also known as an alt tag. Used to provide a text description of an image, so that search engines can understand what is shown on your page.
E.g. The alt text of an image demonstrating this could read “Example of alt text on an image”
Anchor Text – The clickable text that is used to link to a web page.
B
Backlink – A link from another website back to your website.
E.g. This link to the it’seeze Support Site is a backlink from this website to another.
Black Hat – Manipulative or unethical SEO practices that focus only on optimising for search engines and not for a human audience.
E.g. Keyword stuffing - the practice of overloading a web page with keywords in a way that does not read naturally - is a black hat technique.
Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page.
E.g. A 40% bounce rate on your homepage means that 40% of visitors are exiting your website after seeing this page, rather than clicking through to other pages.
C
Content – The material on your website that visitors will engage with, such as text, images, and videos.
E.g. Professional photographs, graphics, and animations are all examples of visual content.
D
Domain – The main web address for your site.
E.g. www.yourdomain.co.uk
Duplicate Content – Content which is the same or very similar to that found on another page or website. Search engines will often penalise websites with duplicate content.
E.g. If you copy the text from a competitor’s website, Google will punish this unethical behaviour by lowering your site’s visibility in search results.
H
Heading – Text on a webpage that indicates what the page is about, placed inside of an H1 or H2 tag and usually presented in a larger or bolder font.
E.g. The text “SEO Glossary” above is a heading.
I
Indexed Page – A page on your website that is stored in a search engine’s database.
E.g. Every link that appears in search results is an indexed page.
Internal Link – A link from one page to another on your website.
K
Keyword – A word or phrase that you want to optimise your website for in order to reach users searching for that specific term.
E.g. “SEO glossary” is a keyword for this blog post.
L
Long Tail Keyword – A longer keyword phrase, usually containing two or more words, that is searched less frequently, and is therefore less competitive and easier to rank for.
E.g. “Small business SEO glossary” is a long tail keyword for this blog post.
M
Metadata – Information that tells search engines what your page is about.
E.g. The metadata for this blog tells search engines that it is an SEO glossary for small business owners.
Meta Description – The short summary that is displayed in search engine results to describe the content of a web page with the goal of attracting users to your website.
E.g. The meta description for this blog post is “What is Search Engine Optimisation? Our up-to-date SEO glossary explains the essential terms that small business owners need to know to succeed online.”
P
Page Title – The name of your web page, which is displayed at the top of the browser window.
E.g. The title of this page is “SEO Glossary – The SEO Terms Small Business Owners Need To Know”
R
Ranking – Your website’s position on a search engine results page.
E.g. When you search “it’seeze” in Google, our website appears in position 1 at the top of the page.
S
Search Engine – A program that searches for relevant information on the internet in response to a user’s search term or query.
E.g. Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – The process of optimising your website to achieve a higher ranking in organic search results and increase the traffic to your site.
E.g. Including keywords in your content is a form of SEO.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – The page that’s displayed when you enter a query in a search engine such as Google.
E.g. When you search “it’seeze” in Google, a page of results with links to our websites appears.
Spider – Also known as a bot or crawler. A computer program used by search engines to browse the internet and collect data about websites.
E.g. Googlebot.
T
Traffic – The number of visitors that go on your website.
E.g. The number of hits your website gets over a set amount of time, for example, 2000 in a day.
W
White Hat – Ethical SEO practices that are recommended by search engines to increase your website’s ranking in search results.
E.g. Creating high quality, keyword-rich content is a white hat technique.
X
XML Sitemap – A file that lists all the pages on your website and makes it easier for search engines to find them.
E.g. sitemap.xml
Can’t find the technical SEO term you’re looking for? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll add it to our SEO glossary for small businesses!
Tagged as: glossary, search engine optimisation (SEO)
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