SEO Terms to Know
SERP - Search Engine Results Pages
Crawling - When a search engine bot visits the pages of your site, evaluates the content, and saves it to their databases. It is called crawling because the bots use your sitemap and internal links to discover other pages and travel through the site. These web crawler bots are sometimes referred to as “spiders.”
Indexing - Like the index in the back of a book, search engines use all the content found on a website, archive it, and use it to provide users with relevant search links when they enter certain queries.
Backlinks - Hyperlinks from other websites that point users to your site.
Internal links - Hyperlinks within your website that point from one page to another.
Keyword or keyphrase - The terms you want to rank for with regards to your business. A successful SEO strategy will optimize pages and blog posts for these terms so users can find you in the SERPs.
Head Terms - Popular, frequently-searched keywords.
The Long Tail - Less popular, rare/niche keywords. Contrary to its name (and to what some believe), these are not necessarily long words or phrases with over 20 characters.
Ranking factors - Aspects of your website as well as your online presence that search engines use to determine where your site ranks in the SERP.
On-page ranking factors - Elements within a website that dictate the informational quality and accessibility of the site. Here are some examples:
Page titles & headers
Meta descriptions & alt-text
URL structure
Keyword targeting
Technical ranking factors - Elements of a website’s functionality that impact overall performance. Here are some examples:
Site and page speed
Mobile device optimization
Internal linking
Off-page ranking factors - Discoverable data and links from other websites that lead users to you. Here are some examples:
Social media platforms
Online business directories
Guest blog posts
Local citations - An online mention that lists your business name, address, phone number, and website. Examples are review sites, business directories, chamber of commerce websites, and social media platforms.
Local SEO - Optimizing and correctly displaying your business info across platforms in order to target your regional audience. It is very important to push accurate data about your business to local citation sites. Consistency in your listings helps your SERP ranking and builds trust with potential clients.
Domain authority - A website’s relevance to a certain subject or industry. This is also known as “thought leadership.” The strength of a site’s authority is impacted by a few specific factors: quality of information, quality and prestige of authors, competition around subject matter, quality of inbound links to site, etc.
Domain Authority Score - Created by the team at Moz, Domain Authority is a 1-100 scoring system that evaluates how likely a certain website is to rank well in SERPs. A brand new website will always start with a very low DA, so don’t be discouraged at the start!
Structured Data - A standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. For example, on a recipe page, this might be a structured breakdown of the ingredients, cooking time, temperature, calories, etc.
Keyword cannibalization - When various pages or blog posts on a website are optimized for the exact same or similar keyphrase, which results in them competing for and poaching one another’s ability to rank well. According to Yoast, “Google will only show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search results for a specific query. If you’re a high authority domain, you might get 3.”
Mobile-first indexing - An effort by Google in recent years to begin treating the mobile version of your site as the “primary” version of your site. Why? Because, a user-friendly and accessibility mobile experience is important, especially when a higher percentage of visitors will hit up your site via their phones first.
SSL - Secure Sockets Layer. Huh? An SSL certificate, put simply, is a layer of protection for your site that keeps the data sent between users and websites secure. It does this by encrypting the data as it travels between the two systems.
TLS - Transport Layer Security. The updated version of SSL. Nowadays, this most likely what you’re adding to your new site, but SSL is just a more commonly known term.
HTTPS - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. This shows up in a website’s URL to tell you it is secured by an SSL certificate.
AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages. A tool that creates “lightweight” versions of your pages in order to optimize and speed up the loading time on mobile devices.
Ok, is your brain tired yet?
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