Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving a site’s ranking in search engine results pages. The higher a site’s search engine ranking, the more traffic it will receive from users searching for keywords and phrases relevant to that site. This makes good SEO a vital part of any web strategy.

We often hear of SEO being referred to as a dark art. It’s not hard to understand why. It is such an essential element to every website’s success and yet to the uninitiated it seems full of mystery, trickery and completely unfathomable terms.

Well consider them a mystery no longer. Here is your essential guide to SEO jargon:

SEO Terminology & Jargon Buster

SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimisation which is the art of making your website or webpages attractive to the search engines thus benefiting from high search engine rankings.

ON-PAGE SEO
Onsite SEO is the act of optimising your actual webpage for the keywords of your choice. Onsite SEO consist of optimising your Title – Meta description – meta keywords – keyword density – page headings and internal link structure to name a few.

OFF-PAGE SEO
Offsite seo is mainly to do with link building – there are many techniques available and a variety of sources should be used. A backlink acts like a vote to your website in the eyes of the search engines.

META TAGS
Your meta tags are placed in an area above the tag in your html or php document. Your meta tags are not visible on your actual page body. Search engine robots crawl the meta tags and find valuable information regarding your website. Meta tags should be used to any SEO agents advantage.

SERP
SERP stands for Search engine results page – these are the pages that are returned by the search engines when you make a search.

CRAWLER
This is a programme which moves through the web via links generally for the purpose of indexing (also known as spiders or bots).

CLOAKING
The technique of showing one page to the search engine (usually filled with SEO friendly keywords) and another to the user – a black hat technique (see below).

DEEPLINKING
This is building links to pages ‘deeper’ than your homepage and gives internal pages more visibility.

WHITE HAT SEO
White hat SEO is the ethical techniques used for search engine optimisation. This is a technique which we abide by that is set by the search engines themselves.

BLACK HAT SEO
Black hat SEO is the unethical way to do search engine optimisation – Google and other major search engines will penalise your site thus de-indexing your site or putting it at the back of the SERP.

BACKLINK
This is a link coming from an external website back to your website.

RECIPROCAL LINKS
Reciprocal links in other words is a link exchange. So site A links to site B on the understanding that site B will link back to site A. In the past this was an effective way of link building but this has slowly been devalued by the search engines.

ONE WAY LINK
One way links is exactly what it says. Site A links to site B and there is not any link back to site A. These are normally obtained by having good contents – through press releases – article submissions and many more ways. One way links are clearly the best way of link building.

THREE WAY LINKS
Three way links is a way of reciprocal linking but using a 3rd site for the link back. This is a form of linkbuilding which tries to hide the fact that you have entered into a link exchange. So site A will link to site B on the understanding that site C will link back to site A. On most occasions site B and C are owned by the same person.

PAGERANK
Page rank is the algorithm used by Google to work out the importance of a website – It is ranked using a scale of 0-10. 10 being the most authoritative site. This is generally used by evaluating all of the links pointing to your website and then assigning a page rank score for your site. More importance is given to the links coming from high page ranked sites as they will pass authority to yours.

KEYWORD
A keyword is an informative word which captures the essence of a topic. When a search engine analyses a web page, it tries to associate that page with the keywords found on it. When a user searches for one of these keywords, the search engine returns a link to that page in its results.

Keywords are at the heart of how search engines work and are thus at the heart of SEO. When site owners look to maximize their sites’ positioning on search engine results pages, they first choose a list of appropriate keywords upon which to build their efforts.

ANCHOR TEXT
This is the clickable text in a hyperlink.

KEYWORD DENSITY
The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalised.

KEYWORD RESEARCH
The hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.

LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING -LSI
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique of indexing – analysing, listing or categorising certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites, books or documents in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them.

ORGANIC TRAFFIC
Organic traffic comes from users who click on a link to a site they see on a search engine’s results page. It consists entirely of visits from people who actively searched for keywords found on that site. Growing a site’s organic traffic is the reason site owners practice SEO.

BOUNCE RATE
This is the percentage of people who are leaving a page on your site without looking at any other pages.

301 REDIRECT
This is a page which appears when the website at the URL searched for, has permanently moved to another URL. It will usually contain information about where the website has moved to.

404 ERROR
This is a ‘Not Found’ error message. This can happen if someone types a URL wrongly or if the page someone is looking for has been removed for some reason.

ALGORITHMS
The formula or procedure a search engine goes through to determine where a page should rank in the search results.

ALT TEXT
Alternative text – used to describe an image. If the image cannot be viewed, the alt text will show up instead. It can also help with search engine optimisation as search engines can ‘see’ the alt text, whereas they cannot differentiate from one image to the next.

CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart – this is a ‘test’ mostly used for stopping bots or automated programs from spamming a website.
You will often see this when you try to create an account on a website, a box containing random letters, numbers or words will appear. It’s easy for a human to read them and type them out again, but it’s much harder for a program to do.

CMS
Content Management System – a program such as WordPress or Tumblr, which allows the creation of content without needing to do any of the coding side of content creation.

CPC
Cost Per Click – each time a banner or advertisement is clicked on, the advertiser will be charged.

GREY HAT
Search engine optimisation techniques which bend best practice rules as opposed to breaking them completely.

HITS
A request for something on a web page to load, such as the page or a graphic.
Hits are not a good indication of website traffic as things like images count for a ‘hit’. For example, if your page has six images and it’s loaded once, that would class as seven hits.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language – a language made up of a variety of tags which will determine how a website will look, such as the layout and the text colour.

LONG TAIL KEYWORDS
These are search phrases which are a few words long, because they are more specific they are easier to achieve a higher ranking with.

META TAG
A HTML tag which contains information about what platform the website was built on and keywords which relate to the website. This information will not be displayed on the website itself.

META DESCRIPTION
This is the phrase that shows up in search results, it tells search engines what the page is about and it also needs to entice people to click.

PAGERANK or PR
This is how relevant a search engine considers your page to be in relation to the keywords searched.
If you have a high page rank, then the search engine considers the page to be very relevant to the words searched. If you have a low page rank then a search engine doesn’t consider your page relevant to what has been searched.
This is why using keywords is vital for search engine optimisation.

PAGEVIEW
Quite simply, the amount of times a page has been loaded.

IMPRESSION
This is the number of times an ad or page has been viewed whether it was clicked on or not.

INDEXED PAGES
The pages of your site that have been found by spiders and have been stored by the search engine.

LINK JUICE
This refers to search engine trust and positive SEO garnered from trustworthy links.

PPC
Pay Per Click – an advertiser will pay each time an advert or banner is clicked on which takes someone back to their website.

RSS FEED
Really Simple Syndication – if an RSS Feed is set up on your blog any new posts will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your RSS Feed. New posts will show up in their RSS reader or content aggregator.
You can send the entire post to the RSS reader or just part of the text or a description to encourage the reader to want to click through to your website and read the full post.

SEM
Search Engine Marketing – a type of internet marketing which relies on search engines to promote a company.
Search Engine Marketing is usually paid for, via things like Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click.

SE
Search Engine – examples; Google and Bing.

SERP
Search Engine Results Page – the list of pages a search engine produces which are relevant to the words searched, starting with the most relevant at the top.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator – this is the address of a web page.