We could rattle on forever about SEO but we are not oblivious to the fact that this profession uses a whole lot of jargon. If you’re just beginning your journey into the world of online marketing and you don’t know your SEO from your elbow then you might need some assistance.
If you’ve looked at other online SEO glossaries you will notice that many of them as still so full of jargon that a beginner could end up in need of an SEO glossary glossary to help them decipher the glossary, if you follow us! This guide isn’t like that – we use plain English.
Algorithm
This is the programming tool set up by the search engines to determine and index the results of a search, then display them back to a user (in other words – what makes a search engine do it’s job).
Anchor Text
Text that is linked to another page. It is usually underlined and it can be clicked on in order to visit somewhere else on the web.
Did you know that Google places importance on anchor text and that highlighting the words ‘click here’ as anchor text will do you know SEO favours. You would be much better advised to use text relevant to the page that the text links to, as your anchor. For example, in the sentence ‘click here to buy a car battery’ the words ‘buy a car battery’ should be your anchor text.
Back Links
These are simply links, from other parts of the web, that point back to your site.
Bot (also known as a Spider)
A spider, a crawler or a bot (short for robot) is a program used by a search engine to index the web and store information from each website that they deem to be relevant.
Why?
Because storing information relating to each website allows the search engines to return quick responses.
How?
Bots search the web downloading HTML (but not graphics) from each website they visit. They strip out anything that they deem irrelevant or superfluous and store the rest in a database, to be called upon later for searches.
Conversion Rate
The rate with which people who visit your site convert to customers.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The price paid, in a paid search campaign, for each click through to your site.
Gateway Page
A page designed specifically to manipulate search engines into driving traffic to a certain web page. These are a tool used in search engine optimization and the pages are often designed for search engines rather than for people – packed with the things that Google deems as relevant.
Impressions
the number of times that your cost per click ad is shown in search results.
Keyword, Keyword Phrase and Keyword Density
The word or words that someone might type into a search engine in order for it to return relevant websites.
If the keywords that you would like someone to type in, in order to find your site, do not appear in the titles and text on your site then there is very little chance of people finding it.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This describes the process undertaken to influence how the search engines rank a website.
SEO makes sure that Google and other engines know that your website is relevant to a particular search.
