A ranging world of SEO can be overwhelming for many beginners. With so many new terms being coined every year, it’s hard to stay up-to-date on all of the latest industry lingoes.
If you’re just getting your feet wet in the world of search engine optimization, don’t worry. You’ll need to know only a few terms to get started. This list of terms may be a long article to read, but it’s here to help you learn what you need to know. With these 25 SEO terms, this is a good way to start your SEO journey.
Why It is Important For You to learn the SEO terms?
If you want to succeed with digital marketing and advertising, then learning these terms will make things easier for you.
Knowing how to use them correctly will give you an edge over other marketers who are not familiar with this field. The more you understand SEO digital marketing, the better off you will be when dealing with clients or potential customers. Learning SEO can also open up new doors for you as well. There are many opportunities out there that require knowledge of SEO.
To help out, I’ve compiled a list of the top 25 SEO terms that are essential for beginners to know if they want to get started in this field.
What is SEO term?
An SEO term or SEO terminology is a phrase that SEO professionals use on a daily basis. It’s important to learn these words because it helps you communicate effectively and efficiently with your colleagues. An SEO term is a phrase that can be used to improve your site’s search ranking on search engine results pages. If you don’t have any idea what some of these phrases mean, then you should definitely check out our glossary page, which has all the definitions listed below.
25 Important SEO Terms For Beginners
Here are the 25 SEO terms a beginner should know.
URL Structure
The URL structure or path refers to how web pages in an online website are linked together. A good example would be example.com/about-us/. Here we see about us as the main link, and www.example.com is the domain name or URL (Uniform Resource Locators) or simply the web address or website address. This means if someone types in www.example.com, they will automatically get redirected to that website homepage. A website with a good URL structure has an important role or impact in search engine optimization, where it functions as a unique address for all the pages on a website. With respect to SEO digital marketing, URLs are essential in determining how your webpages are indexed by the major search engines. One of the most effective ways to enhance the search ranking of your webpage is by ensuring that you have a keyword-rich URL structure.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is a single web page that has been designated as the original or canonical version of a document. A canonical URL helps search engines determine which pages are duplicates and should be ignored in their indexing. A canonical URL (or Canonical Tag) is used when there are multiple versions of one page, and each version should be treated equally by Googlebot. It’s best SEO practice to use this tag so that users can easily tell which version of a page is more relevant than others.
Keywords and Keywords research
Keywords in SEO are words or phrases that you might use to search for a product or service. They help determine the relevance of your website on Google and other search engines, which can affect how likely someone is to click on your website when they’re searching online. Keywords are the backbone of SEO digital marketing. They are the words that will be used to find your website if someone is searching for your content. Every business should know all the keywords they want to rank for and then backlink pages around those keywords so that people who are searching for those terms can find their site.
Before you decide on which keywords you want to be relevant for your website, it’s important to do keyword research on what words are popular with your target audience. Keywords research is the process of finding out what keywords to use using keywords tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.
Keywords density
The number of times a word appears in an article compared to how many other articles have this same word. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on a web page. In SEO, it’s important to have keyword densities that are high enough to rank well in search engines but not so high as to be considered spammy. It is important to note that Google has recently started penalizing websites that overuse certain keywords and phrases. This can result in lower search rankings if you’re found to be doing this. The ideal keyword density is somewhere between 2% and 5%. To calculate the keyword density on a page, divide the number of times a word or phrase appears by the total number of words on that page.
If your keyword density is already too high, you can use the LSI techniques, the LSI keywords or Semantic Keywords, or simply the synonyms of your target keyword on that page. For example, if your keyword is “shoes,” you can use “sneakers.” It is important for a page to achieve the right keyword to avoid the penalty of spamming or keyword stuffing.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a term in SEO that uses a technique to inflate the number of keywords on a web page. Keywords stuffing is considered a black hat SEO technique that involves adding a bunch of keywords to a webpage in order to try and trick search engines into ranking the page higher. While there are many people who believe this SEO strategy is effective, it has been shown time and again to be spammy and ineffective. In fact, there have been several cases where website owners have been penalized by Google for using keyword stuffing.
Long Tail Keyword
Long-tail keywords SEO terms refer to phrases with more than 3 words. These long-tail keywords can help you rank better in SERPs because they’re less competitive. However, if your content isn’t optimized around these longer terms, then you’re missing out on potential traffic from those searches. There is a reason why many companies today use long-tail keyword SEO terms. The reason is that they not only rank higher in the search engines but also produce more organic traffic and conversions for your website.
Long-tail keyword SEO terms are used to target smaller groups of people that show up in those searches. This method can help you rank high on those searches and produce more organic traffic and conversions for your website. A good example of a long tail keyword is search engine optimization tips and tricks. It’s a valid long-tail keyword because it covers the keywords search engine, the optimization, search engine optimization, the tips and tricks, and other combination of them.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
SERP is the Search engine results page that is seen after typing a search term into Google, Bing, or other search engines. This is maybe to easiest SEO term to understand, and I bet you have already encountered or heard this term several times already. SERPs are important for SEO because they contain the text, images, videos, and links that are related to the given search term. So every time you make a search on Google, the output of your search is called “search results,” but the page where those results appear is called SERP or Search Engine Result Page.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a document that contains all the URLs of your website and other important information about each one. The purpose of an XML sitemap is to help search engines find and index pages on your site, which will help you rank higher in their results. XML sitemaps help webmasters find out which pages in their website have been indexed by search engines like google. The XML sitemap file can be generated automatically using free tools such as XML Site Map Generator Tool from www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
You should submit this sitemap to major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) so that it will index all the URLs present inside the site properly. This process helps crawlers or search engine bots identify the pages more easily. A search engine bot is a program that crawls the website and webpages to find and index websites. Search engines use bots and read pages on those sites and then rank them based on what they found.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file that you can use to tell search engine crawlers what they should and shouldn’t crawl on your site. You can use it to block certain areas of your site or to allow only specific crawlers access. This will help prevent duplicate content issues as well as keep search results relevant to users.
The file does this by telling search engine robots what URLs it shouldn’t crawl (and therefore show). While XML sitemaps are a list of URLs that can be submitted to search engines using the Google search console webmaster tools to tell them which pages you want to be indexed and which pages you don’t want to be indexed, Robots.txt is a text file on your server or website that tells search engines what pages to index and not index. It also tells them how to crawl the site.
Schema Markup
A schema is a set of codes that can be put inside a page. Schema markup is a way to provide information about your website to search engines. This can be done using the Schema.org vocabulary, which is a set of standardized vocabularies for data markup on web pages. These vocabularies are intended for use by automated systems such as search engine crawlers and indexers or content management systems.
The schemas themselves are defined in terms of types that represent common entities found on the Web such as people, places, organizations, articles, products, or Local businesses. Schema markup allows you to add structured data about your content in order for Google to better understand how your page fits into their algorithm. It’s important to have schema markup because if there are no tags with certain attributes, search engines won’t know whether something belongs to an article or a page. Schema markup is the hidden information on a page that only a google crawler, google bot, or a web professional can see and understand. For the complete list of important schema markup, you can visit https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a navigational tool that allows users to see the path they have taken on a website. They typically show up as a list of links under the menu bar or in the footer of a webpage. Breadcrumb navigation helps users navigate through websites by showing them where they came from and what links lead back to their original location. This feature also makes it easier for people who use screen readers (like JAWS) to follow along as they read articles.
Page speed
This refers to the time it takes for a user’s browser to load a website. The faster a site loads, the more likely users will stay on the site longer, which means they may be able to find what they need quicker. A fast-loading site also helps improve SEO as Google prefers sites that have fewer errors in their code. According to Google, the ideal page load time is <3 seconds for desktop and mobile devices. There are several ways how to improve a website’s speed, including using responsive design or optimizing images, and having a good web hosting provider could also help to improve a website page speed.
You can also utilize to use a CDN and a Cloudflare service to improve website page speed. To check your website page speed, you can use these websites: GTMetrix (for free), PageSpeed Insights (free), and Pingdom Speed Test (paid).
Title tag
The title tag of a webpage is usually displayed on every browser tab when users click it. It’s an HTML element used to describe what content is available on a specific URL. A title tag is the first thing people see when they visit a website. It’s also called the title of the page. The title tag is important because search engines use it to rank your site in search results. The best length for a title tag is usually between 50 and 60 characters, though some search engines may truncate it to less than 50 characters.
The title tag is one of the most important components of SEO digital marketing. It should be descriptive and concise, include keywords, and not contain any words that will cause it to be filtered by search engines.
Meta Description Tag
Meta description tag is another piece of information used by Google as well as other major search engine crawlers like Bing and Yahoo! They are often referred to as meta tags or metatags. Meta tags provide a brief summary of the webpage’s content and are displayed on search engine results pages. They are also one of the most important on-page SEO factors because they can be seen on search engine results pages (SERPs). Meta descriptions should be concise and relevant to the page content.
The meta description should also include keywords that are relevant to the page content and up to 150 characters long and should be unique on every website page.
Alt Text or Alt Attribute
Alt text or Alt attribute text is the alternate text that appears in place of an image when it cannot be displayed. Alt text in the images helps search engines index the site and provide textual links to images for people who need them, such as screen readers. This is an HTML attribute used for web browsers that have image support, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. It provides alternative text describing what each graphic represents when it cannot display properly. For example: if a user has images turned off in their browser or viewing device, then this alt tag will provide a textual representation of the picture’s contents.
You must use ALT tags with all your graphics on your site. If you don’t, some visitors may not see them at all!
Backlinks
Backlinks, sometimes called link building, is an offsite optimization technique where you try to get your site linked from another high-quality web page pointing to your site webpage (inbound links). Inbound links are a way for search engines to determine how popular your site is. The more backlinks you have, the higher you rank in organic search engine results pages. When building backlinks, it is important to have a mix of Do-follow and no-follow so that Google can tell that you are building backlinks naturally.
You want to avoid using spammy tactics creating your inbound links like buying thousands of low-quality backlinks because this will hurt your organic search rankings instead of helping them.
Internal links
Internal links are the links on a single webpage to other pages within the same website domain. Internal linking is important for SEO digital marketing because they help search engines find content that is not indexed by their crawlers. Internal linking helps users navigate through your website easily by providing easy access to related information or resources on your website. For example, if someone searches for “how do I make money online,” then they may be directed to an article about making money with affiliate marketing. The ideal number of internal links for long-form content is three or four, with an additional link every 300 words or so. The number of links you include will vary depending on the information you’re linking to.
Outbound links
An outbound link is a hyperlink from your site that points to a different domain or website. Linking to other websites helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and can help your website gain organic traffic. Outbound links are great because when a user clicks on them, it jumps away from our domain and goes to theirs. This means that we get credit for traffic even though visitors never came back to our site. It’s not as easy as just creating some outbound links as many people think, but it can still be done quite easily. Again, this method isn’t scalable at all in terms of how much organic traffic you’ll drive. Like the internal links, it is ideal to have 2-3 outbound links per page.
Do Follow and No Follow
A do-follow link is a hyperlink that search engines like Google will crawl and index. A no-follow link is a hyperlink that won’t be crawled or indexed by search engines. A do-follow link is a link that points to another website. This type of link will pass the search engine’s authority to the site it links to, which can help improve its search rankings. A no-follow link is one that does not pass any authority and doesn’t show up in Google’s index.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. It’s typically blue and underlined but can also be purple or orange. Anchor text is not to be confused with a text link, just the plain-text hyperlink you see on most web pages. Anchors are text links used on web pages as shortcuts for easy access to other parts of the page, such as navigation menus, backlinks from another site, or internal linking structures. They’re also known as “clickable” words with the URL of the page where you want to direct after clicking it. The anchor text (also called URL) should describe what the linked page is about.
Domain Rank or Domain Authority
Domain Authority or Domain Rank is a measure of how well a website ranks in search engine results. Domain authority is a score from 1-100 that Google assigns to a website based on the quality of the content. The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank well in search engines. When creating your backlinks with proper anchor text and you get a do-follow link from other trusted websites that will pass the link juice. Essentially, link juice is the portion of ranking optimization that each link sends toward its target website. Your ranking potential, known as PageRank (PR), is being allocated among various redirects to other sites on the internet when you have a post with links to other pages.
Page Rank or Page Authority
Page Rank is a measure of the importance of a web page. Google PageRank is calculated by analyzing how many other pages link to it and also how important those linking pages are in relation to one another. The more links there are from high-quality sites, the higher the rank will be. Page Authority refers to an algorithm developed by Moz that measures the likelihood that you’ll rank on Google’s first page. It takes into account both social shares and backlinks for search ranking purposes. This is how Google ranks web pages. It’s an algorithm that determines what page should be displayed at the top position for any given keyword. A high PR site has better chances of getting ranked first than a low PR one. The higher your PR value, the more likely it is that your content gets seen by people searching in Google and elsewhere.
What is the difference between domain authority and PageRank?
An important aspect of Domain Authority is Page Authority, a metric for assessing the quality of an individual web page. However, PageRank only applies to the entire site. Unlike Google’s own PageRank, DA is calculated by a third party. To determine the relationship between your SERP ranking and PageRank, you can use DA.
Domain Trust
Domain trust refers to the reputation of a web address as determined by other websites. The higher-quality sites will have more content than low-quality ones. This means you should focus on building great content for your own site rather than trying to game existing search rankings through link schemes. Domain trust is a type of website link that allows two domains to share organic traffic and rank in search engine results. In SEO, when you have a domain trust with another site, your content will be more visible on their site for certain keywords. A common use is to create an affiliate relationship between the sites where one company provides products or services, and the other promotes them through links or reviews.
Index or No Index
Indexing is the process of adding a website to a search engine’s database. This is done by submitting your site’s URL to the search engine and waiting for it to be reviewed. Once the URL has been approved, it will be added to the index. No index terms are words or phrases that are not indexed in search engines. These are typically used by webmasters who want to prevent certain pages from being indexed in search engines. The “no index” option disables all Googlebot crawling as well as any subdomains (e.g., images) within this URL’s hostname. If you do not want to prevent users from directly accessing these resources via URLs, then leave the no index selected.
Ranking Factor
Ranking factors are the different aspects or elements of a website that can affect how high it ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are many ranking factors, and they vary depending on the search engine. These factors include domain authority, page speed, mobile optimization, user experience, external and internal links, backlinks, social signals, title tags, meta descriptions, alt attributes, keywords, and other terms that we discussed all contribute to site ranking factors. There are 200+ ranking factors Google is using to determine your site’s search ranking capability based on your niche and website industry.
Conclusion
We hope our list of the 25 SEO terms that every beginner should know was enjoyable for you. We know that being a beginner in digital marketing can be challenging and having a list like this can be extremely helpful. If you are interested in learning more about search engine optimization, be sure to check our blog frequently for new posts.
We hope you’ve learned something from this blog post. It’s a great start to assisting you in your SEO efforts. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate in contacting us at alvin@vhinzborn or post your comments below.
We hope you keep reading more blogs from our website and learning from what we have to offer. Thank you for your time and hope you enjoyed the article. In our next post, we will be covering advanced SEO terms for you to become an SEO ninja.
FAQs
1. What are the 4 main components of an SEO?
The four main components of SEO are content, links, social media, and technical SEO. Content is the strategy for attracting potential customers to your website in order to increase revenue. Links are used as a way to measure how much authority or credibility your site has on Google’s search engine results page (SERP). Social Media is an important part of SEO because it can be used as a tool for increasing brand awareness and customer engagement through different channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technical SEO is a process of determining which part of your site needs improvement.
2. What are the different types of SEO?
There are three types of SEO: on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical SEO. On-page optimization is the process of optimizing your website to ensure it is found by search engines. Off-page optimization includes social media marketing and link building which increases a site’s popularity in order for it to rank higher on Google. Technical SEO refers to the process of ensuring that a site has been coded correctly so that search engine crawlers can index all pages properly.
3. What are the three stages of the ranking?
The three stages of SEO ranking are crawl, indexation, and rank. Crawl is the process by which the search engine crawls through all of the pages on a website to find out what they’re about. Indexation is when Google indexes your site’s content so that it can be found in their search results. Rank refers to how high up in the SERP (search engine result page) your page appears for certain keywords or phrases that people might be searching for.
