Yes, nearly all companies engage in search engine optimization practices. They may be doing SEO themselves or have a professional internet marketing company to do it for them. Either way, it is important to have clear understanding of the most commonly used search engine optimization terms in order to avoid confusion and to better understand the process behind SEO. Here are the top 10 terms every search engine practitioner should know:
2. Backlink – Backlinks are links found on another website that leads to your own. Building backlinks is thus important because it affects a site’s PageRank, which consequently affects its search rankings.
3. PageRank – Created by Google, PageRank is an algorithm the search engine uses to determine important pages on the web. For example, if Site A has a backlink to Site B, it is reflective of its trust to Site B. The more links leading to a site, the more it is deemed important.
4. Linkbait – While linkbaits are often thought to be written materials, they can also come in video, photo, quiz, and more. Linkbaits are web contents published on blogs with the primary aim of creating backlinks to a certain website.
5. Anchor Text – Think of anchor texts as the face of hyperlinks in webpages. Anchor links contain backlinks and are clickable on websites. Google associates keyword-rich anchor texts to a website’s content, thereby making it a useful tool for search engine optimization.
6. Title Tags – Do not underestimate title tags. Title tags are the first thing viewers can see upon clicking a web page because they appear on the top of the browser upon navigation. Title tags are one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithm which is why it should contain unique but relevant keywords.
7. SERP – Search Engine Results Page. Simply put, this is the page that appears on any search engine when users search for a certain keyword. The primary goal of search engine optimization is to make websites appear on the first page of the results because this is what users click on the most.
8. Keyword Density – A particular page’s keyword density is a formula that calculates the number of times a certain keyword should be used, depending on the total number of words in a web page.
9. Keyword Stuffing – A black hat technique, keyword stuffing has been mentioned many times in this blog. Keyword density used to be an important factor in Google’s algorithm which is why practitioners artificially inflated keyword density in web pages. This search engine optimization practice can get a website penalized by Google.
10. Web Crawler – Used interchangeably with the terms “search bot” or “spider”, web crawlers are computer programs used by search engines to scour the web for new links and webpages, which is ultimately the first time in indexing web sites.
