Basic SEO Lingo to Know

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you are new or eager to learn about search engine optimization you are going to have to understand the lingo that is thrown around the industry. For starters it is a must if you are trying to offer this service to your clients but by learning the different lingo or verbiage that is used in the industry you will ultimately be able to really learn different aspects of the industry at the same time.

Let’s go over some of the more frequently used words in the industry so you can get a better understanding:

Crawling
The search engines use bots or spiders to crawl a website for indexing purposes. When someone says a website has been crawled that means the search bots have scanned across your website and either re-indexed the new information or just checked for new information that might be on the site.

Anchor Text
When you are online surfing or reading an article and you come across a link there are two ways to show that link. It is either in its raw form exactly how it is displayed or it is masked as a clickable word or phrase to another web page. The use of a word or phrase in the link is called anchor text and in the SEO world some anchor text in links pointing to your website is just good search engine optimization.

Back Links
One way links pointing to your website is a very important and integral part of search engine optimization. Back links means you have links from outside sources other than your website pointing back to your website creating one way back links or “link building”.

XML Sitemap
A sitemap is an outline of the structure of your website. It basically looks a family tree but each branch is a page of your site. This tells the search spiders what exactly is going on with your website structure.

Keywords
Keywords are simply the words and phrases that your audience is using to find your types of products or services. Your industry could have lots of keywords or it could have very little depending on how wide your area of business spreads online.

Website Analytics
The most popular term is Google analytics because many website owners opt for the free version of Google’s analytics program in order to track website usage amongst visitors. Analytics is the process of being able to track how your audience interacts with your website on almost every level.

PageRank
PageRank is a little number that Google created years ago to give power to individual web pages. You will see this term used quite a bit in the industry. A higher PageRank is always desirable because it shows greater power for that page.

Organic Listings
Organic listings are the search results that are in the white space to the left below the three PPC ads at the top. These are your organic search results which are free but require search engine optimization efforts and time.

Pay Per Click
Pay per click ads are all the ads that are positioned to the right of the search results and to the top of the organic and these ads cost money per click to be there. Each industry is different and each keyword costs a different price.

SERP
It stands for “search engine results page” which is nothing more than looking at your results page after you conduct a search for something specific.

Outbound Links
An outbound link is a link that sits on your website but points to an external source or another web page somewhere on the web.

Internal Linking
Internal linking is when you interlink some of your web pages within each other which is a very important step in the search engine marketing process. Your website should interlink between some of its important pages.

Footer
A footer is an area of your website which sits at the bottom of your website and is typically consistent throughout your entire site.

Navigation
A navigation is at the top of your website and it controls all your pages and how they are laid out. The navigation should be clearly visible on all your web pages.
SEO lingo is something that is always changing because certain elements and efforts are always changing. New items are being added and websites are spawning creating new verbiage. Overtime you will start to understand more and more of them.