SEO (search engine optimisation) terminology can be perplexing, especially when you’re new to internet marketing.
And as search engine optimisation continues to grow and be refined, SEO terminology increases too. Note that most of the terminology is used interchangeably in SEO and internet marketing.
The following is some of the most commonly used terminology in the SEO world, in no particular order:
- Analytics – This term refers to the breakdown of a site’s performance. Analytics tracks certain parameters to determine the performance of a website, such as keyword density, origin of traffic, and number of visitors, among others.
- Authority – This is a descriptive term that refers to a page to which many hubs point. Such a page presumably holds a lot of relevant content relating to a primary topic.
- AuthoRank – This is a mathematical model based on the Page Rank algorithm that is used to verify the quality of an article based on the author’s reputation. It was integrated into Google’s algorithm in 2011.
- A/B Test – This is when two similar sites are created to determine the design variation that yields better results. It is seldom used in SEO but mostly used in PPC marketing.
- Backlink – A backlink is a link that connects to your website from another site. Internal backlinks are within the same website whereas external backlinks link from other websites.
- Black Hat SEO – A collection of methods used to optimise websites for search, but these methods are considered illegal or unfair and violate Terms of Service of the different search engines.
- Blog – A blog is a section of a website dedicated to ‘Web logging’. It may also be called a ‘Web Log’ and is normally used to create content for search engine link placement.
- Blog Farm – A blog farm is a collection of blogs run by a single individual, or it may be a group of blogs populated by automated tools (software). Blog farms are typically employed in link building.
- Blog Network – A collection of blogs used to achieve a common goal. They may be hosted separately on individual dedicated sites or on a single large website.
- Churn – From time to time, search engines alter listings in search engine results due to a number of factors, and the process is known as churn.
- Crawler – This is a special program used by a search engine to read the content of your webpage and file it accordingly. A crawler is also called a bot or spider.
- Keywords – These are words that users are most likely to use while searching for specific information. Proper use of keywords is important for SEO because search engine bots normally group similar items together, and so the crawlers will find it easier to locate the search engine page to which a website belongs.
- Hub – A hub is a page or document that connects to other pages of similar topic. The pages that are being linked to are regarded as authorities.
- Hyperlink – This is a link created in a word document by embedding the address of a particular web page in that document.
- Inbound and outbound link – This is a link that connects to your website from another Internet location, such as Yahoo or any other site with which you’re affiliated. An outbound link is the opposite, one that connects to another site from your site.
- Meta data – Meta data is ancillary data about a web page that is collected for the purpose of categorising it.
- PageRank – The primary algorithm used by Google search engine to assign a ‘weighting’ value to hyperlinked web pages, and is based on the webgraph. The algorithm is the brainchild of Larry Page, a Google co-founder.
- White Hat SEO – It basically refers to the methods used to optimise a website for search engines, following the stated Terms of Service of those search engines.
I hope this helps with any terminology issues that you encounter; if I have missed any, or have any questions as to certain terminologies you have heard before, feel free to ask in the comments below.
