This section goes over the basics of what you should know when getting started with SEO.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): It is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on a website's presence in search results on search engines. The goal is to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your site through organic search engine results.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page): This term refers to the page that a search engine returns with the results of its search. The major search engines typically display three kinds of listings on their SERPs; a pay-per-click (PPC) results, organic results, and local listings or maps (also paid advertisements).
- Keyword: These are phrases in your web content that help people find your website via search engines.
- Keyword Density: This refers to the number of times a keyword is used on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page.
- Long-Tail Keyword: These are keyword phrases that typically consist of three or more words. They're important for SEO because they're more specific and often less competitive than singular keywords.
- Meta Tags: These are text snippets found in a page's HTML that describes its content. The Meta tags attribute isn't visible to visitors but can be recognized by search engine crawlers.
- Meta Description: It's a ~160 character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page's content. Search engines show the meta description in search results, usually when the searched phrase is within the description.
- Backlinks: These are links from one website to a webpage on another website. They are important for SEO because they can represent a vote of confidence from one site to another, thus affecting the site's rank positively on the SERPs.
- Internal Links: These are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are used for website navigation and can help spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.
- Organic Search / Organic Traffic: This refers to unpaid traffic that comes from search engines.
- On-Page SEO: This includes all measures that can be taken by website owners within their own website to improve their search engine rankings. These measures include optimizing HTML tags, headlines, and images, improving website structure and URLs, increasing website speed, and producing high-quality content.
- Off-Page SEO: This refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the website in order to improve its position in search rankings. These measures include link building, social media marketing, and influencer marketing.
- Technical SEO: It refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase to improve organic rankings. It involves aspects like improving website speed, mobile-friendliness, data structure, security, etc.
- Anchor Text: It's the clickable text part of a link. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you're linking to.
- Alt Text (Alternative Text): It describes an image and is beneficial for website visitors and search engines. It is used when the image cannot be displayed and helps search engines understand the context of the image.
- XML Sitemap: It's a file where you can list the web pages of your site to inform Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content.
- URL (Uniform Resource Locator): Also known as a web address, it's a specific character string that refers to a resource.
- Google Analytics: A free Google tool that tracks and reports website traffic. This service offers insights into how users find and use your website.
- Google Search Console: This is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.
- Crawler / Spider: This is a program used by search engines to collect data from the internet. When a crawler visits a website, it picks over the entire website's content (i.e., the text) and stores it in a databank.
- Index: This is a database used by search engines that contain the information on all the websites that Google was able to find. If a website is not in Google’s index, users won’t be able to find it using the search engine.
- Robots.txt: It is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website.
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