17 SEO terms for beginners
Welcome to the world of SEO, a landscape filled with acronyms, jargons, and insider language that might seem like you've stepped into a completely different realm.
It's like learning a new language with its own unique dictionary and grammatical rules. And, just like any new language, you'll soon be speaking it easily once you familiarize yourself with its key terms and phrases.
In this article, I’ll share what I think are the main SEO terms a beginner should know to help them learn about SEO and apply it better to their own businesses and profession.
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
If you're truly new to SEO, you might wonder what the concept means.
Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERP), such as Google or Bing.
It involves ensuring your content, design, and coding stay current with best practices so that search engines can easily crawl and index your webpage. (We’ll cover ‘crawl’, ‘SERP’, and so on.)
It contains several steps, and many experts have their own approach to optimizing for search engines. But you shouldn't worry too much.
At its core, SEO is about ensuring your content is 'findable' by people and search engines. And this largely involves a lot of common sense.
For example, a business might provide services using special glue to make shoes long-lasting. But customers don't care about this detail at all. Customers do care about 'fixing broken shoes' or 'leather glue' or something similar.
As a marketer and SEO expert, you need to understand the language your users use and their intent. And also to understand how search engines seek and file away information to reveal the right information to people. But let's look at each of these aspects separately.
2. Search Intent
One of the most important concepts that SEO professionals care about is 'search intent'.
Search intent is the reason why people are searching for a particular term or phrase. Without understanding search intent, your efforts in optimizing content won't make much sense, and you'll end up targeting the wrong keywords. Or you’ll write the wrong type of content for a specific term.
The major search intents are:
- Navigational: People want to visit a specific website
- Informational: They want to know something
- Transactional: They want to buy something
For instance, if someone searches for 'best running shoes', they're likely looking for a place to buy running shoes. Whereas someone searching for 'how to lace running shoe' is likely looking for advice on lacing their existing pair of running shoes.
Therefore, based on the search intent, you can create different content for each keyword phrase and target the right visitors. And understanding this is critical, especially for eCommerce platforms to build leads. So, make sure that you think about search intent whenever you make content.
3. Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file uploaded to your server that helps search engines like Google crawl and index your pages.
Simply put, it's like a map of all the webpages you have on your website, so when search engine crawlers visit your site, they can quickly find the most important pages that are relevant to user queries.
It also helps these crawlers better understand the hierarchy and structure of your website.
4. SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page, which is the page that displays all the web pages Google finds relevant to a user's query.
This includes organic results (i.e. not ads), paid ads, local listings, video carousels, images, and more.
Most online businesses and SEO experts aim to get their web pages ranked as high as possible on the SERP so that more people can see and click on them.
5. Keywords
A keyword is a term or phrase that best describes what your webpage is about. For example, if you are an online shoe store, the keyword 'shoes' would be relevant for all of your product pages.
It is important to include relevant keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions, and body copy so that search engines can understand the content of your webpage better.
You should also use different variations of the keyword phrase you're targeting to demonstrate to Google that you have a wide range of content related to this topic. For example, if you are targeting ‘grammar checker’, you should also include phrases like 'spelling correction tool' and 'punctuation tool'.
6. Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that contain 3 or more words, such as 'best running shoes for beginners' or ‘best way to clean wine stain’. SEO experts often use them to target users who have a specific intent in mind.
Such long-tail phrases also make it easier to stand out from the competition who will compete on the major common keywords. Finding and writing about long-tail keywords in your niche is a great way to stay ahead in the SEO game.
7. Spiders or Web Crawler
Spiders, also known as web crawlers or bots, are automated programs that visit websites to scan and index content.
Search engine spiders are continuously crawling through millions of pages on the internet to find relevant information related to user queries. When they come across a page, they read the content and then decide whether it should be included in their index. Just like how cookbooks have indices in the end of the book so you can refer to a keyword and find corresponding recipes on the right bages.
By using SEO best practices such as adding keywords, adding internal links, and creating sitemaps, you can make sure these spiders can easily find and index your pages.
8. SEO Writing
SEO writing is creating content that meets all the requirements for search engine crawlers and users.
It involves creating high-quality, relevant content that is optimized with keywords, internal links, external links, and other SEO elements.
This means writing for both humans and search engine spiders to ensure your content is easily found on SERPs. And you should prioritize humans before search engines. Don’t be tempted to use AI content generators and publish just anything on your site.
Take care to write thoughtful content for people but use SEO writing tools to support your work and you’ll see positive results.
9. Meta Description
The meta description is the snippet of text you see below a link when you search for something on Google. It summarizes or describes a page's content, and it should always include relevant keywords.
Search engines can use this to rank your page higher on SERPs, as well as help users decide if they want to click or not.
10. Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is an important part of SEO, as a large portion of users now access the internet through their mobile devices.
Your website must be optimized to look good and run smoothly on all types of devices, from small screens to wide screens. This includes ensuring that all your content is easily readable and clickable on mobile versions and that your pages load quickly and don't require users to scroll horizontally.
The easiest way to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly and loads fast is to use responsive themes or to leverage mobile plugins if you use WordPress. Thankfully, most themes come with responsive features out of the gate and you don’t have to worry about deliberately making your site fit to most devices.
11. Backlinks
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links from other websites that point to your website. Search engines consider them a vote of confidence, indicating that your content is valuable and relevant to others.
The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your website will likely rank in search engine results.
Search engines also rely on links to find new information and gain context, so be sure to link internally in your sites. That is, link from one post to another.
12. Link Building
This is the process of creating high-quality backlinks to your website. It can be done manually by contacting other websites and asking them for links or automatically through link-building tools such as automated outreach software.
The goal of link building is to get as many relevant inbound links as possible, from high authority websites related to your page's content.
13. Domain Authority/Domain Rating
Domain Authority (DA) is a score developed by Moz that represents a site’s authoritativeness and how well a website will rank on search engine result pages.
The score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores meaning that a site has greater authority. It is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including the total number of links and linking root domains, among others.
Domain Rating (DR) is a score developed by Ahrefs that predicts the SEO strength of a domain. It also ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores suggesting stronger websites that are more likely to rank better in search engine results.
The terms are not interchangeable but you shouldn’t place too much importance on them either. Just make sure that your site is healthy and a higher DR/DA will follow giving you more opportunities to work with other sites for link-building collaboration.
14. Alt Text
Alt text is the text that appears when a user hovers over an image. It is used to describe the image and should include relevant keywords so that search engine spiders can understand its content better.
Using alt text also helps improve accessibility for users with disabilities, as it allows them to understand what the image is about without having to see it.
Alt text is an important part of SEO and should be included in all images. It should be short, descriptive, and include relevant keywords.
15. Structured Data
Structured data is a type of code that can be added to webpages to help search engine crawlers better understand the content they are indexing.
It helps search engines identify a wide range of data, from products for sale on ecommerce websites to events and recipes.
Using structured data can help your website rank higher in SERPs as it allows search engine crawlers to understand the content better.
The best way to add schema markup is to use a suitable plugin and make the job easier.
16. On Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages with relevant keywords and content. This includes things like optimizing titles, meta descriptions, and body copy with relevant keywords, adding internal links, and using structured data.
Following on-page SEO best practices can improve your website's visibility on SERPs and drive more traffic to your pages.
17. Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing a website's ranking on SERPs through activities that are not directly related to the content of the page. This includes things like link building, social media marketing, and online reputation management.
Off-page SEO activities increase your website's visibility and authority on SERPs
Learn SEO the Best Way - With Practice
These are just some terms, but you're off to a good start if you get the hang of just these things. In the end, don't worry too much and expect to understand everything immediately.
SEO is something that you can learn with practice and personal experience. The best way to learn it is by building your own site and trying to rank for specific keywords.
In the process, you'll use various tools like rank tracker tools, keyword research tools, and so on. Soon, you’ll get hands-on experience that will make all the terms you learned above second nature to you.
