Basic SEO terms

Your brief dictionary about SEO field.

A

ALT Text/Tag or Attribute - A description of an image in your site's HTML. Unlike humans, search engines read only the ALT text of images, not the images themselves. Add ALT text to images whenever possible.

B

Backlink is any link to a page or site from another page or site. It is a link that is placed on another website that takes the user back to your site. Having a lot of backlinks with relevant anchor text is one of the best ways to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

Broken link or dead link is a link on a web page that is no longer.

C

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - The part of your code that defines how different elements of your site look (examples: headers, links).

D

Domain - The main web address of your site (example: www.yoursite.com). It's good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment

G

Google Search Console (previously Webmaster tool) helps you know whether your site is infected with malware. It also allows you to communicate with Google and Adjust various aspects of how Google sees your websites, such as Internal & External links, By typing the keywords people land on your site, adjusting crawling and indexing of your website, click-through rates of keywords, and many more.

Google Analytics is used to track the website activities of the users such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc. along with the information on the source of the traffic. It can be integrated with Google Ads, with which users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Google Analytics' approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set.

H

Headings - Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2. This text is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.

I

Inbound Link - A link from one site to another. A link from another site will improve your SEO, especially if that site has a high PageRank.

Internal Link - A link from one page to another on the same website, such as from your homepage to your products page.

Indexed Pages - The pages of your website are stored by search engines.

J

JSON-LD: JSON-LD is a lightweight 'Linked Data' format. It is a way to encode your website data to be easier to understand for other machines on the Internet - including search engines like Google! Google looks for JSON-LD, and rewards websites and webshops that serve JSON-LD data.

Making sure that your site serves this type of data can be very helpful in your search engine ranking!

K

Keyword - A word that a user enters in a search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.

L

Long Tail Keyword - An uncommon or infrequently searched keyword, typically with two or more words in the phrase.

M

Metadata - Data that tells search engines what your website is about (Meta Title, Meta Description)

O

Off-page SEO practices are things you do outside of your page to improve your rankings, such as link building.

On-page SEO is everything you do on your page to improve your rankings, including tuning the HTML structure, improving title tags and descriptions, checking keyword usage, and improving the internal linking structure.

P

PageRank - A number from 0-10, assigned by Google, indicating how good your overall SEO is.

S

A sitemap is a file that contains links to every publicly accessible page on a website. Sitemaps are helpful to search engines because they provide a way for search engines to find every page and product on your site.

T

Traffic - The visitors to your site.