SEO Terminology

SEO Terminology

Nowadays, SEO and Online Marketing are getting more and more essential for online business. However, there are not many people who have a good understanding of what they really are. Here are some of common words that are used in SEO works so you can have basic ideas about them.

1. Search Engines:

Search Engines are searching system that allows users to find what already exists and has been indexed on the web or in other words it is simply computer program reporting pages on the Internet that match what users are looking for, based on the information that they have. This information volume of Search Engines is actually a kind of huge database. The data searching is based on keywords that users type in a search box and what they are looking for will be shown on search results pages that contain their keywords. Some of leading Search Engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing etc.

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

SEO is the function of improving a website’s position in the results of a search engine query for a target set of keywords. This includes optimizing your own pages-making your site attractive to search engines, as well as encouraging other sites to link back to you.

3. Keywords or Keyword:

The words that are on your website (including text link, content, images etc.) are added in Meta Keywords Tag. They are also the words that you type in search boxes every time you search for something on Internet. This is called Search Keywords.

4. Sitemap:

Sitemap is a map of your web that has 2 good points:

• Make it easy for visitors to explore your website.
• Make it easy for Search Engines to index your site.

Some of Search Engines prefer XML Sitemap (XML: Extensible Markup Language)

5. URL:

Uniform (or universal) resource locator, the address of a World Wide Web page.

6. Entry Pages:

Entry Pages are URLs that users find and visit your site. Homepages tend to have more visitors normally. From the amount of visitors, you will know which URLs have good rankings and attract more traffic.

7. Page Rank:

Page Rank is quite often seen during SEO works. Google Page Rank is numeric value (from 1 to 10) that is ranked by Google and saved in database. This ranking is based on many elements such as quality and quantity of backlinks on the sites, amount of visitors etc.

8. Backlinks:

Backlinks are the links from other sites to your site. In SEO, if you have a lot of Backlinks that have high Page Rank and top positions on search results pages , you site will have better ranking.

9. Contents:

Content is information that is located on a page (including images, flash, videos, and other information). Normally content of a website is created due to its purpose. For SEO, content has to be text.  Need lots of texts on pages to increase keywords density and searching possibility.

10. Duplicate Content:

Search Engines appreciate good and unique contents so they show only one copy of the data in search results. As a result, it is not a good idea to have many different URLs for one content or many domain names that go to the same content.  The copies are also considered as duplicates. For example one article appears on many different websites. On your site, you can use robot.txt file or Meta Tag Robots as well as ‘nofollow’ attribute to avoid duplicate contents.

11. Indexed Pages:

Indexed Pages are total number of the pages that are analysed by Search engines bots and are saved in Search Engines database.

12. Crawler/ Robot/ Spider:

A program is designed to collect data on the web pages by following the links between pages. Then it is used by Search Engines to find pages.

13. Dofollow:

Standard of the web links without ‘nofollow’ attribute. When there is ‘dofollow’ tag, Search Engines will understand and start indexing the URLs that are linked.

14. Click Through Rate (CTR):

CTR is a way to measure success of an online marketing campaign. CTR is calculated by the clicks dividing showing times of adverts. For example, if an ad is shown 100 times and get one click from a user, it will get 1% for CTR.

15. Pay Per Click (PPC):

PPC is an Internet adverting that is used on the web pages, the advertisers pay for their hosting only when someone clicks on their adverts. With Search Engines, the advertisers normally bid on keywords phrases that relate to their target markets.