Whether you are new to SEO or are happy to outsource it all to a consultant or agency, there are several SEO terms which you should know and more importantly why they matter so much in the world of search engine optimisation. Without this knowledge, you are at a huge disadvantage especially when you don’t know what your SEO consultant is talking about when they are updating you.
The SEO Company advise that the first term is ALGORITHM which is another word for a formula or set or rules. Within the world of SEO, the most important algorithm is the one Google uses for its search results. Their algorithm basically dictates what helps and what hinders a website to rank highly. There is no way of ever knowing Google’s algorithm in full but many SEO experts run tests on thousands of websites to establish the basics.
A BACKLINK is a link from another website to yours and Google take notice of these when it comes to search ranking. Whilst having lots of backlinks can help, what is more important is the authority and importance of the sites that the links come from. The bigger and more powerful a website is the more power it passes back to your site when it links to you.
ANCHOR TEXT is a term relating to backlinks as it the wording which a link may appear as. Instead of the raw URL showing, such as www.mywebsite.com, it is instead replaced with a keyword or phrase which you want to rank for. So, if you want to rank for the term ‘dog grooming’ then you want some backlinks with that phrase as the anchor text.
The words BOT AND SPIDER are often interchangeable and relate to the software which Google sends out into the internet to relay back information about every website they come across. If you can imagine flying drones visiting every building on the planet, and entering through the front door to see what’s inside then this basically describes what these bots do. They visit every website to establish what the site is about and report back to Google what they find.
One of the ways Google’s bots can establish what a website is about is by reading its METADATA. Although this sounds like something only computer geeks would know about, it is actually a lot simpler than you might think. The metadata of your site relates to tags which identify and describe what your site is about.
There is a TITLE TAG which is the text you see at the top of your browser when you visit a website. The title tag is very important to your site’s ranking and should include at least one or two of your main keywords.
The DESCRIPTION TAG is longer than the title tag and gives more information about what your site is about when it appears in Google’s search results.
There is also a KEYWORD TAG where you add several keywords relating to your site and which you want Google to be aware of.