Familiarizing Yourself with SEO Terms

You may encounter varying opinions from many different people on the need for search engine optimization (SEO). Well, if you happen to be on the fence about that particular thing for your business, perhaps this article will help you to get off of the fence and take a step that will vastly improve your business’s success.

The unique qualities of SEO terminology

Even if you should happen to believe in SEO and understand how and why it is important for your business, you may not understand the “language of SEO.” A quick, crash course may do you a lot of good. It may be especially helpful if you are considering hiring an SEO company to do your SEO for you. It will also help you if you or one of the people with whom you work are going to work on the SEO personally.

The following are some of the more common terms that are used often.

• Title: This is the title of a particular page on your website. The title is surrounded by an HTML title tag <TITLE>, which can be found in the head section on that page. The title will be picked up by the search engines and will rank at the top of the page when someone does a search.

• Description: The description (also called the meta description) is another HTML tag <DESCRIPTION>. However, the goal of the description is to describe that particular web page. It is important to note that the description has no bearing on the search engine rankings. However, the description can have an impact on helping to increase click-through rates because descriptions appear in the search engine results. It is important for you to be aware that each of your descriptions should be unique and each one should have a call-to-action included with it.

• Anchor text: This is the text within the body of the text that is hyperlinked. The anchor has a positive effect on SEO because you are linking text that would be there anyway. It isn’t forced. You can use a number of different URLs (you use the URL to send the reader somewhere) and you can choose a bunch of different pieces of text to hyperlink. 

• Black Hat SEO: Black Hat SEO refers to an extremely aggressive approach to SEO in which the person who is working on the SEO is able to engineer (or control) the outcome of the SEO results. It is important to understand that using a Black Hat approach is something that you should try to prevent.

• Content marketing:  This is a marketing approach in which you would use content to strengthen your brand. Content marketing affects your SEO efforts positively because the content that you are sharing with your target audience is top quality and it will positively affect your rankings on the search engines. Content marketing allows you to use back links, which, subsequently increases your professional credibility. 

• Keywords: Keywords and key phrases are essential to your success. If your keywords and key phrases are effective, people will go to the next step with you and you will probably end up interacting with them. That, of course, is the beginning of your relationship together.

  Your keywords and key phrases enable you to offer compelling, effective, valuable content that will elicit positive reactions from your target audience members. Additionally, your keywords and key phrases will help you to improve your ability to generate leads.

• Landing page:  The landing page is exactly as it seems it is. This is the page on which your target audience lands when they click on your link to your website. Because of the nature of what it is, it is critical to your professional success that your landing page is really effective. It must be everything that it needs to be and then some! If your landing page is effective, it will enable you to generate more traffic than you have ever had and eventually acquire more customers than ever before.

• Long Tail keywords: A long tail phrase is a phrase that is more complex than a simple keyword or key phrase. It is a question of quality versus quantity when it comes to that approach. In other words, the question is whether it is more effective to blast a large number of keywords and key phrases within your content to your target audience or to use fewer keywords and key phrases but ones that contain more details (and thus, are longer). Long tail keywords may benefit your target audience a great deal because they can be extremely valuable.

• Search algorithm: This is a combination of pieces of information that comes together to assess the impact of web pages in relation to their keywords and key phrases. 

Conclusion

It is extremely helpful to be familiar with SEO terms. If you don’t familiarize yourself with the terms, you may truly be at a disadvantage if someone tries to interact with you about this particular aspect of your business. It is very important for you to have a healthy acquaintanceship with everything that is connected to your business. The last thing that you want is to allow SEO jargon to get in the way of your business’s success. Becoming familiar with the basic principles of SEO will give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a complimentary assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Let's have coffee