SEO Terms You Should Know

For people who haven’t been formally trained in the ways of SEO and the web, some of the terms and phrases that you come across may sound more like a foreign language than instructions and techniques that are used to help your website rank better with the search engines. This list covers some of the most common SEO terms that you should know:

• Backlink, also known as an ‘inlink’ or just a ‘link’, refers to hyperlinks posted on outside websites that point back to your own site. This is very important to SEO, as it directly affects your Page Rank.
• Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique that involves making a single website appear one way to search engine spiders and another to human visitors. This technique has been abused in the past, so is now considered spamming.
• Keyword Density is a very important factor of SEO and refers to the amount of times a certain keyword is used on a given web page.
• Link Farm refers to a group of websites, where each website contains links to all the other sites in the farm. In terms of SEO, this technique is hoped to increase the Page Rank of all the websites in the farm. Is actually considered a spamming, or black hat, SEO technique.
• Meta Tag is included on a website to give the search engines more information about your content and is, therefore, highly beneficial when it comes to SEO. It is also invisible to human visitors.
• NoFollow is generally used for SEO when a website wants to tell the search engines that they don’t endorse the website that they are linking to. Basically, if Google sees the NoFollow tag it won’t count that link.
• SEM stands for search engine marketing, and is actually an umbrella term for SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) techniques.
• SERP stands for search engine results page, and is basically the page that you see when you search for a particular keyword. You will receive more traffic to your website if it ranks better in SERPs.
• Spiders, also known as ’web crawlers’ or ‘bots’, are whom SEO is created for; it is a computer program used by the search engines to browse the web.

Understanding the various terms and phrases used by SEO experts will give you quite on edge over those people who still think it’s a foreign language. Don’t despair the next time you hear a strange SEO phrase – it isn’t hard to figure out what it means.