Tired of going cross-eyed when your SEO consultant talks to you?
Don't know your SERP from your SEM? (or perhaps your RSS from your elbow?). There's more terms, acronyms, and silly names you'll come across in dealing with an SEO campaign than you ever really need to bother yourself with. There's no shame in getting a little cross-eyed when your SEO consultant starts rattling on about ROI, PPC, 301s and ALT Tags (after all, you're better off knowing your own business than learning how to converse with the lesser-spotted web geek!)
If your SEO consultant isn't able to talk to you in plain English; fear not! We've put together a handy translation guide below. (OK, it's really a glossary of common SEO terms, but that doesn't sound nearly as handy as a translation guide...)
If you hear a term in the wild that isn't mentioned here, that doesn't mean it's simply been made up, I may have just forgotten to include it below... get in touch and we'd be happy to explain the term to you, and add it to this list.
Hope you find it useful.
SEO
There's no point getting halfway through an SEO glossary without knowing what SEO means, so let's start here: Search Engine Optimisation. (Sorry, I don't have a glossary term for glossary, try Wikipedia.) SEO refers to any activity that increases the amount or quality of traffic to a website. It should work to define how much presence your web presence actually has.
301 redirect
The 301 HTTP status code tells search engine robots that you've moved. It's the web equivalent of giving a forwarding address. It also tells the search engine that the move is permament - that you're never coming back to this place. Better still, when the search engine comes across the 301 code, it's usually happy to pass any link value that pointed to the old page on to the new page. The 301 code also tells the search engine to cut the old page from its index. That's why it's essential to use 301 redirects when moving resources or content.
404 page not found
If someone enters a URL that doesn't exist on your site, the server will automatically return a 404 HTTP status code. Your browser will then display a default 'page not found' page. This is usually pretty ugly, which is why we recommend you should always create a custom 404 page for your site. This lets you help the visitor link to your home page or access the main site navigation.
ALT tags
Search Engines are great at understanding the text on a web page but not so great at working out if that picture on the home page is of your company CEO or your late great-grandmother. Alt tags are used on images to provide some clue to what the image is about. Best practice: all images should have an alt tag.
Anchor Text
When site A links to site B, it has to link something: A piece of text, a word, a sentence - that's the something a visitor clicks on to follow the link, and it's called anchor text. In SEO, anchor text become valuable 'votes' for your site content. That means it's a good thing if anchor text contains your target keywords. (Just don't overdo it - Search Engines know what 'natural' links look like, and tend to frown on 'unnatural' links)
Bing
Popular crooner and actor probably most famous for singing "White Christmas" and appearing in the "Road To..." series of comedy films with Bob Hope. There is a rumour that it's also the name given to a search engine developed by Microsoft. Go figure.
Black Hat SEO
No. not a comical-looking piece of headwear popularised by witches. It's the dark art of performing SEO techniques which generally attempt to trick Search Engines into listing a site highly in the rankings. Achieved by underhanded means, Black Hat SEO rarely wins out in the long run, which makes it a BAD IDEA. But great if you're looking to get your site banned.
Crawl Rate
Search engine spiders and robots check out your site from time to time. This lets the search engine work out the relevance of your pages for search terms and tells it how many pages your site contains. The more often your site is crawled, the more likely more of your pages will be indexed and your rankings will benefit.Google Webmaster Tools can show you your site's crawl stats.
DMOZ
This is a directory of websites run by the Open Directory Project and claims to be the "largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web". Built and maintained by an army of global volunteers, the Open Directory aims to become the definitive catalog of the Web. Make sure you have sumbitted your site for inclusion, if only because it lends some authority to your domain.
Seriously? If you need to ask, you're probably still adding up on an abacus, and reading this from text carved into slate. Your loss. You're missing out on a, sorry THE, Search Engine in the UK. 88% of your potential customers are using Google to search the web. You really should go find out what the big deal is.
Header Tags
Nothing exciting here: simply the way paragraph or section headers on web pages are coded. Generally you have 6 header tags (h1, h2, etc) - the lower the number, the less times it should be used, and the more important it is as an SEO factor.
Keywords
When someone searches for something using Google, they use keywords. Strictly speaking, keywords can also be key phrases, especially as people become more specific in their searches. The more relevant your site is for a keyword, the more likely it is to appear in search engine results (see SERP above). Keywords should be part of page titles, links, navigation, and copy - as long as they describe the content of your site and page.
Link Baiting
Great content on a site attracts attention around the web. Attention usually leads to links, which is great for a site's ranking in the Search Engines. Link baiting is the name given to the process of creating compelling, informative, funny, useful, helpful, resourceful, and all sorts of other 'ful content in order to attract these links. It hasn't got anything to do with catching fish. Unless you call links fish, in which case it has everything to do with that. Either way, it has definately got everything to do with creating content people want to talk about and share.
Link Building
Search Engines treat links between pages almost like a 'vote' from one site to another, as it's vouching for the credibility of the content to be found there. The more links a site or specific page receives, the more credible it is, and this has a huge, (actually HUGE) impact on how well the site ranks in Search Engines. Link building is the art of earning these votes for your site using a variety of methods. There are right ways and wrong ways to link build - golden rules: Keep it relevant, don't pay sites to link to you, and create content that people will want to link to.
Link Juice
Search engines use the quality of links to your site as a way to measure the value of your site. The better the links, the better the chance you have of rising up the search engine rankings. The SEO community - like all groups - has their own term for quality links: we call it getting link juice. We should get out more. (See Link Building)
Meta Description
Type your site name into Google. See the description for your site that comes up? The odds are 90% that that text came from your page's meta description.
Page Titles
Getting your title tag right has possibly the biggest impact on how search engines regard the relevance of your page. Make sure every page on your site has one - and that they are both unique and descriptive. Each page will discuss different things, so make sure the title conveys that, with a key phrase as the first part of the title.
PPC
Advertising with Adwords or another pay-per-click (PPC) network is a cost-effective way to reach potential customers. You only pay when someone clicks through to your site and you can measure exactly what you spend and what results you're getting. Couple that with the fact that your ad is served to people actively looking for your service or product and Adwords is quite easily the best advertising medium for many businesses.
Ranking
Where your site or page appears in the SERP is influenced by a wide range of factors, including keyword relevance and the number of links to your site. There are mathematical formulae that attempt to describe exactly how Google calculates rankings. Ranking itself is where your site appears in the list of results. A Google ranking of 2 means that you will be the second organic result listed in the first oage of results. With 10 results per page, a ranking of 14 means your site will be the 4th result on page 2.
ROI
If you invest money in building a website and then marketing it with pay-per-click or SEO campaigns, you want to make sure the investment is worth it. That means you need to establish some monetary value for a visit, a lead, and any cost per sale. Only by measuring everything related to your campaign - from traffic stats to ranking changes to bid costs for PPC ads - can you hope to work out the return on investment (ROI) of your site.
Search Engine Friendly
This topic merits a whole book on its own. Think of search engine robots and spiders as having many of the same skill levels and boredom threshold as humans. Then imagine a first-time visitor arriving at your site. Is it clear what your site is about? Is it easy to find information? Clarity and relevance are friendly, Flash front pages are not.
SEM
Search Engine Marketing - improving the awareness and traffic for your site or brand with the Search Engines. SEM generally comprises a blend of paid adverts and organic (natural) listings. Like SEO, SEM campaigns should be tailored against specific keywords. If you're hiring a company to market your site or brand on-line, be sure to know what keywords they are targeting.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation - any activity that increases the amount or quality of traffic to a website. It should work to define how much presence your web presence actually has.
SERP
Search Engine Results Pages - a page of results from Search Engines. Type something in to Google, click search, and the results you see are referred to as SERPs. If someone asks if you want to rank highly for your keyword term of choice in SERPs, say "Yes, Please". Be sure to thank them if they manage it - the extra traffic makes it worthwhile.
Sitemap
When you're in London, it's easy to spot the visitors: they wander around staring into a street map. If they didn't, they'd have little hope of getting anywhere (except lost). A site map is the guide for visitors and Search Engines so they can find their way around your site. It's not only polite to provide a site map, it's essential for even medium-sized sites. Best practice: Always have one, always keep it up-to-date, always make sure Search Engines know where it is.
So that's our guide to the most common SEO lingo - hopefully you learnt something new, or just made sense of the latest piece of tech speak your SEO consultant threw at you. It's not important to know everything here off by heart (unless, of course, you charge people to optimise their web site!), but it's nice to know you're not being ripped off if your web guy talks to you in a language you don't understand!
Oh, and we're hoping to have an extra-handy travel version of our SEO translation guide ready by 2019, drop us a line if you're interested.
