One of the best ways to improve the online presence of your business or personal brand is to use organic website traffic growth techniques, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). A good SEO strategy can provide an immense boost to your online marketing campaign by making your website more visible. It helps in increasing your organic search engine traffic and inturn, generating more consistent leads.
Before delving into SEO, it is important to understand the general SEO vocabulary associated with the practice. In this article, we will take a quick look at some of the most popular terms used by SEO experts.
A guide to core SEO vocabulary
Organic search Result
This refers to all the results of a search engine (Google, Bing, Yandex etc.) that are not directly influenced by paid advertising. The results of an organic search are ordered in relation to the search term’s context and relevance. Understanding the top ranking factors and getting high rankings in search results is what SEO is all about.
Keyword, keyword density, and keyword stuffing
These are some of the most commonly used terms in the SEO vocabulary. Keywords are words or phrases included in a piece of content to drive traffic. Whenever someone searches for that particular keyword, your article or page might show up, based on how well it is optimised.
This might lead you to believe that adding more keywords is a good practice. However, filling your article with non-essential keywords is known as keyword stuffing, which is a black hat SEO practice (see below). To ensure that the keywords are used in the right proportion, we use a metric known as keyword density. This metric measures the ratio of the number of occurrences of a keyword to the total number of words.
Meta tags
Meta tags are normally located in the ‘<head>’ section of a page’s HTML structure. Meta tags are specially designed to be picked up by search engines like Google. The tag will contain information about the page itself in three separate elements – meta keywords, meta title and meta description. Metadata helps the search engine understand your webpage better and consecutively, use this information to display snippets in the search results.
Since you are the best judge on how to characterise the content on your pages, it is a good idea to manually set these tags for each page and content piece.
Link building
Link building serves as the backbone of a good SEO strategy; it involves getting backlinks to your website.
While publishing content on a reputable blog or channel, a link from this piece of content to your website or landing page will increase your page authority – the search engine will take the fact that you are being linked to from an authoritative website as a sign that your website is also reputable, meaning your site may be ranked higher in the future. Some of the top ranked pages on the internet are replete with a dense network of quality backlinks.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of good SEO practices. These include the optimisation of the title and meta tags, correct management of headlines in a content piece, and adding alt tags for images. On-page SEO is restricted to pages that are directly owned by you or your business, such as an information page on your site.
Black hat & white hat SEO
Search engines have a rigorous set of guidelines that must be adhered to. In simple terms, any attempt to grow organically without obeying these guidelines is deemed a ‘black hat’ SEO practice. Although it is not illegal, indulging in black hat practices such as keyword stuffing can be detrimental to your marketing, as these practices will not typically appeal to human readers and are nearly always picked up by Google and down-ranked as search engines get smarter. Using white hat tactics such as backlinks and limited placement of relevant keywords is a better SEO strategy.
Robot.txt
A robot.txt file is an essential text file that manages web crawling, Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, permissions for search engines. By modifying this file, you can tell search engines which pages on your site should be displayed as a search result.
Cloaking
Although you can use this SEO strategy to quickly get a good search engine ranking, it is not a sustainable practice in the long run. It primarily involves displaying different types of content based on whether the visitor is a web crawler or an actual person. Using cloaking, search engines can be temporarily tricked into believing that your content is organic when it is actually not.
Anchor text
Anchor text is essentially a short phrase/text that links to the destination webpage. It is a crucial requirement for successful backlinking.
Here’s an example to help you understand it better: Step up your SEO content strategy with lexicons. The destination link is https://relevance.digital/blog/step-up-your-seo-content-strategy-with-lexicons/ and the anchor text is “Step up your SEO content strategy with lexicons”.
Armed with the knowledge of these concepts, you are all set to dive into the world of SEO and learn more about how to boost your online traffic. Don’t be afraid to reach out to Relevance if you have any further questions about SEO vocabulary.