From A-Z here are all the terms you will hear in the SEO world. Use this guide to take a deep dive into SEO-lingo or as a simple reference point if you find a word you don’t understand.
Above the Fold Content
Above the fold content (or ATF for short) is an important content opportunity on websites. This content can be seen on web pages without the need to scroll further down meaning it has an immediate impact on the viewer and is their first impression of a page. This section of text also offers a perfect opportunity to internally link to product pages or blog posts in your website, strengthening your site’s structure and signposting to search engine crawlers.
It is also a key indicator for search engine crawlers when analysing your site. For Google, and other search engines, the content that is located at the top of a web page is considered to be the most important. Ensuring that the keywords you want your page to rank in searches for can be found within this initial content is critical for good SEO practices.
Alt tag
An alt tag is the HTML attribute of the IMG tag, describing an image on your website through words. The IMG tag is responsible for displaying images. The alt tag is the text that gets displayed in case the image can’t be loaded (if the file is missing, for example).
Including this text within your website is an important consideration for user experience, especially for visually impaired users who use screen reading softwares to be able to navigate your site.
To give you an example, here’s what a standard IMG tag could look like:
<img src=”clock.jpg” alt=”picture of a clock” />
Alt tags hold SEO value, acting as a means for search engines to understand images that they cannot ‘see’ when crawling websites, as well as signalling strong website structure and user experience.
Anchor text
Every link consists of two main elements. There’s the web address that the link is pointing to (the destination) and there’s the anchor text. The anchor text is the text that works as the link (in our case above, the word ‘link’).
Anchor text is particularly important for SEO. Avoid using generic terms such as “find more information here”, you should aim to use descriptive keywords such as “the best SEO agency of all time”.
Backlinks
Links are votes. The greater the number of links to your website from other sites, the greater the confidence and trust search engines will have of your online presence. Not only will more links to your site increase traffic and conversions, but the authority of the content on your website and the quality of the products and services you offer will strengthen.
Link building, with search engines’ regular updates and scrutiny, has become a sophisticated and strategy-driven undertaking, therefore, the process of building high-quality links is an important driver for any SEO campaign.
Nofollow Links
These links have an HTML tag applied to them that tells search engines to not put your full weight behind it, meaning that there will be no ‘link equity’ passed between your website and the page you are linking to. This attribute is commonly attached to external links enabling you to link to content without connecting your website and business to the authority of the page you are linking to.
Dofollow Links
Any other link that does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute is considered a ‘follow’ or ‘dofollow’ link. When you are linking to external sites, these links are considered to be a connection, meaning that you are associating yourself with the authority of the website you are linking to. It’s effectively an endorsement. The retweet of links.
Black Hat SEO
Cloaking, keyword stuffing and link farming are all the practices of Black Hat SEO cowboys. This term refers to the type of SEO practice that is not only frowned upon, but violates search engine guidelines in order to force higher rankings for low quality websites. Today search engines have adapted to not enable these tactics to work for higher rankings, ensuring that high quality useful content and website structures with superior user experience rank higher on searches.
Canonical tag
It’s an HTML link element that lets webmasters inform search engines about some duplicate content pages they’ve created. The tag is placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure.
Here’s what it looks like:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/” />
This tag informs search engines that the current page is a copy of the page located under the address set in the canonical tag (href).The main idea is that when a search engine sees this tag it does not rank that page, but transfers all the rankings to the canonical page. So in essence it’s very similar to the 301 redirect. Google offers a clear breakdown on how canonicalization works on their blog for website developers.
Content
Written content that is intentionally crafted with SEO tenets in mind. SEO driven content can be found all over your site from Title tags to blogs. Employing an SEO agency to consult on and optimise your content can be key for making sure it’s seen by the right people, namely motivated customers.
Conversions
The term ‘conversion’ relates to the action of a user when visiting your website. This could be a user choosing to make a purchase on your site, but can also include a viewer subscribing to a newsletter, subscribing to social media channels or sending an enquiry form for a service.
Duplicate content
If you have two separate pages within your website that have the same content on them (or very similar content) then you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is believed to be a bad thing for SEO. Search engines don’t like sites that use the same piece of content over and over again, and they often penalise them for it.
Common instances of duplicate content are found on product description pages or in meta descriptions. Ensuring distinctive and unique content across your website will help you to target larger volumes of keywords as well as signal to search engines the quality of your site.
International SEO
For businesses who operate internationally, making sure that SEO work is done across your platform to accurately target SERPs and users across the globe can be crucial for success. Conducting keyword research in multiple languages is key for ensuring that your website can perform optimally across the globe.
Keywords
There are many definitions of keywords. Let me share the one that matters for SEO.
Keywords are single words or whole phrases of a particular SEO importance for a given page or website. They are the terms you want your website to rank highly for when searched online. Keyword research can often be surprising for businesses, unlocking unknown uses for their product, and can offer deep insights into the wants and needs of their customers.
Local SEO
For businesses with a physical location, optimising your searchability through local SEO can make a massive difference in ROI. Ensuring that your website is optimised for searches affixed with “in my area” and making sure that your business appears with fully correct and detailed information on platforms such as Google Maps will improve your local search rankings.
Meta description
The meta description is the short snippet of information seen underneath a title tag when a website shows up on a SERP. The meta description for StudioHawk’s London SEO page is highlighted below:
This short description of your webpage can offer a wealth of SEO opportunities. Whenever someone searches a specific keyword or phrase the search engine will make a decision which websites should be displayed and in what order. If the meta description of the website contains the keyword used by the user then the meta description will be displayed. Here we can see that a search for ‘SEO Agency London’ resulted in the words ‘SEO’, ‘agency’, ‘London’ and ‘services’ being highlighted within our meta description, evidencing how relevant the result is to the viewer.
Sometimes, if the meta description doesn’t contain the keyphrase, a fragment of your website’s content that does contain it will be displayed, revealing the importance of having strong keyword centred SEO written content on your web pages themselves too!
SEM
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. In other words it means “marketing via search engines”. Marketing or promoting your products or services via search engines can be done in two main ways. You either optimise your site so it appears at a high spot in organic search results, or pay for the clicks directly, in which case your site is listed under the “sponsored listings” section.
SEO
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of increasing traffic to websites through organic means. This can be achieved through optimal website structure and technical work, acquiring backlinks to a site and producing targeted content informed by keyword and target audience research.
Shopify
Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that enables you to build websites. You can build your site from scratch using this platform or you can migrate your current website onto the Shopify platform.
SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page (SERPS). This is a page that gets displayed when you enter a keyword into a search engine. In the world of SEO we aim to boost your websites ranking on SERPs, the higher your ranking, the more likely you are to receive higher traffic to your website from new and returning customers.
Spider (crawler, bot, robot)
Search engine spider is a special piece of software that browses the web, looks for new sites, checks what’s going on on them and sends the data back to search engines so they can index and rank these sites.
Search Intent
Understanding the motivation behind a user’s search can be crucial to suit your website content to meet their needs. When customers don’t have to work hard to find the information they want from your website, they are more likely to stay on your site and make conversions.
These are the four recognised search intents and the meaning behind them:
Informational
The user is looking for information from their search. Examples include “How to understand long tail keywords” or “How to calculate the ROI of SEO”. Understanding the informational searches that your target customer base will make can be a great way of increasing organic traffic by producing informative blog posts.
Commercial
The searcher is interested in investing in a product but is looking for more information, often comparative content about what they intend to invest in. This can look like, “Best SEO agencies London” or “top website development tools”.
Transactional
This type of search will take place when a user knows the specific product or service they want to invest in and will search for it. They have intention to buy the product in this search event.
Navigational
The user is ‘navigating’ to a known website or destination. Example searches would be “StudioHawk UK” or “Facebook”.
Technical SEO
By eliminating on-site errors and improving the technical aspects of the website, search engines crawlers will be able to flow more easily through it. Fixes will increase the speed of the site – a critical SEO consideration – as making a site faster improves the user experience, increasing the crawl rate. Efficient crawling automatically leads to better indexing and will lead to improved rankings over time.
Title tag
Every page has a title tag – it is the text that is found in the browser title bar, as well as in the search engine results pages (SERP).
It’s a very important SEO factor. There’s no better way for search engines to find out what the page is about than by looking at the title tag, so ensuring that the keywords you want your pages to rank for are front and centre in your title tag is key!
User Experience (UX)
User experience (sometimes shortened to UX) is a key consideration that sits at the heart of all SEO endeavours. How users interact with a website, the ease with which they can access and navigate its structure and the digestibility of its content are all aspects of user experience. Ensuring that your website is navigable, speedy and easy to use will ensure that you don’t lose users too early in their journey with your product or service. Equally, many of the factors that search engine crawlers are looking for in a high quality site align and overlap with good human utility, so prioritising UX is a core element of good SEO.
Website Migration
In the event that your business wants to change its website platform, you may need to perform a website migration. The process of website migration can be a vulnerable point for your business’ online presence. It is not uncommon for a migration to result in traffic loss with knock on reductions in conversions and sales. Consulting with SEO experts and implementing their recommendations through the migration process can help prevent these consequences.
WordPress
WordPress is a website development platform that can help you create an online face for your business. You can build your website from its foundations with WordPress or you can migrate your current site to the WordPress platform.
White Hat SEO
All that is good in the SEO world is considered to be White Hat SEO. Unlike its tricksy and underhand counter, Black Hat SEO, White Hat work is honest, transparent and founded upon good quality website structuring and content.
XML sitemap
It’s a file (usually sitemap.xml). Its main function is to give search engines a map of all the different URLs that your website contains (all pages, posts, archives, etc). With this sitemap, crawlers can index your site a lot quicker.
301 redirect
Essentially, there are two types of redirection: temporary and permanent. From a user’s perspective there’s no difference between them, but there is one from a search engine’s perspective. The 301 redirect is a permanent redirection. It informs search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. This means that whatever rankings the page already has should be transferred to the new address (this doesn’t happen with a temporary redirection).