Search Engine Optimisation is your key to make your business and brand visible online. Before starting SEO, it is important to understand some of the most important and relevant terminologies related to SEO.
1. URL: URL or Universal Resource Locator is a link which helps in locating a particular data or file stored on a local computer or a computer networked with the internet. The target can be a file, a directory, an HTML page, an image, a computer or cloud-based program, etc. A URL consists of 4 parts namely: Scheme, Server name, Path & Resource.
There are two types of URL:
Absolute URL: An absolute URL shows the absolute (or full) path to access, reach or retrieve a target file, data or a page. It is also known as Absolute link or Absolute path and it forms part of the anchor tag. It consists of a protocol (e.g. HTTPS or HTTP) as well as a domain name(www.laveenagoyal.com). In simple words, we can say, Absolute URL contains all the necessary information required to locate a resource. e.g. of an HTML relative URL:
Relative URL: A relative URL does not provide the full path of the data, file or page but it only consists of a path and in some cases it also includes resource. But it does not include a scheme or even a server name. It is usually created to provide only a tag of an absolute URL. We can say that if a relative URL appears on a certain page, then that particular page can be assumed to be its root. e.g. of an HTML relative URL: <a href=”product”>.
2. Alt tag (Alt attribute): An Alt tag is also known as alt text or Alt attribute is used along with an image or an HTML or XHTML document to describe what the image or the page shows or conveys. It helps your viewers to understand what the image is about or what is shown in the image. It is very useful for the users who have either turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen-reader due to visual impairment. Secondly, it helps search engines and web-crawlers to understand the relevance of data shown in your image and helps you in better SEO.
3. Anchor text: Anchor text also known as link label or link text is the visible and clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. In older versions of the HTML, ‘Anchor’ word was used to specify a text. If we understand in simple terms, for SEO, it is best to use natural & conversation language which is reader-friendly. Avoid content with exact match or overly spammy content. Your texts linking you to other sites should be rich in keyword but it should not be containing too many keywords. But now, it is referred to as & text that the element wraps around.
4. Backlink (Inbound link, Incoming link, Citation, External link): A backlink is created when one web page of a website is linking to another webpage of another website. In simple words, it is a link that connects one website to others. Backlinks play a vital role in SEO because when one website refers to your website, it is a sign that other website points to you as a valuable and relevant information source. Search engines consider backlink as a ranking signal High-quality backlinks can help you increase your website’s ranking and visibility in search engine results (SEO).
5. Bing: Bing is the search engine owned by Microsoft with a worldwide market share of 3.18% worldwide. Bing replaced Windows Live Search and has its roots crawl back to Microsoft previous search engines: MSN Search and later Live Search too. Research tells that 85% of Bing users live in the USA & 87% of the users are less tech-savvy and use bing because it is the default browser of Internet Explorer. Reports also tell that Bing users spend 25% more than the users who spend through other search engines.
6.Black Hat (SEO): Just like a Black Hat Hacker conducts unethical computer hacking, a black hat SEO is the practice of unethical SEO tactics which violates the search engines guidelines. terms of services. It involves practices which are meant to manipulate search engine to rank higher in search results and it does not care about the user experience. Practices like keyword stuffing, using paid links and doorway pages, performing over-optimization, writing hidden text in pages, cloaking, bait and switch etc. form part of black hat SEO.
7.Blog commenting: Blog commenting was initially a method to share opinion or knowledge on a particular topic. It was a good method to generate leads and engagements for your page. But in SEO, blog commenting refer to posting comments on different web-articles and blog pages with a backlink to your site. These blogs or articles are the ones which are relevant to your niche, business or website and you leave a link in the comment which can re-direct a reader or viewer from that site to yours. Although, in the past few years this method has been over-used and has caused a lot of spam comments on blog articles.
8.Bounce rate: Bounce rate is a metric that shows how many visitors came to your website and then left immediately after without browsing any of your other pages or without taking any actions like clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase. The lower the bounce rate the better it is for your website’s ranking on google. If your bounce rate is higher than you must understand that your site has some issue which needs to be fixed real soon. The issue may be related to the content, user experience, page layout or copywriting.
9. Branded keywords (Brand keyword, Brand term): A branded keyword, or a branded search, are keywords, phrases or queries made via a search engine which includes the name of your company, business or brand. Fundamentally, a branded search is a keyword search or a query which includes your brand name as a part of it. However, Search engine marketers and optimisers argue that you don’t need to spend money on branded keywords to rank them. One can adopt intelligent SEO strategies to rank high in organic search results.
10. Breadcrumb navigation (Breadcrumb trail): A breadcrumb or breadcrumb trail is a
graphical control element or a type of secondary navigation aid which is frequently used in user interfaces and on web pages. It helps users to keep track and be aware of their locations in a particular program, a website, or a document. Breadcrumbs appear horizontally and have a large amount of content organized hierarchically. It helps in improving user experience and benefits in crawling, as it provides an improved internal link structure for large sites. If we look at the simplest form of breadcrumbs, they are horizontally arranged set of text links, which are separated by the “greater than” symbol This symbol is indicative of the level of that page relative to the page links beside it.
11. Broken link (Dead link): A broken or a dead link is the one which does not work. This generally happens either because of an improper URL or the page it was linked to was either deleted or has been moved or renamed. On clicking a broken link, the viewer sees a 404-page error or a similar message explaining the webpage is not available. A broke is very bad for your SEO as it can stop crawlers from indexing your website and eventually reduce your search engine rankings.
12. Canonical URL (Canonical tag): It may be possible sometimes that your website has duplicate content or pages. This might confuse search engines to know which one is original. This is why you need to pick one as the original one. A canonical link element is an HTML element which is used by webmasters to prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization. You can set canonical URL on all the copied pages pointing to the original one. For this, you just have to type a canonical tag (rel=” canonical”) in a piece of code in each one of the copy pages and it will help you identify a specific URL as the master copy of a page.
13. Competitor Analysis: It refers to the process of evaluating and analyzing the competitors’ performance that is either already ranking or are trying to rank for a particular keyword(s) which you are also competing for or the keyword belongs to your niche. Competitor analysis helps you understand your competitors’ campaigning strategies and find out tactics which work in your niche. You can prioritize the areas you should focus on by understanding your competitor’s keyword strategy.
14. Content: Content is all the information available on a website. Any text, images, videos, and animations or anything which a website offers to its visitors and users is content. Content is the primary factor for undertaking SEO of your website because every SEO strategy revolves and works around your content. The quality and type of content you provide determines the amount of traffic you can attract and how you influence user experience.
15. Conversion rate: The percentage of users that completed the desired action and converted out of all the users who have seen your ads/website/email/CTA which was intended for visitor conversion. Higher conversion rate indicates successful marketing and web designing. It is a sign that people are interested in what your offering, and easily able to get it! Depending upon your business goals, a “conversion” could be making a purchase, filling a form, calling your business, engaging with your online chat, signing up to your services, subscribing for a trial period etc.
16. Cost per click (CPC, Pay per Click, PPC): Cost per Click (CPC) or Pay per Click (PPC) is a type of payment method used by Google Ads. In PPC or CPC ad-format, advertisers have to pay advertisement price based on the number of clicks their ad gets. Two major factors which majorly influence your actual CPC are you and your closest competitors ad rank, maximum bid, and Quality Score. What’s important to note is that your CPC will always be lower than or equal to the maximum bid you’ve ever placed. This happens because of it CPC an average of bids against a series of competitors over a while
.
17. Crawler (Bot, Spider, Web crawler, Googlebot): A website crawler also known as a search engine bot, a spider, or a google bot is a computer program made for automatically search documents & pages on the world-wide Web. A crawler constantly browses the internet and helps search engines to build an index of URLs for every type of query and keyword search. Its algorithm is to scan and analyze websites to rank them in the search engine index.
18. Cross-linking: Cross-linking is two-way back-linking. When two web-pages or two-websites are interconnected with each other through a link, then it is called cross-linking. It is the basis on which the whole internet is built. Website owners, creator and blog writers use it to connect their two different web-pages or websites having similar content. It can also be used to divert traffic to the desired page like a call-to-action. It is an extremely powerful tool to increase page relevance on your website. It has a massive impact on your rankings.
19. Deep linking: Deep linking is the use of hyperlinks/internal links in the website content which re-directs the users/visitors from one page to another page on the same website which contains more informative content. It can be used as a call-to-action to lead the visitors to dig deep into your website’s content and direct traffic beyond a business’ home page and other entry pages. This practice is highly used in web marketing to guide visitors to more informative content and help businesses to improvise their web conversions and engagements.
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