Most Important SEO terms

Keywords, Backlinks, Internal links, you might have heard a lot about these SEO terms. So if you have your own business and want to create a website, to boost this business. First, you got to recognize what SEO is.

What is SEO?

You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to search for anything on. You simply type the question you want into a box and Google, or whatever search engine you’re using. Replies with a long list of links to web pages that could potentially answer your question.

This sounds true, but have you ever think about how that works? Here’s how SEO works: Google (or any search engine you’re using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those in about 1 second and back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.

There are a lot of terms that go into a search engine’s algorithm, and here are some of them.

SEO Terms

SEO on page: It is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized. As opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals

Keywords: Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. As a website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.

Domain age:  It is an important SEO factor for your Google ranking. Among the hundreds of factors that Google considers in determining how to rank search engine results is the age of your domain.  in other words, how long that domain has been around. It’s worth noting that domain age isn’t referring just to how long you have owned a given domain name, but instead how long it has been since Google first indexed that domain, or saw a link to the domain that’s been registered for 10 years but has no actual site up, or nothing that Google has ever found, is the same as a domain that you bought yesterday.

Indexing: An index is another name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes contain the information on all the websites that Google (or any other search engine) was able to find. If a website is not in a search engine’s index, users will not be able to find it.

Search engine results page ( SERP): It is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query. Each listing includes the linked Web page title, the linked page URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a brief description of the page content, and, in some cases, links to points of interest within the website.

Internal links: Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman’s terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.

Backlinks: They are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink. Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to. Therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility.

Anchor text: is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text. The blue anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard. Although it is possible to change the color and underlining through HTML code. The keywords in anchor text are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web page.

Site Usability: This tool measure the ease of use of the website for visitors, and how they can browse from one page to another in the website easily. When your website is user-friendly this can improve the site’s ranking position or search

Mobile Usability: In light of society’s increasing dependability on mobile devices, Google announced that the search engine giant will begin using mobile usability as a ranking factor for mobile searches. Google will use the mobile-friendliness of a website as a ranking signal to promote the mobile experience.

Site maps: A good sitemap allows your users to find what they are looking for and it helps the search engines better index your entire site. It’s always a good idea to group your site’s pages under topics or categories.

There is absolutely no reason at all that your design can’t cater to both visitors and search engines.  There are many techniques and tools that you can utilize to make your website more accessible and search engines friendly, such as external style sheets, clean code, or easy navigation systems. Website usability can definitely go hand in hand with good SEO. And these things I’ve outlined for you today are not at all difficult to implement.  Not only will these things make it easier for a visitor to want to keep coming back to your site, but they will also give search engine bots incentives to crawl your site more frequently, and index you accordingly. You can learn more about SEO terms at  Search Console Help