SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your website in order to increase the chances of many of the right people finding your website.
If you’ve ever wondered how related topics and products appear when you search for something specific, then here is your answer!
To understand how you should drive traffic to your website, you need to have a clear understanding of SEO and all its details. This sounds easy, but SEO is quite a complicated concept with many components.
But to get you started, here are six SEO terms we think you should know as a beginner…
SEO Term 1 – Alt Text
Alt text is the text description of an image that tells you what the image contains. This text is hidden in the backend of a webpage so cannot be viewed by users unless there is a fault with the website.
Adding alt text to the images on your website is important as it helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows your images to be found from searches.
SEO Term 2 – Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase in your content that users are entering into search engines. By using keywords in your content it means your desired audience is more likely to come across your business when searching for the specific word or phrase.
These words or phrases allow you to build an SEO strategy around specific target phrases in a way that’s meaningful and measurable.
SEO Term 3 – SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and is the page that is returned by the search engine when a user submits a search query.
For example, if you enter a phrase into Google, the SERP appears straight after you press enter and it will display all the results that are related to your search.
This page is what you want to aim to rank highly on as a result of good SEO.
SEO Term 4 – Authority
Authority is the page’s ability to rank highly on the page shown when a user submits a search query.
There are many factors that are considered in authority rank, such as:
- Positive user experience
- Backlinking profile
- Regularly updated content
- Age of the domain
Search engines use many factors when evaluating the authority of a webpage, which is why quality SEO is so important.
SEO Term 5 – Crawler / Spider
A web crawler (or sometimes called a spider) is a bot that indexes the content of websites all across the internet to determine where these websites appear in search engine results.
The goal of this bot is to learn what each web page is about so that the correct information can be retrieved when it’s needed. They’re called “Crawlers” because crawling is the technical term for automatically accessing a website and obtaining data via a software program.
SEO Term 6 – Meta Description
A meta description is a short summary that appears underneath the title of the page in the SERP.
The meta description should be what convinces the user that the page is exactly what they are looking for and encourage them to click on your link over other results that appear. You are only given a very limited amount of words so it has to be written well, as well as be descriptive and relevant to the content that is on the page.
In summary
Again, these SEO terms are just touching the surface of what SEO entails but are a good start to understanding the research and analysis that is put into optimising a website.
Or if it all sounds way too complicated for you, why not leave it to the experts?
We produce our web content with a focus on keyword optimisation so your pages have an increased chance of being discovered by your potential customers.
Get in touch today to start the process of bringing more quality users to your website!
