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SEO: Jargon Explained

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SEO: Jargon Explained

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation; the process of making changes on your website and content to improve its visibility on search engines. There are a variety of different ways to improve the SEO on your site from adding Keywords, Technical SEO and more. SEO can be confusing, especially as there’s a lot of new words and jargon to understand on top of the concept of SEO. This blog post will help with that, explaining all of the jargon and helping you to rank higher on Google.

Rankings.

The process that search engines use to place and order websites and pages. A higher ranking will depend on your site’s SEO and how well your page or website responds to a user’s web search.

Visibility.

Refers to how detectable your page is on a search engine. A high visibility means a higher ranking on SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Technical SEO.

Technical SEO looks at the optimisation of your page, search engines will search through your page, index and rank accordingly. Although keywords are important, there are other factors to consider too, your website quality, page load speed and broken links.

Local SEO.

Local SEO focuses on ranking higher for customers in your local area. This is effective if you own a business like a shop or a restaurant. For example, if you owned an antique shop in your local town, you wouldn’t only show up on searches for antique shops, you would also rank on searches in your area too.

Black hat SEO.

Black hat SEO involves going against search engine guidelines and manipulating their algorithms (keyword stuffing, buying links and cloaking). As ranking on search engines can take a lot of time and effort, people may turn to Black hat as it’s much easier and you may see faster results. However, this technique can lead to your site being completely wiped from all listings if you’re caught.

On-page SEO.

On-page SEO simply refers to the SEO on your website. This includes external links, internal links, keywords and content.

Keyword research.

Keyword research is an essential part of optimising your website for search engines.

Do your research and find out what keywords work best for your business, what your customers will be searching for and what your competitors are using on their sites. Remember that although keywords are important, overusing them can be ineffective.

Here’s a walkthrough of how to carry out effective keyword research.

Backlink.

A link on another website, linking back to your website or content. Simply, if another website is linking to your content, it’s evidence to search engines that your website is of good quality and credible, therefore ranking you higher.

Links Quality Factors.

Backlinks are important, but there are more factors to consider when it comes to improving your ranking. While the number of links plays a part, search engines are also looking for quality, whether the links are relevant to the target page and if it’s coming from a reputable source.

Link Building.

Link building is the process of building up backlinks from other websites. It’s is a very effective way to improve your website’s ranking as search engines will view your website as good quality and rank it higher. Again, it’s important that your backlinks are coming from reputable websites and that they are relevant to your content, otherwise, search engines may remove your website from their results as you are going against their guidelines.

Here are some ways you can start link building for your SEO.

As you can see, when it comes to SEO there is a lot to learn. This can seem very overwhelming. It’s important to remember that it takes time and patience and as long as you are following guidelines and producing good quality content you will see results. After all, the aim is for search engines to provide their users with the most suitable and credible information.

Need a hand with SEO for your website? Get in touch with a member of our team right now