SEO Terms you Need to Know with 8 Ways Media SA

Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be something of a quagmire, leaving even the most veteran marketer feeling a little confused. Certain terms and acronyms continue to crop up and knowing their meanings can make a world of difference to your understanding of online marketing.

Listed below are some leading Search engine optimisation terms that you need to know…

Anchor Text

The anchor text is text that has a hyperlink going through it. Anchor text stands out from the rest of the sentence (usually in bold and underlined) as it is intended to divert the reader’s attention and encourage them to click through.

Black Hat Tactics

Black hat tactics are unethical search engine optimisation practices that you need to avoid. They are used by some businesses to unethically boost rankings. Some common techniques include keyword stuffing, inserting unrelated backlinks and duplicating content. However these techniques are quickly picked up by Google and if you use them your site will be quickly penalised.

Indexed Page

This is a page of your website that has been crawled by Google’s spiders and indexed accordingly. Being indexed is favourable to the rankings of your site.

Link Building

This refers to earning high-quality, valuable links that direct people back to your site. For example if you run a coffee shop and have links back to your site from a coffee bean manufacturer and a shop selling coffee mugs, then this is the equivalent of high-quality, valuable links. Linking must be relevant and applicable in order to be positively acknowledged by Google.

Long-Tail Keyword

This is a phrase rather than an individual keyword. In other words, a short tail keyword could be ‘coffee’, whereas a long tail keyword might be ‘coffee shops in Liverpool’. Using a long tail keyword is more advantageous for small sized businesses who are trying to boost their rankings on search engine results pages.

Penalty

A penalty is a number assigned to your website by Google (from 0 to 10) to inform you of your overall SEO score. The higher the number the more superior your website.