SEO: Essential terms you need to know

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a marketer’s best friend when it comes to increasing organic traffic on the website. However, SEO is a complex field with many technical terms that are not always easy to describe.

An SEO glossary is one of the most important tools that marketers should have in their arsenal. Like a dictionary, it allows you to quickly learn the meaning of terms that are not always easy to know by heart. As you develop your digital marketing know-how, there may be moments of doubt with the jargon used by professionals. With SEO being such an important area in digital marketing, this can make it  difficult to communicate with the marketing team.

So, let’s get down to business and learn some of the most common terms used in SEO. Let’s start with the most obvious one!

SEO – Stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It consists of the set of actions, practices and strategies to optimise the website in order to appear in the best positions in search engines, for specific keywords.

Authority – The relevance of the website based on the search engine’s algorithm.

Black Hat – a set of SEO strategies that are considered ethically questionable and are usually penalised.

Bounce Rate – The number of users who abandon the website without doing anything.

Cache – storage location that collects temporary data in order to facilitate the user experience.

Crawler – Program used by search engines to crawl websites, collect information and rank them.

Domain – website address.

Google My Business – Google’s business directory.

Google PageSpeed Insights – Google’s free tool that allows you to measure the loading speed of a web page.

HTML – code language used by programmers to develop the website.

Keyword Stuffing – exaggerated repetition of keywords with the purpose of manipulating search engines, and is considered a bad SEO practice.

Meta Description – HTML tag that appears in the SERP and summarises the content of the page.

Search Engine – systems of algorithms whose function is to crawl, index and rank the contents of the web and display them in an ordered manner according to users’ searches.

Keywords – word or set of words that users enter when searching on search engines.

SERP – Stands for Search Engine Ranking Page. The page that results when we do a search for a certain keyword in the search engine (for example, a Google page).

Sitemap – Document that provides a map of all the pages of the website in order to be more easily indexed by search engines.

Search Volume – The number of times a given keyword is search for in a given period.

Traffic – The total number of visits to the website.

Organic Traffic – visits to the website gained in a spontaneous way, without resorting to advertisements.

UX (User Experience) – According to Neil Patel, it is “a strategy whose actions seek not only to deliver the best content, but also to ensure that it is consumed in the most enjoyable way possible. On the website, it goes through responsive, organised and intuitive design.”

Coming to the end of our list, we hope it helps you have a better understanding of the most commonly used SEO terms. Share your opinion in the comments and, until then, be sure to read this article with a glossary of “fit” terms for gym lovers.