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Important SEO Terms You Need To Know

Basic SEO Terms Everyone Needs To Know

Frankenstein Monster - He never heard any SEO terms!
Oh, wait. I never knew any SEO terms!

Search Engine Optimization is not only preventing spammy posts, or writing quality content. You need to know some important SEO terms before you can get your hands dirty doing the optimizing work yourself. First you can go through this basic SEO guide.

Here are the most important SEO terms you will need to know :

SEO: This may sound ridiculous but there are many (like me a year back) who don’t really know what SEO means. When I ask people, they answer point blank, “Why?, Search Engine Optimization.” When I ask what is that, they walk away. No, seriously, if you want your content actually read you need to come up on the search engines. This is (don’t laugh 🙂 ) the most important SEO term.

SERP: This is as important an SEO term as it gets. Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the page  you are automatically directed to after running a search query in any search engine. Approximately 10 search results will be shown as per your settings.  The higher your page rank, higher will be your SERP. Aim for high SERPs right from the beginning.

SEM: SEM stands for search engine marketing. It is the process of marketing your website over the Internet. You can market your website by a number of ways over the internet. you may try the social networking sites, bookmarking sites, use Adwords or Pay per Click programs.

Keyword: Keyword is probably the most important SEO term. It can be a single or a collection of words that should be present in your content. For example you you write an article on Mayors of New York, so your keyword may be like ‘mayors of new york’. This is what search engines primarily look for.

Keyword Density: Keyword density is also an extremely important SEO term. This is what lets your page score over others. Keyword density is the ratio of the number of keywords per total words in your article. An ideal keyword density is around 1 to 2 %. Any less means your site won’t be noticed, a lot more and your post may be marked as spam.

Related : SEO Terms, Definitions and Keyword Stuffing

PageRank: PageRank or PR value is the ranking of your site in the search engines(read Google) and it varies from 1 to 10.The site having the highest quality content gets PR value of 10 and the worst gets around 1 or even 0. However, PR value alone is not much of a factor. Even if your PR value is not high you need not worry. You can still get a great deal of traffic.

Backlink: Any link of your page on another website is a backlink for your website. But you need to be careful about backlinks. Search engines now give ‘juice’ to backlinks. So having good backlinks is important while avoiding bad ones is also necessary. This means that you should only link to sites of good reputation.

Meta Tags: This is one SEO term that had seen its good old days way back in the early ages of the search engines. These contain some keywords to describe your website . Now search engines attach little or no importance to these meta tags.

Anchor Text: The text that is used to hyperlink to other online content is called an anchor text. They are essential because they provide valuable information about the hyperlinks on your website.

Sitemap: Sitemaps are the guides for all the pages of your website that you want the search engines to index. The most popular Stemap format is XML. It is useful to submit sitemaps manually to search engines from time to time.

Crawler: A script or tool used by the search engines to read your pages and record them in their index. The search engine then calculates attaches ‘importance’ to your website according to its reputation. You have no control over how they ‘crawl’ your site. The more frequent the crawling, sooner will your new posts be shown in the search results.

301 Redirect: This SEO term is used exclusively to transfer and redirect traffic from an old website to a new one. If you have transferred your blog from free domain to a self hosted one, in some cases you may need to use this.

Alt Tag: This SEO term is used to describe an alternative text for media content like images or videos if they are not available for some reason. Most importantly, images and videos cannot be read by the crawler, so the alt tag helps search engines know what the image or the video is for.

These basic SEO terms should get you started. For more SEO terms check these top 20 terms. In case you need to know even more check this out for more SEO terms.

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Thanks to BeginWebsites.

By Sarthak Ganguly

A programming aficionado, Sarthak spends most of his time programming or computing. He has been programming since his sixth grade. Now he has two websites in his name and is busy writing two books. Apart from programming, he likes reading books, hanging out with friends, watching movies and planning wartime strategies.

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