10 SEO terms you need to know for a highly visible website
SEO (short for Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of improving your website for better visibility on Google and other search engines when people search for things related to products or services you offer.
The better your search engine visibility, the higher you’ll place on search engine results, and the more likely you are to get traffic and/or sales from organic search results. Great SEO allows you to stay visible to dream customers, without constantly having to work on short-term digital marketing strategies like social media.
If you’re looking to improve the SEO score of your website, here are 10 terms you need to know.
Keywords
Consistent keywords are how search engines understand what your business and website actually does. If you’re a copywriter who works with wellness business in Cornwall, for example, there will need to be plenty of mentions of ‘copywriting’, ‘wellness’ and ‘Cornwall’ in your content in order for search engines like Google to understand that. Keyword ‘spamming’ (writing keywords over and over again in your content) is a no-no now that Google is smart enough to detect it. Instead, opt for content that is engaging and explanatory that is naturally rich in your chosen keywords.
Indexing
There’s a lot of information on the internet! Search engines go through all of this information (in a process called ‘crawling’) to understand how to organise and process all the data. This process is called indexing. Once you’ve created new content for your website in the form of a new page or blog post, you’ll need to wait for Google and other search engines to index this content before it impacts your SEO score.
Headings
Website text copy is broken up into two types; headings and paragraphs. Search engines use the information and order of your headings (heading 1, heading 2 etc in Squarespace, H1, H2 etc in HTML) to understand which information is most important and relevant to your website. This helps them place you where you fit best in search results. Your H1 or Heading 1 is the most important piece of information on your page, with other Headings denoting importance in descending order. Paragraphs are then used for body text that will all be attributed the same level of importance.
Traffic
Traffic refers to the amount of visitors your website has over a certain time period. SEO is essentially about increasing traffic to your website by making it as visible as possible in search results. The more traffic we get, the more sales we’re likely to make, so it’s important to think of ways to increase website traffic if we’re going to see results.
Meta Description
Also known as 'SEO Description’ in Squarespace, meta descriptions allow you to describe the purpose of your pages and attract dream customers to click your links in search results. Think about the needs and goals of your dream customers when writing these descriptions - and be sure to use keywords! This ensures you’ll be visible in the areas you want to be visible in and you’ll encourage your target market to click the links.
Backlink
We can improve the SEO of our website by having links to it from other reputable websites. These links are known as ‘backlinks’ and help improve the authority of your website with search engines - e.g they’ll see you as a more reliable an trustworthy business if people are talking about you a lot! Get backlinks by guest blogging, adding yourself to directories and using digital PR.
Alt Text
When you upload images to your website, you may have noticed being prompted to fill in some ‘alt text’. This alt text is essentially just a text description of the content of the image. This alt text is used by screen readers so that people with visual impairments can understand the content of your images. Filling this in for every image makes your website more accessible which is a huge win for SEO.
Accessibility
Adding on to the last point, accessibility refers to how usable your website is for as many people as possible. Are your colours high enough contrast for everyone, including those with colour blindness? Is your website clear and easy to use across devices of all sizes? Is your navigation simple and easy to… navigate? Focussing on accessibility will improve the user experience of your website massively which means happier users and a better SEO score - winner!
Inbound & Outbound Links
There are two different types of links in SEO. Inbound links refer to links to your own website - linking to your services page from your home page for example. Making use of these through text links and CTA buttons makes your site easier to navigate and will benefit your SEO. Outbound links refer to any links that lead to a different website. Outbound links to trustworthy and legitimate sites (high authority sites) will improve your SEO, while outbound links to untrustworthy or scammy sites will be a black mark against you, so be careful where you link to!
Bots
We talked earlier about Indexing, well the little creatures that perform this task are known as bots. Search engine bots ‘crawl’ your web pages and content in order to best place you in search engine results. It used to be that you could trick these bots by filling your website with keyword spam, but those days are long gone. In order to impress the modern bots, we need to make sure our content is clear, engaging and useful to humans (yes, they’re THAT clever!).
We hope this post has helped you make sense of some of the more common SEO terms out there! By making use of these tools, you can massively improve the visibility of your website and get your business in front of more dream customers than ever!
Have an existing website that’s struggling with being visible on search engines? Do you want more dream customers to start finding you organically, without so much hands-on marketing work?
You need to strengthen your SEO so that you can start showing up and standing out on Google!
Our SEO Audit is the perfect solution. You’ll be sent a short questionnaire to fill in once you’ve booked so we can best understand your current SEO struggles and goals. Using this and our detailed competitor analysis, we’ll provide you with an actionable SEO report to work through in your own time.
