Make Sense of Search Engine Optimisation with this Jargon-Busting Guide
Hands up who’s ever felt personally victimised by techy jargon like ‘meta tags’? Wtf is a ‘backlink’ anyway?
If you’ve ever felt confused or a bit unsure when it comes to SEO, know that you’re not alone. So many female founders that we discuss SEO with say they feel put off by the confusing language, like they’ll never be able to master SEO because they can’t get to grips with the basics.
But here’s the thing, SEO is not as confusing as it sounds!
At it’s heart, search engine optimisation is just another form of marketing for your small business.
SEO, in simple terms, is just about building your online visibility by elevating your search engine rank. This involves getting to know your ideal customer, using the same language that they do online and increasing your online brand trust.
Keen to learn more about the basics of Search Engine Optimisation? Check out our SEO podcast miniseries!
In this post we’re going to break down some jargony SEO terms so that you can feel more confident boosting your online visibility and welcoming more dream customers into your business than ever before.
Adwords
Adwords is Google’s online advertising service. Use Adwords to place paid ads on Google’s search results by ‘bidding’ on certain keywords. It also includes a handy tool, called Keyword Planner for targeting the right audience for your business.
Algorithm
Basically, an algorithm is a specific set of rules that have been defined to solve problems in an automated way. Search engines use algorithms to discover pages on the web and rank them in the most relevant way for the searchers.
Alt text
Alt text provides search engines with information about the content of your images. Search engines can’t see images like we do, this helps them understand what’s on photos, graphs and other pics. It’s also an important accessibility feature as it allows those using screen readers to understand your images.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your website, from other websites. To search engines, backlinks are like votes of confidence; the more votes you have from other quality websites (because they’re happy to share your content) the better your site appears to search engines.
Blog
Articles that your business shares on your website - just like this one! They can be updates, industry news, or useful tips and tricks. We have a whole section on blogging in Soar, our SEO course for female founders.
Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors that visit your website and choose to leave after viewing only one page, and ‘bounce’ away. A high bounce rate will negatively impact your SEO.
Bot or Google Bot
A bot is any type of programmed application that is able to run tasks in an automated way. Search engines bots are tasked with looking through the web and scanning every websites’ pages.
Content
In SEO, content refers to any type of piece of information visible on your website. This can be written copy, images, videos, infographics, anything like that. High-quality content is one of the main factors that will positively impact your ranking, just like with any marketing!
Conversion
Conversion can mean different things to different sites, but essentially means a visitor has achieved what you want them to be that a sale, filled out an enquiry form, downloaded a freebie etc.
Crawling
Crawling is what search engine bots do when they read the code of a webpage. Once a web page is ‘crawled’, the info is kept in a massive index that is then used to bring up search engine results.
Domain
Your domain is essentially your website’s digital address. For example, our domain is luckynightstudio.co.uk (but we also own luckynightstudio.com) Your domain name is an important element of your SEO and brand strategy, and they’re a simple and cheap thing to acquire.
Domain authority
How trustworthy, reliable and well-ranked your website is. The more best practices you follow, the higher your domain authority will become and the higher up the search engine listings your site will fall.
Duplicate content
Identical duplicate content across different pages of your website will damage your SEO score. Make sure all content on each is fresh, relevant and unique.
External link
A link on your website that leads users to an external website like another business’ or to an external resource like a PDF or course hosted on a different platform.
Heading tags
Also known as ‘headers’ in some website building platforms, headings in web design are labelled 1-6 in order of importance. Using these in the right order is important as it shows content hierarchy (level of importance) to both search engines and skimming readers.
Hyperlink
This is just a link - whether it links internally (your own site) or externally (someone else’s site).
Inbound link
Similar to a backlink, this is a link to your website from an external website.
Index
This refers either to the the automated tasks of a search engine bot, in which a copy of a website’s page is saved in a massive database or library or to a search engine database which includes all URLs and the files within them. Search engines will first crawl your site, and then index it.
Internal link
A link on your page that links to another page of your own website.
Keyword
The words or phrases that your users will type into search engines to find the product/service you offer. You can learn more about effective keyword research here. Plus, we go into it in more depth during our SEO course, Soar.
Local SEO
Specific actions you can take to make sure that your site appears in search results when someone is looking for a business in your geographic area.
Long tailed keyword
A longer keyword phrase that you can really specific with and target with blogs.
Organic traffic
Traffic that comes to your website as a result of unpaid search results. The main purpose of optimising a website for search engines (SEO) is to drive as much free traffic to it as possible. More traffic = more eyes on your site!
Optimisation
Tweaking and fixing your site with the goal of making it as search engine friendly as possible so that you’ll appear higher in the search results.
Outbound links
Links from your site to an external site, the same as an external link.
PPC (Pay per click)
A form of Internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked on. You can advertise your own site on search engines using this form of paid marketing.
Position
In SEO, a position refers to a website’s rank in the search engine results page.
Page speed
How quickly your site loads impacts your SEO score. This is known as page speed.
SEO title
This SEO-targeting feature allows you to put in a specific header phrase for each of your pages to be discovered for search engines.
SEO description
Short pieces of text that describe your site’s content. Search engines show these descriptions below the page title in search results. We’ll walk you through creating these as part of our SEO course.
URL
Your full web address, eg www.luckynightstudio.co.uk
We all know that solid SEO is the key to getting visible on Google and being discovered by more dream customers than ever before. But where to even start?
Start with Soar, our signature SEO course especially for busy female founders just like you.
In as little as 30 minutes per week, Soar guides you through the search engine skills required to start boosting your visibility, gathering enquiries and selling your offers consistently through your website.
