Definitions of Common SEO Terms – Abuzz Creative

People who know SEO tend to speak a language all their own. SEO terminology can be confusing to the small business owner who wants to optimize their website.

This blog post is meant to help website owners understand SEO terms with definitions in plain English.

An algorithm is used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. Algorithms are becoming a big part of our lives. A search engine algorithm assesses the relevance and importance of websites and then ranks them accordingly in search results.

When another website links to your website, that’s a backlink. You want quality links from authority websites.

This is a professional writer who specializes in writing compelling and engaging copy for your website.

Google sends out robots (or spiders) to find web pages. They then record the details they found in an index. Bots find their way from page to page and site to site. Text links are like doorways for bots.

Domain Name

Your domain name is the virtual address of your website. My domain name is abuzzcreative.com.

Google is an American search engine company that was founded in 1998. The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in publicly accessible documents (websites, for example). Google is the most used search engine and has indexed more that 11 billion pages on the Internet.

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the standard language for creating web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page and consists of a series of elements that tell the browser how to display the content.

The Internet is a vast worldwide network connecting computers. People can share information and communicate from anywhere with an Internet connection.

JavaScript is a scripting language that creates and controls dynamic website content. If it moves, refreshes, or otherwise changes on your screen without you having to manually reload a web page, that content is run by JavaScript (animated graphics, photo slideshows, interactive forms).

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they’re looking for. Keywords are search terms that you want to rank for with a certain page on your website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. For SEO, keyword density determines whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

Keyword Phrase

Keyword phrases are made up of multiple words. Keyword phrases are short, simple descriptors that people type into search engines to find information or answer a question.

A hyperlink, or simply a link, tells the user they can click to find more information. A link will point to a document like a PDF or will link to another page.

Link Text

This is the part of a text link that is visible to the reader. Adding links to keywords can be really effective when it comes to SEO. Here is a link to my Search Engine Optimization page.

Meta Tag

Meta tags are bits of text that describe the content on a web page. Meta tags don’t show up on the page itself, they can only be viewed in the source code. Meta tags help tell search engines what a web page is about.

Organic Search Results

Organic or natural search refers to unpaid search results. Results are calculated strictly by the algorithm, not by advertiser dollars.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is when you advertise and then pay each time a user clicks on one of your online ads.

Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page. Ranking for keywords or keyword combinations varies from search engine to search engine.

Robot, Bot, or Spider

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links.

Search Engine

A search engine is an online tool where you search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The top search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Some social sites are used the same way we’d use a search engine (Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest).

A sitemap is a list of pages included in a website within one domain. A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website and it leads Google to all your important pages.