In order to understand the most common search engine optimization strategies, it’s important that you are familiar with the terminology associated with SEO. Here is a quick reference guide to help you get started:
SERPS
Serps is simply an acronym that represents “Search Engine Results Pages”. When you conduct a search in major search engines like www.Google.com, the results that are generated from your query are known as this page.
Page Rank (PR)
Page rank is an indication of the popularity and weight of specific, individual pages. It’s quite possible (and common) to have different page ranks on main and sub pages of any given site. Page Rank (PR) can be passed onto other pages and is also factored in by backlinks to each page from relevant, authority websites and communities.
Backlinks
Search engine positioning is heavily influenced by the number of quality backlinks directing visitors to your website. Backlinks are similar to ‘votes’ in that each one represents a positive vote for your website, helping you to gain top positions within the search engines. Backlinks reference incoming links from external sites, not links that run internally to interior pages or sub domains.
White, Black and Grey Hat SEO
White Hate SEO is focused on ethical, honest and legitimate strategies for gaining top positioning within the search engines. Black hat SEO focuses on “gaming” the search engines, primarily by using questionable techniques and non-compliant strategies for exploiting holes in the search engine algorithms to gain rank.
Grey hat stands somewhere in between both white and black hat strategies and often encompasses both types of strategies to gain positioning in the search engines.
If optimizing your website for ongoing positioning is important to you, it’s always best to focus on legitimate, white-hat methods that will ensures the longevity of your search engine optimization efforts.
Search Engine Crawler (or Spider)
Search engines sent out electronic crawlers (otherwise known as bots) that evaluate websites by exploring content, analyzing keywords, and overall relevancy. In order for your website to become indexed in the major search engines, it needs to be “crawled”. You can trigger the presence of a search engine spider or crawler by creating and submitting site maps that provide a blueprint of your entire website’s structure.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
LSI is a term that refers to website theming. With theming a website, you are ensuring that relevant keywords and categories appear close to each other. For example, if your website was about ‘dog training’, both your title tags, keywords and overall content would contain the keyword ‘dog training’. Links leaving and coming into your websit would also carry similar keywords, helping to build a consistent theme.
Keywords, Keyword Phrases, Long Tail Keywords
Keywords are what power your search engine optimization and need to be injected into both your actual content and different areas of your website pages including title and anchor text links. Keywords used on websites are then matched to keywords manually entered into the search engines by people interested in similar content.
Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that consist of multiple words, such as “dog training resources” or “how to lose weight quickly”. Long tail keywords are often easier to rank for based on a lower level of competition targeting these phrases.
Website Map (Site Map)
A site map offers a clear “blueprint” of your entire website to both human visitors and search engine spiders. Sitemaps can be automatically generated using online tools and should be submitted each time they have been updated to contain new information and links. Sitemaps provide guidance with the navigation of your overall website, by showcasing internal links throughout the site. Sitemaps are usually created using the XML format.
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