If you have a website or blog, or if you work with anything related to the Internet, you’ll certainly need to know a bit about search engine optimization (SEO). A good way to get started is to familiarize yourself with the most common terms of the trade, and below you’ll find 20 of them. (For those who already know SEO, consider this post as a refresher!).
1. SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.
2. Backlink: Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.
3. PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.
4. Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example of linkbait are the “Top 10? lists that tend to become popular on social bookmarking sites.
5. Link farm. A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was effective in the early days of search engines, but today they are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).
6. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had “weight loss” as their anchor texts.
7. NoFollow: The nofollow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g., blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and advertisers). When Google sees the nofollow attribute it will basically not count that link for the PageRank and search algorithms.
8. Link Sculpting: By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.
9. Title Tag: The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.
10. Meta Tags: Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.
11. Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors (according to Google itself), including the PageRank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on.
12. SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.
13. Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.
14. Keyword Density: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.
15. Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.
16. Cloaking. This technique involves making the same web page show different content to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search engines.
17. Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it’s a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.
18. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on your website because it can get you penalized.
19. Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.
20. Robots.txt: This is nothing more than a file, placed in the root of the domain, that is used to inform search bots about the structure of the website. For instance, via the robots.txt file it’s possible to block specific search robots and to restrict the access to specific folders of section inside the website.
All the terms were explained in an easy-to-understand manner and these terms are a must while doing SEO. Thanks for such a great blog.
Great blog post and discussion. Two more important terms for your list are “white hat SEO” and “black hat SEO.”
The sandbox is definitely one I struggle with. I have heard varying opinions on the sandbox effect or whatever you would like to call it. I’m perhaps one to disagree with mainstream opinion on the sandbox, and suspect it does not exist at all. Does anyone know of anyone at google ever admitting to the existence of a sandbox? I recently built out a new site and it is ranking #1 for specific keywords (longtail) on google within the first 10 days.
I have a quick questions for SEO experts. For example dipeshpatel.com is a website which offers services. Out of 20 which term or method is more important?
Hi Daniel
Canonical URL is the one that I struggled with for ages.
I am going to learn SEO through best practices in the new year.
new bies who keep asking me about these terms now get the perfect place to get all the answers.
Thanks for the list- I am writing an ebook and one part has terms- I had never heard of Link Farm, either!
I agree with your opinion.
I don’t like making blog comments dofollow, as you can’t really know the quality of the links that will be posted there (and I sure don’t want the work of checking 20-30 links per day).
I knew 15 of the 20 terms, but thank you for this useful post!
Daniel,
This is awesome information. Thanks for sharing
@Himanshu,
Canonical URLs are actually two copies of your same website. One with www and the other without www.
Google treats these websites as two different websites. If you don’t tell Google which is your preferred site (you can set your preferred site in Google Webmaster Tool) then Google will index and rank both of your sites individually and it may happen that your own site acts as enemy to your site. This is because if these sites were not ranked individually, then your overall search engine ranking would have been much higher (combined of www and non www).
@Lavina,
When you say your articles have appeared in other sites first, how did this happen? I assume it was due to a guest post written by you for other site. Now, you have used the same copy on your site as well. Now it’s important to pay attention to dates on which these two articles were published. Its clear (even to google) that your article on the other site was published first, it is assumed that this version is the only version thats going to appear in search results. Article published on your website may not appear in the search results because google thinks (yes it is) that these two copies are exactly same and will show only one copy from the site which has highest authority (putting the date published logic first).
Daniel,
wow seems to me that you invested very good time to collect tthese terms.
I also am a firm believer in creating quality content. I have certain niches that get indexed instantly, which tells me that Google is waiting for me to publish something new. Even pages that are not optimize as well as they could be.
Hey Daniel,
Ideally you want your original articles to appear on your site first. If they appear on other sites first Google will assume the version on your site is just a copy of it, reducing your search rankings for those keywords.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for a really useful article – I shall also pass it on to other newie bloggers who are still confused about SEO. I wanted to know more about duplicate content and how Google penalizes the site which uses it. I have several articles which are written and copyrighted by me but have appeared in other places first, and I’ve now used them on my blog too. Is this a problem? Should I be putting a no-follow on them?
Thanks for the article Daniel. Link Sculpting was a new term for me.
seo is something which no one can understand, as day by day algorithms changes and its hard to keep ourselves update with every thing.
one thing i like to ask is that you have mentioned nofollow but where is dofollow??
Making your blog dofollow is good or not??
Link wheel may be hard to detect today but in the long run Big G will ultimate find it. In my opinin, it’s better to play the rules to avoid headaches and losses of our time and money.
The Google search algorithm is so complicated that no one could really know how to optimize your site.
I agree. In my opinion the best strategy is also to play by the rules and focus on creating unique and valuable content. The other ones might work in the short term, but over night you could get a penalty and all the rankings.
In my opinion – the Search engine algorithms are smart enough now-a-days to understand and identify a link wheel. Be it a more than 3 tier link wheel also. So its recommended to SEO that ads value and linking content that gives value. This way it does not show any signs of forced optimization.
Whew! I dabble in SEO a little bit but this list made me realized I need to read a lot more. This is definitely a post that you should read a few times and not only just once.
Hi Josh,
Hey Daniel,