20 seo terms you should know

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20 SEO Terms You Should Know

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.

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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

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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.

Related Articles
Good Keywords
Tools and Resources for Keyword Research
Download Google’s SEO Report Card

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15 Responses to "20 SEO Terms You Should Know"

1. Josh Garcia on December 22nd, 2010 9:32 am | Reply

Hey Daniel,

Thanks for refresher. Link farm is the first time I heard that word. I knew this
strategy as link wheel.

Have a great day,
Josh

Daniel Scocco on December 22nd, 2010 9:33 am | Reply

Hi Josh,

In my opinion a link wheel is more advanced then a link farm. For instance,
you can have different layers on a link wheel, and not all sites link to each
other. So a link wheel is harder to detect than a link farm. Both have the
same objective though.

2. Nica on December 22nd, 2010 10:02 am | Reply

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.

3. Joshu Thomas on December 22nd, 2010 10:12 am | Reply

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

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its recommended to SEO that ads value and linking content that gives value.
This way it does not show any signs of forced optimization.

Nice post again!
Josh

Daniel Scocco on December 22nd, 2010 10:26 am | Reply

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.

Brent Stangel on December 22nd, 2010 5:42 pm |

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.

Brent

4. Make a perfect site on December 22nd, 2010 10:35 am | Reply

The Google search algorithm is so complicated that no one could really know
how to optimize your site.

5. TrafficColeman on December 22nd, 2010 10:48 am | Reply

Seo is complex but very easy if you have an road map..these tips has answered
some important question for the newbies.

“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”

6. Eleazar on December 22nd, 2010 12:53 pm | Reply

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.

7. Vivek Parmar on December 22nd, 2010 12:54 pm | Reply

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??

8. Rojish on December 22nd, 2010 1:11 pm | Reply

Thanks for the article Daniel. Link Sculpting was a new term for me.

Optimizing for Google is becoming more and more complex nowadays. For me
my websites are waving in the results page. I found my sites on top 10 results
some weeks, but some other weeks I may be not be in even the top 50 results.

5 de 9 22/12/2010 20:26


9. Lavina Melwani on December 22nd, 2010 2:07 pm | Reply

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?

Daniel Scocco on December 22nd, 2010 2:42 pm | Reply

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.

10. Himanshu Chanda on December 22nd, 2010 4:57 pm | Reply

Hey Daniel,

This is a great post and yes this is wat I term bookmarkable
Just wanted a bit more light on Canonical URLS and Link sculpting. Still not very
clear…

Wud be great if u can share some links on tht

Regards
Himanshu

11. Web Marketing Tips on December 22nd, 2010 9:59 pm | Reply

wow seems to me that you invested very good time to collect tthese terms.

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