What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ? List of SEO Terminologies

SEO is something really really serious thing now a days. You need to have deep knowledge of SEO in order to work properly for your clients and on your own websites. If you have a website or blog, you’ll certainly need to know a bit about search engine optimization (SEO). So let starts to familiarize yourself with the most common terms used in today’s SEO.

1. SEM:

SEM Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and it is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.its actually the process of promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results.

2. Backlink:

Backlinks are actually main building blocks to good SEO it is also known as inbound links or inward links, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.Search Engine will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks.

3. PageRank:

PageRank (PR) is a quality metric invented by Google’s owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin.It is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. Page Rank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. So websites with higher Page Rank are more likely to appear on top of search results.

4. Anchor text:

Anchor text is an important element of SEO (search engine optimization).It is the visible text on a Web page that you click for the hyperlink. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. The most important off page factor to securing high rankings in Google is appropriate anchor text pointing to the specific page of your website.SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.

5. NoFollow:

A nofollow tag is a basic HTML attribute. It provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page”  So it is a way to control whether search engines follow a hyperlink or not on your website. Nofollow used for blog comments to combat comment spam, it protected blogs from inadvertently linking to so-called bad neighborhoods on the Internet. So this means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

6. Title Tag:

The title tags are the element that creates the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important on-page factors inside Google’s search algorithm.So this the most important factors in achieving high ranking in search results. Title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. Title tag of any web page can be seen on top of the browser while navigating it.Properly written title tags are critical to your SEO strategy.Title tags tell search engines what your page is about.

7. Meta Tags:

A meta tag is a HTML tag that is use to describes the contents of a Web page. The meta tags are placed inside thesection of your HTML code, and it is not visible to human visitors.Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites.So it will help ensure your website appears on search engine results pages.

8. Search Algorithm:

The search engine algorithm are the rules and formula that the search engines use to determine the significance of a web page. The algorithm considers over 200 factors, including the PageRank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on. Google’s algorithm searching out Web pages that contain the keywords you used to search, then assigning a rank to each page based several factors, including how many times the keywords appear on the page.

9. SERP:

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.It is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. 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.

10. Keyword Density:

Keyword density is an SEO term that refers to the amount of times a keyword phrase is found on your Web page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. 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.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.

Two more important terms for this list are “white hat SEO” and “black hat SEO.”
Link building through quality content and good anchor text with relevant keywords are white hat strategies. Link farms are a black hat strategy.