Continuing our Redcliffe Marketing Labs SEO Glossary, today we look at K to R and explain all the key terms you are likely to come across.
Keyword
One of the most important SEO words! This is a word or phrase that describes a characteristic or feature of a product or service that people will use in their searches with search engines. They can be specific or more general. An example would be ‘redcliffe social media’.
Keyword Density
This is an old term that the search engines used to use to measure the relevance of a page to a topic – based upon how many times the keyword appeared in copy. The system was open to abuse.
Keyword Research
This is the process of identifying relevant keywords/keyword phrases to focus your SEO and Pay Per Click marketing on. This can be done using Keyword Research tools, analytic tools, examining competitor websites, using a search box on your own site to see what people are searching for etc.
Keyword Research Tools
These are the tools that help you identify the keywords that you will focus your online business marketing on – such as the Google Keyword Research Tool, Wordtracker or the Overture Tool.
Keyword Stuffing
This is the practice of writing website copy that over-uses a keyword/s. The idea here is that people think that if they can put a block of text at the bottom of their page that just contains a long list of suburbs or related terms that it will help their rankings. Generally trying to ‘trick’ the search engines can actually bring a risk of ranking penalty. Its better to just produce good content that your target market is looking for.
Landing Page
This is the page that a visitor is sent to when they click on a link or advertisement.
Link
This is a reference or citation from one web document to another or to another place within the same document.
Link Baiting
This is the art of targeting and creating information that encourages other sites to point to your website with a link and thereby improving your authority. Link baiting is becoming more popular with the rise of social media and blogging. An example would be a informational graphic comparing statistics about your industry.
Link Building
This is how much of traditional SEO time will be spent – building a web of links pointing back to your site so that search engines credit you with authority in your market area and reward you with high rankings.
Long Tail Keywords
These are keywords that are more precise and specific and so more likely to attract qualified “buying” traffic to your website rather than general “browsing” traffic. A longtail keyword would be something like ‘social media training options near redcliffe’ rather than the shorter ‘redcliffe social media’ keyword example at the top of the page.
Meta Description Tag
This is one or two sentences which describe the content of the page and usually including primary and secondary keywords. These again have been open for abuse in the past and search engines are using more advanced methods to determine the content of the webpage. Where these are very important though is that they usually appear in search engine results. Including compelling text copy in the Description tag can induce searches to click through on your result even if its not in the first position. Don’t overlook this.
Meta Keywords
Like the ‘description’ tag above this is information in the code of the website that is designed to indicate to search engines what the page is about. Best practise is to include certain keyword phrases that you are targeting with that webpage but know that, again because of reasons of abuse and manipulation, this won’t be sufficient to actually rank for those terms.
Meta Tags
This is the generic term for meta descriptions and meta keywords. ‘Meta’ means information about other information. In this case its information in the website code that relates to the content of the webpage itself.
Navigation
This is how users find their way around a website. Navigation techniques are used to help visitors understand where they are, where they have been and where they need to go. Sometimes providing a large number of links to other pages on your home page can overwhelm the visitor. If there are particular parts of the website that you want visitors to go to then it pays to plan out the navigation to support this.
Nofollow
You may hear this term in relation to “nofollow links.” These are links that instruct the search engines not to count in measuring authority of a particular website. Often used on blogs.
Organic Search
Organic search is the unpaid listings in search results, which are usually listed by relevancy to the search term – as opposed to the paid advertisements. Conducting Search Engine Optimisation for a site is done with the goal of improving the ranking and relevancy of the site inorder to get more free visitor traffic.
Outbound Link
These are links that point out from one website to an external site.
Page Rank
This is a Google tool used to give an indication of a page’s authority, based largely on amount and quality of back- links pointing to it. If two websites are roughly comparable then the higher page rank website will normally perform better in search results.
PPC – Pay Per Click
This is a pricing model which most search engines use – they only charge advertisers when a customer clicks on an ad. Considered low risk for the advertiser, but needs to be set up properly to work well.
Reciprocal Links
This is the process of exchanging links between websites to attain a win-win for both websites in terms of building authority with the search engines. Less emphasis is placed on this than before because it is open to abuse.
Relevancy
Another important SEO word! It is a measure of how useful searchers find search results; you should try to make your website as relevant as possible to the keywords that describe your business.
Reputation Management
This is becoming more important with the rise of social media. It is about ensuring that your brand retains a good name online; there are many monitoring tools to help with this nowadays. Along with achieving better search engine rankings SEO can also be particularly useful in ensuring that when people search on your company name it is information that you control and provide that is resulted in search results rather than third party information.
Did we miss any important SEO definitions in the K to R section? Let us know in the comments below and we can add them! Next week we have the final part of this series – S to Z.