Demystify SEO by understanding the key terms.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a practice which helps people discover your business by driving traffic to your website. It also helps create a positive online experience for people when they do arrive.

There are a series of simple DIY steps anyone can take to improve their website’s SEO – sometimes it’s just the language and jargon that puts people off.

To improve your SEO knowledge, we’ve drawn up a list of 13 essential SEO terms with a brief description of what they actually mean.

You can use our list as a reference when making those all-important optimisations to help drive traffic to your website and get your business seen by more people, more often.

01 | Backlink

Backlink refers to a link from another website to a page on your website. Search engines use backlinks as a ranking factor because it’s a signal that your website contains useful, quality, relevant content. The more backlinks you can attract the better.

02 | Core Web Vitals

Announced in May 2020, Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics (such as speed, responsiveness, and visual stability) that Google uses to evaluate the quality of your website’s user experience. This has become an important ranking factor for search results.

Tip – making little improvements to your website’s vitals is better than none. Start by viewing your website as a visitor would. Are pages slow to load? Does it look okay on a mobile or tablet? Visually is anything ‘off’ or distracting?

03 | Crawling

This is the process by which search engines visit your website, discover your web pages, and ‘read’ your content. This content is then collected and indexed by the search engine.

Google and other search engines will ‘crawl’ your website every four to thirty days, depending on how much traffic you receive.

04 | Featured snippet

Also known as Position Zero or P0, the featured snippet appears in a box above everything else on the search engine results page. As this is essentially your shop window online, it’s worth spending time on your featured snipped to get it just right.
Tip – the perfect length of a snippet is 40-50 words, or around 300 characters.

05 | Internal link

Internal links are simply links from one page on your website to another, allowing users to easily navigate and see related content. Search engines also use internal links to crawl your website.

06 | Keyword or key phrase

A word or phrase within your website’s content that allows people who are searching online to find that page in search engine results. For example, someone looking for an electrician might search for ‘Electrician in Leeds’.
Keywords are important as they help to connect your business with the searches your customers are making online.

07 | Local pack

A local pack is a map with three business listings that show in Google search results when a user enters a location-specific query, such as “UK advertising”.

Tip – claiming your business profile on Google and making sure all your information is correct is a good place to start to get your business ranked in the local pack.

08 | Meta description

Meta description refers to a small snippet of text you can add when publishing or updating a page on your website that will show in search results below the page title and the link.

09 | Organic traffic

This refers to the number of users who come to your website via search engine results pages. As you improve your website SEO, your organic traffic should increase making it a great metric to track to ensure your changes are having the desired effect.

10 | Sitemap

A list of all the pages on your website and how they link together. Whilst a sitemap is not essential, it helps search engines quickly crawl and index all of your content, particularly if you have a large ecommerce, informational or news website.

11 | SERP

This stands for Search Engine Results Page, the page you see when you type a search query into a search engine. SERPs typically contain two types of content: organic (non-paid) search results in the main body of the page, and paid search results at the top of the page and on the right. There are usually 10 organic search results per page.

Tip – getting your business featured on page one for your chose search terms is your ultimate goal. People tend to want instant results from their searches.

12 | Ranking & indexing

Ranking is the position in which your website appears on a search engine results page.

Indexing refers to the search engine’s process of storing and organising the content it found on your website when it was crawled.

13 | Query or search query

The word or phrase that a user types into a search engine.

Tip – whilst we have ended with this, it’s probably where you need to start to improve your SEO. Find out what your potential customers are searching for and then apply these keywords or phrases to your site’s content to attract those searches.

We can help with your SEO ambitions.

If you’re looking to improve your website using SEO best practice guidelines, but you don’t have the time or know-how required, the online experts at Reach can help.

Our SEO solution will address your on-site needs by first performing an audit of your website and then implementing a range of technical and content optimisations to ensure you rank highly in search engines.

We can also combine this with our Sonar solution which will take ownership of your business’ presence across a network of 50+ search, social and directory platforms, thereby complimenting your on-site SEO improvements.

So don’t get left behind and lose out on vital business. Talk to us today about how SEO and Sonar can work together to improve your website and boost your overall online presence.

Enter your details to find out more and arrange a quick demo.