Jargon Buster

In the digital world a lot of jargon is used. So this is the place where I explain what all those buzz terms mean, in layman’s terms.

A

  • Anchor Text – the words you use to link out from your website.

B

  • Back Link – a link from somebody’s website through to yours.
  • Black Hat – this term is used to describe practices that are against Google’s guidelines. If you’re caught doing this, Google may issue you with a penalty, which will negatively impact where you appear in searches.

C

  • Crawling – this term is used to describe search engines discovering your web page.
  • Cornerstone Content – this content is the backbone of your site. Mark your best and most important articles on your site as ‘cornerstone’. these are the articles you want to be ranking on Google and they should be long and informative.

D

  • De-indexed – this means that you’ve asked Google to remove your page from its index.
  • Dofollow Link – search engines count these links as votes of quality. By default, all links are dofollow, unless they are modified to be nofollow.
  • Domain Authority – a metric devised by Moz, to rank the your link profile. Generally, the more links you get pointing back to your website, the better.  Every website has Domain Authority attributed to it. The number will be between 1 and 100. 1 is the lowest and 100 is the highest.

E

F

G

H

  • Hyperlink – a link which is found within an article. Sending users to another page within your site, or to external website.

I

  • Indexing – the way that Google stores your page once it has been discovered.

J

K

  • Keyword – this is a word that a user may type into Google. You can tailor your web page to come up in that list of results.
  • Keyword Research – using websites and web tools, to determine what keywords you should try to rank for. The aim is to find terms which have traffic, but not a vast amount of competition. If you do it successfully, you’re much more likely to rank in Google.

L

  • Long-tail Keyword – a phrase, generally made up of between three and five words. An example of a long-tail keyword would be “yellow Ford Escort”. The term is more specific, which means that less people will be searching for it. But the search traffic you do get will be stronger.

M

  • Meta Data / Meta Description – this is the snippet of information about your URL, which Google displays within search results. If you don’t manually add it, then Google will add something automatically.

N

  • Nofollow Link – This tag, within the link, tells search engines to ignore it. These links do not benefit search engine rankings.

O

  • Organic Traffic – web traffic that is earned because of the quality of the content, rather than through paying for an advertisement.

P

  • PBN – ‘Private Blog Network’. This term refers to a series of websites that have just been set up to boost the authority of another site. They are usually owned by the same person or organisation.

Q

  • Query – the word(s) that the user type into a search engine.

R

S

  • Search Engine – a site that provides results to search queries. Google is the biggest and most well known.

 

  • SERP – A ‘Search Engine Results Page’. This term refers to the page you see after you’ve made a search query,

T

  • Traffic – visitors to your website.

U

V

W

  • White Hat – SEO practices that meet Google’s quality guidelines.

X

Y

  • Yoast – a popular WordPress plugin. Used to assist with SEO. There are free and paid-for versions.

Z