As with any industry, the SEO world has it’s own slang and terminology. At first glance this geeky lexicon can be daunting. To help fledgling optimizers get their feet wet, we’ve assembled this beginners guide of SEO terms and definitions. This is by no means an exhaustive list of industry terms. If you feel so compelled to travel deep down into the rabbit hole to compile a truly comprehensive list, be our guest.
Keyword- SEO revolves around keywords. This is what a search engine looks for to identify which pages should show up for on the SERP.
SERP- search engine results page. This is the page that appears after you click search on search engine.
Title tag- The title of a page that appears on the SERP.
Meta tag- A brief description of a page’s content placed under the title of the page on a SERP.
H2 tag- A heading on a page. You can also use a H1 and H3 tag for a heading. All tags will be bolded, and you’re limited to a certain number of H1 and H2 tags. Be sure to put your keywords in these tags.
Alt text- A description used to let search engines know what a picture is. These are needed since search engines only see code, not pictures.
Anchor text- The word(s) a hyperlink is attached to. Try to get your keyword to be the anchor text if you can.
Fold/scroll- The top search results that show up on a SERP without having to scroll down, this is where you want to be.
Backlink- Links to your site that appear on other sites.
Crawl- How search engines find out what the content of your website is about. Using spiders or search-bots, a search engine will crawl every letter of code of your page to determine its content.
Again, a complete list of SEO terms would be longer than Pinocchio’s nose when he plays poker. However, knowing this list will allow anyone to hold their own in a crowd of SEO peers and pretentiously spew terms left and right. If you have questions about any of these terms or want to add some more terms, let us know.
