If you are new to SEO, here are some of the commonly used terms in SEO, and their meanings.
Backlinks -
Backlinks are hyperlinks directing users to a website. Originally, these links serve as navigation tools through Internet users follow to reach websites. Today, they have grown in importance with the development of SEO.
The number of backlinks a website has ranks among one of the most important factors for search engines to determine if a website is popular or authoritative. This in turns affects the ranking of the website on the search engine results page. For e.g., in Google’s PageRank system, a link from webpage X to Y is is perceived as a vote from X to Y.
Pagerank -
Pagerank is a numerical rank assigned by Google to webpages according to its importance calculated by an algorithm. The Pagerank assigned to a webpage is dependent on the number of backlinks it has, and the Pagerank of the pages that link to it.
The Pagerank of a webpage in turn affects its ranking on the Google search engine results page.
Other search engines use slightly different algorithms which take into consideration the same factors used in Pagerank calculation.
SEO -
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in a search engine’s search results naturally (“organically” or “algorithmically”).
What SEO aims to achieve is to push the website to a high rank on the results page for the targeted keywords. The higher the ranking of the website is on the search engine results page, the more visible and easier it is for people to find and visit the website.
Some popular SEO techniques include backlinking and social bookmarking.
Target Keywords -
These are keywords which the business’ target audience would use while searching for products or services that the business offers. These keywords are deemed important to a business and often relate to the industry it is in, the products it is selling, and the brand that is building.
Effective target keywords should be broad enough for the target audience to think of searching for, yet narrow enough for the business to be featured high enough to be seen in the search engine results page. Some SEO techniques include targeting dovetail keywords, which are keywords that pertain to niches. These keywords tend to be optimized at a lesser degree, which makes it easier for small businesses to be ranked highly in the results page.
Web crawling -
Web crawling is a process undertaken by programs, Web spiders, or Web robots to browse the Internet, for the purpose of caching these pages. This allows search engines to index them for providing search results.