Here’s a quick blog for complete SEO beginners. If you’re just starting SEO as a newbie, you’ll be confused with a lot of the terms and phrases you’ll read in SEO blogs and articles. To help you penetrate this intimate circle we’ve explained some of the key jargon you’re likely to come across.

SEO

Let’s start with SEO. If you don’t know this already, it stands for Search Engine Optimisation – put simply, it’s the art of improving your website’s position in search engines by making changes to pages themselves (see on-page below), or by other processes external to the website (see off-page).

SEO is also the name given to the person or company involved in carrying out this process. For example: ‘My SEO thinks we need to adjust some of the on-page of the homepage’.

Bot/Spider/Crawler

These terms all refer to the same thing: a search engine robot. A bot will periodically visit your site to keep abreast of the changes you make to your pages and to assess what it thinks your content is about. It follows links it finds to other pages on your site (see internal linking) and uses all of this information to ultimately rank your site in its result page.

On-page

These are the changes made to the pages of a site itself. This may include changing the title of the webpage, adding alt tags to images (see alt tags below) or adding links to relevant subpages, known as internal linking.

Off-page

Just as on-page techniques focuses on the pages we’re trying to make rank well, off-page is all about external work. Getting links to your site from others, issuing press releases and articles are all examples of off-page techniques designed to boost your website’s profile, and ultimately it’s rank.

Alt tags

Alt tags added to an image offer an ALTernative text-based description to devices that can’t load images, like some mobile devices and screen reader software used by the blind. In the case of screen readers, the alt text is spoken to the user. Alt tags are relevant to SEO because search engines can use this information to determine relevancy for a search term.

Internal linking

This is simply linking from pages on your site to other pages on your site. As well as creating good keyword association with the correct anchor text (see below), it offers a better experience for the user if they can reach subpages of your site easily. Search engines favour sites that are good for users, both in terms of relevancy to their search term but also in usability, which makes internal linking a must.

Anchor text

This is text that is clickable, and links a user to another page. Search engines bots use anchor text to determine what the target page is about. The ‘clickable’ example in this paragraph is not good anchor text because ‘clickable’ offers little information about the target page.

There are many, many more that will be covered over the next couple of weeks. Please leave a comment or join the discussion in our SEO Forum.

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