If you’re looking for free SEO tips for beginners, then you’ve come to the right place. SEO is vital for reaching the right audience, improving web traffic, and ultimately driving more sales. An SEO crash course is a great way to get started, but it’ll be difficult to learn if you don’t understand the jargon to begin with.
Below is an SEO glossary of terms that you will need to know to fully understand how SEO works to improve your Google ranking.
Understanding these common SEO terms will help you understand SEO basics for 2021. You may already know what some of these terms mean, but it never hurts to gain a fresh understanding of certain concepts.
Knowing these terms is also a great way to streamline your SEO strategy because it will help give you a bigger picture from the start of creating it.
Refers to any content atop a webpage that is readily visible without the user needing to scroll down. This is important for making a first impression on your visitor and intriguing them to check out other areas of your site.
The complex program designed for search engines to retrieve indexed data and provide search results for a query.
A link to your webpage that comes from an external website. Good backlinks indicate to search engines that your page provides trustworthy and helpful information.
See also: Link Building
Any text, images, sounds, and videos used on your webpage to convey information to an audience.
Examples: Blogs, graphs, how-to videos
A search engine’s process of gathering information from billions of webpages to organize and update the search engine’s index.
Your website address. Ends with an extension such as .com, .org, .net, etc.
A block that appears above Page 1 of Google’s organic search results to provider users with direct information from a specific site. Also known as “position zero.”
Tags that separate content into different sections based on importance (H1-H6). Help make a long article easier to digest for readers, therefore increasing their average time spent on the page, an important SEO factor. H1s and H2s should also include your primary keyword for that page.
The process of search engines storing and retrieving information obtained during the crawling
Refers to what the user or searcher is hoping to achieve when using a search engine. Understand your buyer persona and their search intent is crucial to reaching your intended audience.
The specific word or words used in a search engine to find results. Ranking for the right keywords is the best way to organically improve your website’s traffic.
Short for key performance indicator, which is a measurable value that indicates how well your activities are performing.
Optimized for capturing leads and generating conversions, and almost always includes a form the user can fill out to receive an e-book, newsletter subscription, RFQ, etc. in exchange for their contact information. Thus a lead is born!
Someone who may be interested in your product or service.
The process of other reputable and relevant websites linking to your website. This helps improve your visibility and organic search rank. You can achieve link building in multiple ways.
A multiple-word term designed to target a more refined range of users with higher purchase intent.
Example: “best marketing strategies 2021”
Acts as the description of a webpage’s content. Can be seen in snippets that appear in search results. They’re not required for all web pages, but it’s highly recommended you include one that contains your primary keyword.
A measure of activities and performance used to determine the success or failure of an SEO aspect.
An area of interest or a specific market that consists of a group of people passionate about the subject. Long-tail keywords and well-defined buyer personas help you better target a niche audience that’s more likely to buy from you.
Natural or unpaid listings that are displayed on a SERP (which we’ve defined below). Designed to give you the best and most relevant results based on your search query.
The speed at which your website loads completely. Pages that take more than a few seconds to load will likely see many viewers leave before loading is even finished -- which will bomb your average-time-on-page metric.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements that appear above and below organic search results.
A fictitious representation of what an ideal customer looks like. Demographics, needs, goals, motivations are all accounted for in a persona. Also known as a buyer persona.
The word, words, or phrase that you enter into a search engine to find what you’re looking for.
An information program that searches for items in a database based on your search query. Examples of search engines include:
Short for search engine optimization, this refers to the entire process of improving the quality and quantity of your website traffic from search engines.
SERP stands for search engine results page. This page is what search engines display to you after conducting a search. Normally, a single SERP displays 10 organic search results, and can also include a mix of:
Another section that exists within a primary domain.
Example: blog.example.com is a subdomain of example.com
The number of people (or bots) visiting your website.
Refers to the position in which your website sits within organic search results.
If you already have a digital presence and want to improve your SEO ranking ASAP, then a great place to start is to begin (or refine) your keyword research.
Sick of relying on paid ads to get website traffic? Knowing what terms to target and use in your content will help you improve your organic traffic effectively. So will understanding the back-end details that make a site rankable (or not).
Luckily, we have some advice for you. Below is our free interactive SEO checklist for 2022: