The Zelst Glossary of SEO Key Terms

For those new to the world of SEO and digital marketing, it can be slightly overwhelming, becoming accustomed to all the SEO terminology. You may find yourself asking what is a SERP, what is an SEO campaign? Not to worry, we have put together a glossary of key SEO terms to give you some insight into what they mean and why they are important for SEO.

Analytics – This is a suite of tools designed to collect and analyse data about website usage. The most commonly used tool is Google Analytics, a free program which allows you to get a massive amount of data on the way people are using your site, which pages are working, what converts and many more sets of data. This helps you track the success of your SEO strategy.

Anchor Text– Anchor text is the highlighted text in a hyperlink e.g. this link to our SEO page. In HTML this link looks like this “<a href=”https://www.zelst.co.uk/”>this link to our SEO page</>”. Good, descriptive anchor text is also an important part of your link-building effort. Anchor text lets your readers know what to expect when they click on the link, and also helps to tell Google’s algorithm what your content is about and what your page should be ranking for.

Blog – This is a great opportunity to create unique content that allows you to appear as an authority on the subject of your website. Every new post you create is another chance to be found online by a search engine. Creating content-based on longer tail keywords and questions that users may ask about the topic is a great way to increase the likelihood of being found.

Keywords – These are specific words and phrases that trigger a search. They play a huge role in SEO as a website that has well-optimised keywords, relevant to a user’s search query is likely to display higher up a search engine results page than one that isn’t. Some keywords are simply a word, whereas others are questions or phrases that make for opportunities in terms of content creation. These are known as long-tail keywords.

Keyword Research – This is one of the most important areas of SEO. Dedicating time to keyword research is a valuable activity with the potential for a huge return on the effort put in. Keyword research involves considering what a site aims to do, what you think a customer will be looking for and finding ideas that will help bring traffic to the site, but more importantly the right kind of traffic.

Link Building – A term often mentioned by digital marketing professionals. Link building aims to actively grow the number of quality relevant links into your website. This is something that needs a careful and methodical approach, as changes to Google algorithms have cracked down on low-quality spammy links used to gain quick results.

Local SEO – Use of mobile technology has increased dramatically in recent times and will continue to do so. Because of this, people can access information on the go from almost anywhere. Local SEO allows a user to find your website as search engines (Google especially) are gearing up towards more individualised search results. For example, if you’re logged into your Google account, a search uses your search history and location as well as the keywords you use to bring results to best match your needs. Therefore, ensuring you have put effort into local SEO is hugely important (read more here).

Meta Descriptions – The perfect accompaniment to a title tag. A meta description is a snippet of up to 155 characters summarising the page’s content and should ideally include any keywords that page is trying to target. The meta description is displayed underneath the title tag on a SERP and often includes the searched-for phrase to help the user. To find out more about how to create the best meta description, read Yoast’s guide.

Rankings – This is a term that people place a lot of emphasis on when it comes to SEO. Rankings are where a website shows up relative to other search results on a SERP. Many different factors come into play in terms of rankings. You can’t simply stuff large numbers of keywords into a page and hope it works (it doesn’t!). Instead, you should focus on having useful and relevant content that is easy for a user and search engine to understand and navigate.

Search Engine – A search engine is a website that allows its users the ability to search the content of webpages online for specific content that they require, based on the keywords that the user has searched. These are constantly evolving to give the user better results that are relevant to their search. Google is the world’s most used search engine, however there a range of others such as Bing Yahoo, Baidu (a Chinese language-based search engine) and Yandex (a Russian language search engine).

SEO – the simple definition of SEO (search engine optimisation), is any activity that attempts to improve organic (searches that are not paid for) search engine rankings. The more optimised a site is, the more easily it will be found – from the perspective of a search engine and by your potential customers.

SERP – The SERP is the Search Engine Results Page. For many, the SERPs are the most important pages on the internet, as they are a scene of fierce competition to be ranked highest – both organic and paid (PPC). The page has ads, images and organic search results. Alongside this, there can be a knowledge graph, and information about local businesses, depending on the search.

Site Structure – The way that a site is laid out is vital for SEO. A well-structured website means having pages set up in a hierarchy of importance with keywords assigned to each specific page. The website structure also has to be logical for the user to navigate. For more information about creating an SEO friendly site structure, read here.

Title Tags – Put simply, a title tag is a clickable headline for a given search on a SERP. Technically a title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage. Title tags are a crucial element of SEO as it’s the first thing a search engine reads about your page to give the user the results they need. Therefore, when creating your title tag, it must describe what is on the webpage and try to include a keyword if possible.

Zelst is a leading expert when it comes to SEO. If you need more information about any of the SEO key terms discussed here or any other aspect of SEO or digital marketing, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us and see what we can do to help you and your business!