I got my first PC back in 1998 – yes, you guessed it right, I had Win98 on it and a 56k modem. For those who don’t know what a 56k modem is, believe me, you missed out on all the fun! Since then, I have surfed the internet (slowly), I witnessed Google taking over Yahoo as the main online search engine and I was at university when Facebook came around and then the big e-boom started to happen – imagine, the first time I had an e-commerce marketing lecture was during my Masters degree in 2005 and not even the lecturer knew a lot about digital marketing in practice! These were also the days where I was learning basic HTML to add sparkle and moving stickers to my MySpace profile and I was wondering how to be top in Google Search so I can get more followers..!

Well, good news : 12 years after finishing University, I know what most of the digital terms mean not only in theory but also in practice. I can actually explain pretty well to my boss when I am asked, for example, what these “page loads” mean on my Google Analytics report. How did I manage to fit all of this change into my brain? Practice and repetition. I created a glossary, for which I gathered plenty of information from 2005 until now. And after all these years, I present to you the most common terms that any marketer might stumble upon on their digital trip to SEO success.

Glossary

A/B Testing: testing a new online technique, whether this is SEO or PPC, against a control to see whether the new technique is more effective than the existing one.

Adwords: the tech that Google uses to power PPC advertising. So, basically, you pay for Adwords, that facilitates targeting adverts to specific searches, adverts appear to the top right of organic searches, customer clicks on your link, you pay Google.

Affiliate marketing: An online marketing strategy that involves getting commission by selling third party services and products. You usually pay for subscriptions, sales, or  clicks or a combination of the above. AWIN is the most known platform. Sometimes, affiliate marketing is mixed with partnership marketing for more cost-effective, long-term exposure.

Alt text: aka alternative text. Adding text to your images so Google can identify them on Google Image Search. 

Anchor text: The word or phrase contained in a link. It is usually blue and underlined and takes you to another page. Like this one here.

 

Backlinks: The total number of links a website has based on other websites that direct traffic to your website. Also known as incoming links, inbound links and inward links. The more backlinks you have on quality websites, the more you will appear on Google Search. I will give advice on some outreach marketing techniques on another blogpost.

Black Hat SEO: trying to improve your ranking with techniques that are not aligned with search engine guidelines, i.e. keyword stuffing (yes, everyone has done this before). If such techniques are used, it is likely that the website will be penalized by search engines.

Blog: a section of a website of a whole website with regular published articles of a certain theme or topic. The more you post, the bigger the probability to get crawled by search engines.

Bot (or spider or robot or crawler): Search engines use bots to find websites on the Internet. Imagine it like the crawlers from the Matrix that were chasing Neo.

Bounce rate: The percentage of users who leave a site immediately after visiting one page, or as RuPaul says, “sashay away”. The higher the rate, the more it affects your SEO.

 

Content: any useful piece of information on a topic or theme that is regularly updated, not copied/unique and actually useful to the reader.

Conversion: the ultimate goal behind an SEO strategy. A purchase made, an email list subscription, an enquiry sent are some of the conversion goals. Improving web optimisation also improves rankings on search engines, which helps to bring customers to your website and increase the conversion rate.

Crawl: The process in which a search engine scans a site by collecting information. Usually made by crawlers aka bots (go to B for Bot).

CTR: Click Through Rate. Formula: No of clicks/No of impressions. Example: my blog appeared 50 times on a search engine results page and was clicked through 20 times = 20/50 = 0.40 = 40% CTR.

 

Domain: your website’s name without the www. (this was easy!)

 

Google Analytics: software by Google to track information on your website that will help you identify strengths and weaknesses. Do more of the best, improve all the rest!

 

Heading Tags: titles and headlines on the website. In coding, they range from H1 to H6 – that is the font size of the heading. Great to make content easily readable.

Hyperlink: or external link. Connection of one page to another. It is good to open a new page when setting up a hyperlink.

 

Image SEO: optimising images, photos and graphics with alt text and captions. Making sure images load quickly is also good image SEO practice.

Impressions: No. of people that see a web page, usually in search results. It also counts for pages within your website.

Inbound link: A link from another website to yours. See also backlink.

Index: a search engine database that includes all URLs and their files. Google, for example, first crawls your site with bots, then indexes it and then – voilá – it keeps it ready for potential search results based on set criteria.

Internal links: A link from one page to another, but within the same website.

 

Keyword phrase: A word the phrase a user makes a search for. Aim for quality, not quantity. When you have 4 or more words, this is called a long tail keyword, which can be more accurate and can help improve your conversion and target a more defined audience.

 

Link building: The process by which we create links from other websites to ours.

Local SEO: making sure your site appears in search results when someone is looking for a business, a product or a service in your area.

 

Meta: aka meta keywords. Only visible to search engine. Think of it as a hashtag for Instagram but for a website. What words are relevant to the topic or theme you talk about? What could the reader search for when looking for information on the same theme or topic? Kinda redundant now, though, as search engines improved their ability to search for content – all praise the new Google algorithm!

 

Optimisation: the process of tweaking your website’s structure and content to be found easier by bots and get listed and ranked high on search engine results.

Organic results: Physical results of search engines. Unpaid results. All traffic that comes to the website through those results is the so-called organic traffic.

 

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising. Business model of internet marketing. The advertiser pays a fee for each click of their advert. Usually easily identifiable on search results.

Pageviews: Important web metric for the website. Pageviews = total No of pages viewed on a site within a specific timeframe. The higher the pageviews, the greater the reader engagement. Can be combined with other web metrics for better data interpretation, such as bounce rate and sessions.

Paid results: Display a web page in search results for search engines with a monetary price (Google Adwords).

Panda, Penguin, Pigeon: Google’s zoo. Just names of algorithms that were amended to improve search results for users.

Position: Ranking of the website on Google results page.

PPC: Paid Google results which can be found top and right of the main (unpaid) results.

PR / PageRank: The rating that Google’s search engine gives to each site with possible values ​​from 0 to 10.

 

Quality backlinks: Whether a backlink to our site is considered quality by search engines.

 

Ranking factor: A factor that uses a search engine to rank web pages.

 

Search Console: as per Google’s words, ” Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.”

Search engine: aka Google (or Bing). Aka an automated system that continually searches for information on the Internet.

Search Engine Algorithm: Mathematical formula used by search engines to rank a website in results.

SEO: everything you do that helps your website appear in better positions on Google results after a customer search. Aka Search Engine Optimisation. This includes SEO title / Title tag (the name of your page), meta tags, original and quality content and a combination of EVERYTHING.

SEM: aka Search Engine Marketing. Type of internet marketing. The paid version of SEO.

SERP (search engine result page): A search engine result page. Can feature a snippet, also called Feature Snippet and it is one of the most prominent trends for 2018 in SEO.

Sitemap: the trunk of your website tree. It shows how the pages are connected to each other and helps the Google bots to identify pages that were not going to be discovered otherwise (unless you clicked through all the website manually to find what you are looking for) and promote them in search results for the benefit of the reader.

SMM (social media marketing): Promoting a website or business through social media sites (eg Facebook, twitter).

 

Time on page: web metric. Measures the time visitors spend on a specific page. The higher the time, the better the ranking of the page. To be linked to bounce rate and pageviews or sessions to give better data interpretation.

 

URL: The address of a web page. For example, WordPress is www.wordpress.com

 

Website Speed: time that takes a website to load. Need to keep it below 6 secs. It actually pays off to be quick on this one..!

White Hat SEO: Optimization techniques allowed by search engines. Focusing on people, what their interests are, what their behaviours are and making sure that you create content for the people, not just for the search engines.  Opposite of the Black Hat SEO.

 

If you want to contribute any other words or amend existing term explanations, please feel free to comment below or message me on vdiamanti@gmail.com and I will be more than glad to take on board any recommendations. Thank you for taking time to read my blog!