SEO is a hot topic these days and if you own an online business and have a website or blog, it’s imperative to make sure that your site is optimized so search engines can find it. SEO means search engine optimization, which is explained further in another blog post. When trying to optimize your site, you might come across some terms that sound pretty foreign. Below are just a few SEO terms you need to know and their definition to help you navigate the world of SEO.
SERPs
SERP is the first of many acronyms that we are going to come across. This one stands for ‘Search Engine Results Page’ and is any page with results for a particular search term. You want to be at the top of the SERPs.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate refers to the amount of time visitors spend on your site when they go there. A high bounce rate means that the greater proportion of your visitors comes to your site, looks at just one page, and then leaves. A low bounce rate means that the majority of users follow at least one internal link.
HubSpot has compiled a rough benchmark of bounce rates by industry that show the average bounce rate across different types of sites.
How do I check my bounce rate?
Statcounter lets you track your bounce rate for every page on your website. To get started, create an account, add the Statcounter code to your website and go to the Reports section. In the Pages widget, select the Entry tab and then View Report.
Link Building
Link building means getting as many links as possible that point toward your page. You want to get lots of links because Google uses these to rank and index your page.
Check out this awesome list of the 15 Best Link Building Tools!
Spiders
Spiders are the pieces of code that Google sends out across the web to read all the different sites and to look for content relevant to particular searches. You want to make your site spider friendly if you want to get onto the SERPs. You might also find these referred to as ‘robots’.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO means that someone has targeted a website to try and damage their ranking. To do this, they simply aggressively link build for that website by placing their links on irrelevant and low-quality sites. Google then mistakenly believes the owner of the site to be spamming and punishes that site accordingly.
Negative SEO is one example of black hat SEO. This means basically using sneaky and not-so-upstanding methods to raise a site’s profile and fend off competition. Black hat SEO is bad news because it’s immoral, but also because you risk getting caught and having your site punished as a result. White hat SEO is ‘good’ SEO that aims to win by providing good quality sites and working with Google.
Algorithms
Algorithms in regard to SEO mean the algorithms that Google uses to decide which sites deserve to be at the top. When Google changes its algorithms, suddenly the whole SEO game changes.
Penguin/Panda: Penguin and Panda are the names of two big algorithm changes that caused a real storm in the world of SEO.
