As of July 2022, online search engine market leader Google had an 83.84% market share in the worldwide search engine industry. On the other hand, Bing accounted for 8.88%, while Yahoo’s market share was 2.55%.
These statistics show how popular Google is as a search engine. Most businesses that want their websites to rank high in Google’s search engine results typically turn to search engine optimization or SEO.
For the uninitiated, the concept of SEO may be challenging to understand without consulting a digital marketing expert. Digitalspotlight.com.au offers a free consultation to help you become familiar with SEO and manage your business’ digital marketing needs.
What are the standard terms used in SEO, and how does SEO work? What do crawl budget, heading tags, keyword stuffing, and rank mean?
This article lists the terms often used in SEO and their definition. The write-up also defines SEO and how it can work for your business.
Common SEO Terms and Their Definitions
Below are some terms you are likely to encounter when working with SEO:
- 301 redirect: This status code indicates that a web page has moved permanently to another location.
- 404 error: This error code means the web page no longer exists or has been taken down permanently.
- Anchor text: This text refers to the words you can click to redirect you to another page. Anchor text also affects the ranking of the page being linked.
- Black hat SEO: This strategy is an unethical practice to manipulate a website’s search engine rankings through methods such as keyword stuffing. Websites using black hat SEO can receive a penalty or ban from the search results.
- Crawl budget: This budget is the allocated number of pages thatthe search engine bot can crawl and index within a specific time.
- Crawler: This program, also called a bot or spider, crawls or reads on- and off-page site content to gather information for proper search engine indexing.
- External link: This link redirects users to a domain outside the website’s source domain and helps improve ranking based on trustworthiness, popularity, relevance, and anchor text used.
- Heading tags: These HTML (hypertext markup language) tags help explain a web page’s content hierarchy. H1 tags have the highest importance, while H6 has the least.
- HTTP: This term stands for hypertext transfer protocol and determines how a computer server sends data to a web browser.
- Internal links: These links direct the user from one page to another within the same website. Internal links help users navigate the website and allow search engines to understand your site’s structure.
- Keyword stuffing: This practice involves repeating or adding irrelevant keywords to manipulate search engine rankings. Keyword stuffing violates Google’s guidelines and can penalize a website.
- Long-tail keywords: These search terms have more than two or three words and typically have lower search volume but are more specific.
- Query: Queries are words, phrases, or questions that users enter into the search engine.
- Rank: This term refers to a website’s position on the search engine results page for a specific keyword.
- SERP: This term stands for search engine results page.
- Visibility: This metric measures how visible a website is to users based on the site’s prominence or popularity in the SERP.
- XML sitemap: The XML (extensive markup language) sitemap is an index of all website pages intended for ranking on search engines.
What Is SEO and How Can It Work for You?
SEO is the process of capturing traffic from free, organic, or natural search results from search engines. SEO aims to improve your website’s ranking in the SERP. The higher your website ranks in the search engine, the more likely people will see it.
Digital marketers perform SEO by engaging in the following activities:
- Identifying relevant keywords with significant search traffic potential.
- Creating helpful and high-quality content optimized for users and search engines.
- Adding relevant links from reputable and high-quality websites.
- Measuring the results of the SEO campaign.
With the extensive search engine and social media usage, businesses now consider SEO an essential marketing activity.
To know more about how SEO can help your business or improve your website’s search engine ranking, consult a digital marketing expert or agency.
References
https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
