When working with clients, we generally try to turn off the industry jargon. Often the terms are confusing and mean little to those outside of our industry, and it makes working together more difficult when the two parties aren't speaking the same language.
However, there are some terms that just can't be avoided; there is just no other word for them. We'll try to explain them as best we can, but in case you're still a little lost in all the mumble-jumble of search industry terms, I've put together a little glossary.
Analytics
Analytics generally refers to statistical software used on websites for the purpose of tracking and analyzing the behaviour of visitors to a web site.
Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the text in a link. For example, ‘Click here’ or ‘More Info’ are common anchor texts. When working on off-site optimization, you generally want the anchor text of sites linking to you to contain your keywords.
Back Links
This term refers to other sites that link back to your site. Search engines consider links to a site as ‘votes’ for that site. Yes, the internet is a popularity contest. A simplified explanation of the importance of links is this: the more links to a site from other authoritative and relevant sites, the better a site will do in search.
External Links
External links are the links on your website that point to other sites or resources on the web; these “outside” sites should be useful to your users or support your content.
Impression
Generally a paid advertising term, impression refers to how many times a page is viewed by users. The acronym for this type of paid advertising is PPM, or pay-per-millions, and you generally pay – or receive – a few cents for each million ad views.
Internal Links
These are the links on your website that point to other pages on your own website, including any navigation or menu system, links within content, links in the footer, or a sitemap.
Keywords
Keywords, or key phrases, are the terms that you want to be found for when users enter them into a search engine. These can range anywhere from one- to two-word phrases, to the so-called “longtail” where a key phrase may contain three to five or more keywords.
Meta Description
The meta description is a line of code in a web page that describes the contents of that page. It does not get displayed anywhere on the page, but it may be shown in your search results (at the search engine’s discretion) so it’s important to keep this relevant and readable by your users.
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag is also code within a web page that is not displayed anywhere on the page itself. It is for listing words and phrases relevant to the content of the page. Meta keywords became extremely easy to manipulate, and therefore search engines no longer use them.
Meta Robots
Again, the meta robots tag is code within a web page that is not displayed on the page. It is a directive to the search engine crawlers instructing them what to do on each individual page. The options allowed are: follow (follow all links on this page), nofollow (do not follow any links on this page), index (place this page in the search engine index), noindex (do not place this page in the search engine index). It is related to robots.txt.
Off-Site Optimization
Off-site optimization is the process of improving your search rank by changing external factors, rather than changing your own site. This involves link building or link acquisition – basically, attaining those all-important back links to your site.
On-Site Optimization
On-site refers to optimization techniques performed on a site itself, which may include changes to information architecture, page titles, meta descriptions, internal linking strategy, content creation, and more.
Organic Results
A search results page is divided into regions for ‘organic results’ and ‘paid results’. Organic simply refers to the results that appear naturally, based on what the search engine deems to be relevant for a query. If you try the same search on several different search engines, you will often notice many of the same sites appearing in the results.
Paid Results
These are ads that companies pay for to have placed on a search result page for a specific query. Also known as PPC ads, or pay-per-click advertising, the owner will often pay a few cents to a few dollars for every user who clicks through from a search result page to their website. Paid results are often found along the right hand side, and sometimes across the top of search engine results pages.
Page Title
The page title - or title tag or <title> as it may alternately be referred to – indicates the name given to a site or page that appears in the title area of the browser, in browser tabs, in a browser’s bookmarks or favourites listing (unless the user changes it), and in your search engine results. Because of its high visibility, the page title is very important, both for identifying the nature of the page to the search engines but also to your human users.
Ranking
Ranking refers to the position your site is listed on a search result page.
Robots.txt
This is a simple text file that is placed on the server and directs the actions of search engine crawlers. It can be used to block or permit access to various files or parts of the site, and can be customized to include all search engine bots or just specific ones. The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) all follow robots.txt directives; smaller bots and crawlers may not.
SEM
SEM stands for search engine marketing, which is comprised of all aspects of internet marketing including, but not limited to: search engine optimization, PPC, social media, and digital asset optimization.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is the process of improving how well a given website or web page performs in search results. This can be performed through a combination of on-site and off-site tactics.
SERPs
This stands for ‘search engine results page’. When you perform a search query, you are presented with a series of pages of what the search engine deems to be the most relevant results.
Sitemap
There are actually two kinds of sitemaps. The first was created as a way to help users navigate complicated websites; it shows a sort of road map of all sections and pages on a web site. The second is a type of file that lists all the pages on a website and is submitted to search engines to help ensure they crawl your site the way you want them to.
Traffic
Traffic is simply a term referring to a website’s visitors as a group, rather than individually or broken down into segments.
Web Crawlers
Search engines discover new pages on the internet by a process called “crawling”. They send out crawlers (also known as robots, bots or spiders) that visit site pages, and then follow the links from those pages to other sites and pages.