Even if you are not planning to do SEO for yourself, but are instead going to employ a digital agency, it is still immensely helpful if you understand what some of the terms relating to SEO mean. Here are 5 of them, which you really should know:
Backlink: This is a link located on another website that links directly to yours, meaning if someone clicks it, they will be sent from that site to yours. Backlinks play a significant role in SEO and rankings.
Google has made it clear that they do not just count the number of backlinks going to a website and are more inclined to consider the authority of the websites that are being linked from as a ranking factor.
Spider: Not an eight-legged creepy-crawly but is instead software that is used by the search engines to gather and send back information about a website when the spider ‘crawls’ it. Crawl basically means to analyse. Spiders visit a website regularly and come from all kinds of sources albeit search engines are the most common
Anchor Text: This is the text which forms parts of a piece of written content and contains a link to another website. The specific words are used to establish the keyword relevance of the website being linked to.
An example would be in a sentence that includes the words ‘dog training’ and if they are used for the anchor text it suggests that the website linked to wants to rank for the term dog training
Algorithm: This is the formula used by search engines that calculates where a website should be ranked on their search results. Google’s algorithm is the one most referred to given that itis the biggest search engine by some distance.
Metadata: This is data that is mainly hidden from visitors to a website, and which identify to the search engines what keywords a website is aiming to rank for, and its relevancy to them.
Specific metadata are called tags such as the Title. Description and Keyword tags. A different title and description tag can be used for each page of a website allowing it to rank highly for several different keywords.
