I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.
If you want my team to do your SEO & digital marketing for you, click here.
If your new to the SEO field and have spoken to a few companies to try to get a better understanding of what the hype is all about you may be left feeling somewhat confused and frustrated by all the new words.
In fact, these SEO guys have a language all to themselves. In order for you to get a clearer idea of what they’re talking about following are 10 buzz words with easy to understand descriptions.
SEO : stands for search engine optimisation and it’s the main buzz word that everyone says on a daily basis. It’s basically the process of improving the trust and authority of your website so that Google and other search engines start to rank it. SEO is divided into 2 parts; ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ and both are critical in helping your website gain more trust and SEO rankings. The logic behind SEO is that the better the rankings and online visibility of your website, the more traffic you will receive and this will drive sales and revenue. Google makes it extremely difficult for companies to achieve the best SEO rankings as they manipulate their ranking criteria daily. No one knows what they do or when they are going to do it. So, SEO is a kind of guessing game. Having said that, there are rules and guidelines that most SEO companies should follow and this is termed white hat SEO.
White Hat SEO: stands for best practice SEO. This means that any form of link building or ‘on-page’ SEO is going to abide by Google’s best practices. The opposite of white hat is black hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO: this used to be a common method employed by SEO agencies in the past to try and rig or manipulate SEO rankings through the use of over optimising websites with dodgy backlinks or keyword stuffing on the website.
Related post: Small Business SEO guide – Black Hat vs White Hat SEO
Over Optimisation: A term used to describe the purchase of hundreds if not thousands of backlinks over a short period of time to over inflate the importance of your website. It’s part of black hat strategies used by many SEO agencies in the ’90s and early 2000s until Google rolled out algorithms to detect this type of activity.
SEM or Search Engine Marketing: is a type of pay per click also known as Adwords where you pay to be on the top 4 search results of Google. SEM is based on a bidding system where the more your prepared to pay for a certain keyword the higher your ad will appear. There is a technique behind the bidding strategy and there are a few factors that combine to produce better results.
Google Analytics: is a code that is placed into your website which will give you a whole range of tools to measure your sites performance, number of visitors as well as a whole army of data to work out who is coming to your site.
User Experience: This refers to the way your customer engages with your website. Do they land on site and leave (known as bounce rates) or do they drill further into the site to see other pages? Do they click on designated buttons such as newsletter sign-ups, inquiry forms or contact us fields. The better the user experience (UX) the easier it will be for a potential customer to navigate your site in a seamless experience. This will in turn make it easier for them to buy from you.
Bounce Rates: Google has a term in its Analytics called bounce rates. A bounce rate means when someone lands on an entry page on your site and immediately leaves the site. High bounce rates are not good and show that the user is leaving your site quickly. This proves that they are not enjoying the user experience and will look elsewhere or your site does not have the product or service the user was searching for.
B2B Business to Business: refers to businesses selling to each other and not consumers.
B2C Business to Consumer: refers to businesses selling to consumers and this is probably the biggest market that needs SEO.
SERP’s Search Engine Results Pages: These are the pages that appear on Google when you conduct a keyword search. These results are ranked 1 through to 10 and are positioned according to the most relevant results. This is where SEO comes in handy. The better quality SEO the better your SERP’s. If you can get your head around that last point then you’re well on your way to a better understanding of SEO.
Still, confused? It’s best to speak to us in person at SEO Sydney Experts. If you ever want terms explained or want to know how well your website is performing on Google, we can help. The digital marketing landscape is really confusing and if you don’t understand the basic fundamentals then you need to talk to a SEO professional.