Top SEO Terms for Businesses to Understand

Posted on April 19, 2019

When working with an agency on your WordPress website and SEO strategy, knowing the basic terms will help you have a better understanding of what your marketing team is doing – the “method behind the madness,” so to speak.

7 Important SEO Terms

Keywords

Keywords are the terms that define what your page or website is about and are used like a beacon to make your website easy to find for the people looking for your products or services. They are the phrases or words you associate with your business and would expect someone to type into a search engine if they’re looking for a business that offers the goods or services you offer.

For instance, a candy store may use “chocolate candy” or “candy shop in North Carolina” as keywords, anticipating potential customers to type these words into a search bar. Your SEO agency will implement these keywords into your content to help search engines see your website as relevant to what your target audience is using.

Meta Tags

These tags are bits of HTML code added to a site that help define its category and purpose. Some of these tags are seen by users when they search your site, and some of these tags only appear to search engines crawling your site. Below is an example of how a user could see your Title and Description tags when searching “candy stores in Cary NC” on Google:

Link Building

The more authoritative websites that link back to your website, the better it is for your search engine results because Google, Bing, and other engines assume that if a reputable site is linking to your site, it must be reputable, too . However, having low quality or spammy websites link to your site can have the opposite effect. Link building refers to finding good, quality websites to link back to you. This could be done by reaching out to a popular blogger to write about your product, building a Yelp profile, or by submitting a business listing to a directory.

Internal Linking

Linking internally to different pages in your website is a way to help users find the information they are looking for. It is also a method to help distribute authority throughout your website. For instance, if you have 4 awesome links from your blogs pointing to your service page, the service page distributes some of this “link juice” or “link authority” throughout the other pages it links to internally.

White Hat vs. Black Hat

In SEO, there are both “white hat” and “black hat tactics.” White hat techniques include ways of optimizing your website that enhance user experience, staying within Google’s guidelines. For instance, building social profiles to enhance your online presence and linking to these profiles on your website is a white hat technique.

Black hat techniques are often the easy way out that later result in a Google penalty. Acquiring irrelevant or low quality backlinks to your website is a black hat tactic that could boost your results temporarily, followed by a harsh drop. Another example of black hat could be “keyword stuffing,” overusing keywords to the point where the content isn’t readable, or creating useless, poorly written pages for the sake of increasing content.

Conversions

At it’s base, a conversion refers to having a visitor to your website do an intended action, but the specific definition of a conversion depends on your preferences and goals as a business. For instance, if your priority is to become an authority on a topic, a conversion may be a newsletter subscription or download of a white paper. If you are interested in selling products on your e-commerce website, a conversion would be a sale, while a business who offers a service would consider a phone call or form lead as the conversion. Ultimately, conversions are your goals for the users coming into your site.

Traffic

Traffic means the amount of visits, or sessions, on your website. The types of traffic include:

• Organic: From a search engine
• Paid: From a paid advertisement, like a Facebook Ad or a Google Ad campaign
• Direct: Typing your website address directly
• Referral: From a link from another website like Facebook or a blog

Knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you find your strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Contact Us for SEO and Digital Marketing Services

At WP.digital, we design optimized, business-class WordPress websites with monthly worry-free site hosting and ongoing digital marketing packages to continually boost your business. Speak with a member of our team today for a high conversion, search engine friendly website and to learn more about our services by calling us at 888-239-9222 or fill out our form here.