We have put together this SEO Jargon buster because if you are new to SEO, It’s overwhelming to hear all these SEO terms to begin with, especially when you don’t know what they mean! By reading this article, we hope to give you a better understanding of what an SEO expert is talking to you about. So let’s start off easy…
301 Redirect
This is normally used 2 ways. If you have had a new website built and you are looking to preserve your current page rankings and keywords, you will re-direct an old page URL to the new page URL – as an example:
Old: https://www.website.com/services/webdesign/
New: http://www.website.com/webdesign/
The old URL would re-direct to the new one to keep the integrity of links coming into the page, so they can be redirected to the new page without creating a 404.
The second use of a 301 redirect is to use a domain that might have expired or is currently for sale that has good domain authority. By following the correct steps to set up a domain 301 redirect, it can be very beneficial as it will pass the domain authority onto your main website, thus in turn giving your own website a higher authority than it did before.
Ahrefs
This is a tool that an agency will use to check what is known as DR (Domain rating). Ahrefs crawls websites and, by using its own metrics, will give the website a DR score. The software can be used many ways and can help an SEO lead come up with competitor analysis and keyword gaps.
Alt text
If you have a WordPress website, you might see this term when you upload an image. By adding the Alt text, you are alerting the search robots that the image is represented by the Alt text which you have given it.
This is considered a must-do part of SEO if your current website and blog post images don’t already have ALT text. Check through your website and add any relevant keywords to the images.
Anchor text
Anchor text is used to link between your own pages of a website or a link to another website. Anchor text is normally hyperlinked to another page or website and it is generally highlighted with a different colour than the text on the page.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. If you have a lot of backlinks from high authority websites, this is good to increase your own website’s authority.
There is 2 different versions of backlinks, one is “No follow” in which your website doesn’t get the authority link juice from that website. The other is “Follow” in which your website will benefit from having a link placed on that website.
Domain Ratings
As a digital agency, we use 3 websites that all give different website scores. They use their own algorithm to determine the score of the website. Here is a breakdown of each one.
DR = Domain Rating
DA = Domain Authority
PA = Page Authority
TF = Trust Flow
CF = Citation Flow
We use these to give your website an overall score when we do competitor analysis. We do the same for your competitors and this gives us a rough idea of how your website stacks up against its competitors.
Disavow
A lot of people don’t know what this great disavow tool does, but it’s an important part of managing backlinks to your website. While there is so many amazing websites in the world, there is also a percentage of really bad websites that might harm your website by linking to it. The goal of the disavow is to get rid of these websites from your own website backlink profile, as it can harm your website by getting a link from these often Google banned sites.
SEMrush has recently added a new tool that shows if a website has a good or bad backlink profile; helping you make smart choices about the websites you get a link from.
Duplicate content
Knowing if you have duplicate content on your web pages is very important as Google doesn’t like this. Whenever we start a discussion with a new client, we will run a website SEO audit to determine if the website has duplicate content. If this is the case, we will work with the client to replace the content.
Featured snippet
By getting a feature snippet, Google have put you above general search results. The content of the snipper is normally informational content that shows up for question google searches. By winning feature snippets, they can drive a lot more traffic to your website. When you devise a content plan, this should include informational content that puts you in the best possible chance of winning feature snippets.
Google My Business
Also widely known as GMB (Google My Business), this is when you create a Google business profile. So when people search for your brand name, the search results will come up with your brand. The other part of this is having a full profile that shows all the services and products that you offer. By having a solid and high performing GMB profile, you can generate many searches for different search strings.
Customers and clients can also leave feedback about your business and generating good feedback can really help your business grown within the different search terms.
Keyword research
This is a very important aspect of SEO. We consider your website authority against your competitors and research keywords and blog topics we think you could rank for. If you have a brand new website and starting at zero, we generally look for long string keywords to get you started with. Any digital agency would look to start link building as part of the overall SEO plan to help grown the website to have more authority to gain the harder to reach keywords.
Link building
Link building is probably one of the most important parts of an SEO plan, if you have a goal to overtake your competitors. If you plan on having an overall SEO strategy, link building should be a part of it. If you have a website ranked with a DR1 but your competitor is a DR35, you have a lot of link building to get to the same level and beyond that competitor.
Picking the correct website to link build on is very important. The website should be clean from spam and any words that Google doesn’t like. Here at Visions Design, we run the domains through a 19 point check to make sure links are only placed on the highest quality websites.
Page load speed
This is probably one of the most important ranking factors for SEO, having a website that loads quick. This helps Google decide where to put you in the rankings. It doesn’t want to put your website top for a certain search string if the end consumer ultimately gets a web page that takes so long to download they click off it. There is a certain expectation for websites to load to and you can check your own page speed test.
Conculsion
While the world of SEO can be a minefield, we hoped that our SEO Jargon buster brief has made it easier for you to understand. We are happy to discuss and spend time with you to explain everything and the process of becoming an SEO client of Visions Design.
Book a meeting today to discuss your SEO Project!