Blog
SEO

Big SEO dictionary

Advanced terms are often thrown around quickly when talking about SEO. It can be difficult for someone who doesn't work with SEO on a daily basis to understand what all the terms mean. Therefore, here is a glossary with explanations so you can ask the right questions and fully understand. Often, SEO sounds much more complex than it really is.Table of contents

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short, it is about optimising your website so that you appear in the right type of searches in search engines, such as Google or Bing.

Metatitle

Meta title can sometimes be confused with page title. Metadata is the data that search engines pick up and index and then present in search results. The meta title is the title of the search result. A metatitle is needed for each page and if you have not declared a metatitle yourself, the search engine will take a heading that you have on the page that it thinks fits. The meta title is not visible to a visitor of the page but is written into the underlying code of each page. See image below how a meta title looks like in a Google search.

Meta description

Meta description is the longer and slightly shorter text presented in a search result in a search engine, such as Google or Bing. The meta description is entered on each individual page and should be unique. However, you cannot see a meta description when you visit a specific page, but it is entered as code on the page. See image below what a meta description is in a Google search.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is part of search engine optimisation. The technical SEO is about the underlying code of the website and what is not visible to a visitor but what a search engine (e.g. Google) sees. Examples of technical SEO can be meta titles, meta descriptions, internal linking, SSL certificates, alt texts, heading classes, etc. Often it is seen as a complement to content.

Alt text

Alt texts are an informational text about an image that should describe what the image shows. Actually, it is intended to be printed as text if the browser has difficulty displaying the image. But when it comes to SEO, alt text is the way search engines index images. Search engines are not yet as good as humans at identifying what an image shows, so the search engine reads the alt text.

SSL Certificate

You've probably visited a website where your browser says "this page is not secure". This means that there is no SSL certificate on the website. You can tell the difference between a website that has a starting address that begins with https or only http. Https is the secure version and only works if there is an SSL certificate. The SSL certificate can be installed on a website via your hosting provider and is nowadays often free of charge. Basically, the SSL certificate is a type of encryption that makes the site less vulnerable to "hacking". Having a valid and working SSL certificate has a positive impact on your website's SEO.

SSL encryption Contitude

Heading classes

If you wrote HTLM code when you made your website, you probably used H1, H2, H3 etc. to declare headings. Using your keywords in headings has historically been very important but has become less and less important over time. Some now claim it has no importance at all.

Internal link

In short, internal linking is the links between your pages on your website. If there are many internal links to a specific page, search engines will think that this page is more important than other pages. Often there are the most internal links to the front page as most pages have links in their logo on all pages back to the front page.

Backlinks

Google as a search engine started with the basic idea that the websites that had the most and strongest links to them were more credible and therefore better than other websites. Today, there are lots of factors in Google's algorithms that determine which pages will rank higher or lower but backlinks are still an important part. A backlink is a link from another website that leads to your website. A backlink can carry different weight depending on which website is linking to you. A website that has high credibility has more weight than a start-up blog that links back to you. A distinction is also made between no-follow links and do-follow links. A no-follow link is worth less than a do-follow link.

10 content tips before publishing_Jobassigner3

Content

Content is exactly that and can be text, images, audio, video, etc. For your website to be indexed and ranked, there must be some content that a visitor can access and that a search engine can index. This is often referred to as content or technical SEO and is most important for your overall SEO. Depending on who you ask, you will get different answers. We at Contitude tend to reason as follows: if there is no content, it doesn't matter what technical SEO tricks you use. There will still be nothing to index. Therefore, we value content more but it depends on a case-by-case basis what you need help with.

Length of Content

For example, if you're writing a blog post because you want to appear on a certain keyword, there's a reason to check how many words your blog post will be. This is because search engines take into account how long your post is. The reasoning behind this is that if you can only write 100 words on a topic, it means you don't know very much about the topic, but if you can write 100,000 words on a particular topic, you must know a lot about it. There are studies that say that the average article that is on the first page of a Google search is about 1200 words. Another interesting thing about length is the fact that it takes a certain amount of words on a page for that page to be relevant to be indexed and appear in a search engine. That length is not stated and clear but there is talk that the limit is at about 300-500 words.

Keyword density

Whether you're recording a video or writing a blog post, a search engine will try to identify all the words that are said or written to understand what the post or video is about. Keyword density is about how often your keyword/keyword that you are trying to be indexed on is mentioned. The guideline is to try to have a keyword density of about 4%. But you should be careful about using the keyword too much as it will be penalised by search engines.

Broken links

A broken link is a link that leads to an error page (404 page) without information. It happens quite often if you have had a website for a long time and delete pages or change URLs (see the section on URLs below). If you keep links to URLs that no longer exist, the visitor ends up on a page with no content and this is identified by search engines as a bad user experience. It may therefore be a good idea to go through all the links and see if there are any broken links on your website and, if so, redirect these links correctly. This is also called adding 301 redirects which is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

Broken Links - Contitude

Sitemap

The sitemap is just as it sounds, a map of your website. Once upon a time, it was extremely important for search engines to index and crawl your entire website correctly. Nowadays, search engines are more sophisticated and often find all pages without problems. But having a sitemap still affects your SEO ranking. It is easy to fix and there are several websites that offer free sitemaps and several plugins for WordPress.

Language declaration

When you make a website, you can specify the language in which the website is written. This was an important part historically as search engines had difficulty identifying which language a website was written in but nowadays they usually find it themselves. Regardless, you should have specified the language in which the website is written. This is usually done in the basic settings of your website. The most important thing is that you have not set one language and write in another.

Page speed

An increasingly important element for search engines is to rank websites according to how fast they load. In fact, it has been shown that one of the biggest reasons why a visitor leaves a page is because it loads too slowly. There are many elements that affect the speed of a website, including the size of images, extra code on the website, server response time, etc. Different parts are differently difficult to influence and our best tip is to check your page speed here.It is also important to check the speed on both mobile and desktop. It can differ a lot.

Page speed Contitude

URL

URL is the full website address. E.g. https://www.contitude.se/seo sock engine optimization which is the landing page for SEO. This greatly affects which keyword you will show up for in a search engine search. Above all, it is the last part behind the main domain that matters. Always use your keyword in the last part of the URL and change å, ä, ö to a, a, o. It is also good if the URL is not too long.

Responsive website

It is important that the website is responsive, i.e. works on desktop, tablet and mobile. Several search engines have switched to what they call "mobile first" which means that they primarily rank the website on how it works on a mobile device. This is determined on how much traffic your current website has from mobile and tablet compared to desktop. Regardless of whether you are ranked mobile first, it is important that your website performs well on mobile devices. What may be worth checking is that all buttons are visible and easy to click and that the text is at a readable size even on mobile.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this glossary useful and that you have a better understanding of the terms used when talking about SEO. If you come across a word that you are not familiar with in a discussion about SEO, please stop and ask what it means in practice.If you are missing a term in this glossary, please let us know and we will be more than happy to add it.

DOWNLOAD THIS GUIDE 2021

Want to get started? Send us a message...

Thank you! We'll be in touch as soon as we can!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Book an appointment now.

We'd love to hear about your digital marketing ambitions, goals and challenges - and most importantly, give you tips on marketing activities that work for you!

Book a meeting