For all the talk about SEO, if you don’t understand the search engine optimization lingo, you won’t know how it can help you market your business online. Here are some terms you need to know.
The Alt Effect
When you have images on your website, the alt text, which is a description of the photo is important. It tells Google what photos are on your site. These descriptions are often left out, but they are vital for SEO marketing. The reason why this text is important is because Google crawlers can’t read images, but they have no problem with text. If you manage to come up with a viable description of the image and it fits with your page, it will be displayed in Google queries for images. And remember; keep SEO keywords out of the image descriptions.
Backlinks
A backlink is a hyperlink that directs people from one website to yours. These are very effective in Google’s estimation. However, with the introduction of Google Penguin, it’s important that the quality of the website you link from be superb or it could end hurting your SEO endeavors.
Header Tags
This is an HTML term and it means that a specific line of text is more prominent than others. This would be the case with the title of a blog or name of a product on a website. It is meant to denote importance.
Internal Links
These links take people to different pages on your site. Not only do these features help people get around you your site, but they are also used to rank your website by Google. Google will rank your website based on the content of each page, not just your home page.
Long Tail Keywords
Keywords are at the heart of SEO, but if you use too short or worse yet too general of a keyword, you are going to find it difficult to eek out much in the way of results when it comes to search engine queries. You see, a longer keyword phrase may have less search demand and might be the best place to maximize improved rankings. For example “Skateboards” is going to get a lot of searches, however, “Skateboards for teenage boys” is a bit longer, not searched as much and you can see better search engine rankings.
Meta Keywords
These words are metadata that find a home in the websites header. These keywords must be relevant to not only the page but to the entire website as well. While these keywords have waned in relevance, there are still some search engines that place a significant priority on their existence.
Title Tag
This is the title that will displayed in Google’s search results. You’ll want to try and fit in keywords here as this is the most valuable page aspect in SEO today