In the world of SEO, there are phrases and abbreviations that are constantly batted around. As people in the biz we know exactly what they mean but are often guilty of saying these phrases without realising that others are most likely looking at us thinking we are talking in a completely different language. To end this once and for all we have put together a jargon buster so that you never have to be confused again when talking to anyone about SEO!
SEO
Let’s start with SEO itself as although people understand what it is a lot of the time, they don’t always know what it stands for. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation which is essentially the art of encouraging search engines to rank your website higher.
CRO
Conversion Rate Optimisation is a pool of techniques used to encourage more visitors to complete whatever task you want them to complete. That can be getting in touch via a contact form, calling the phone number or ordering a product through your e-commerce website. These techniques include making sure all phone numbers are clickable, putting contact information in an easy to see place and simplifying the checkout process as some examples.
Onsite SEO
At dapa we work on your Onsite SEO first, which includes various aspects including creating landing pages to make sure all keywords are accounted for, page titles, meta descriptions and content. Onsite SEO is essentially a check list for Google to make sure when the page is looked at by the search engine, it is clear what the page is about.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is what we call the various techniques used to create increased authority of your website. Your authority is decided by the search engine and is based on how much your site is mentioned across the internet, where you are mentioned, social activity and other related signals.
Bounce Rate
You will see this mentioned within Google Analytics if you have it already set up for your site. It is a percentage of the visitors who come on to your site, only view the page they landed on and then bounce off the site within 30 minutes of coming onto the site.
PPC
This stands for Pay Per Click and is a way of bringing traffic to your website. It does what it says on the tin, so you pay every time a visitor clicks on one of the adverts listed in Google’s search results and comes to your page. You will find these ads at the top of the search pages as well as down the right hand side.
CPC
CPC is an abbreviation of Cost Per Click which is related most commonly to PPC activity. It is the cost of each click made to the website by a visitor.
Direct Traffic
Visitors who type in your website address directly and come straight on to your site are called direct visitors.
Organic Traffic
Any visitors that come through a search engine and do not use the paid for ads come through organically which is the preferred method of gaining traffic. This is what we aim to achieve with SEO as it is essentially free traffic.
Referral Traffic
When a visitor lands on your site through a link on another site or through social media, this is referral traffic as they have in one way or another been referred to your site.
Landing Pages
These are pages that are not your main pages that are created for SEO purposes so that we can target specific keywords. For instance, if a company offers IT services in London, they may decide to also branch out to Manchester. Therefore we would create a landing page specifically for ‘IT Services Manchester’.
Keywords
These are the phrases that are targeted within an SEO campaign.
Link Building
This is the process of creating and encouraging the creation of links from other sources to your site. This is a crucial part of Offsite SEO.
Black Hat
Bad SEO practices are called ‘Black Hat’ tactics. These include stuffing keywords into pages, creating thousands of bad quality links from irrelevant sites creating just for link building purposes and hiding text on the page.
White Hat
‘White Hat’ SEO is SEO that search engines like because it benefits the end user. For instance using relevant page titles, headings and content that reads well and is not created specifically to include keywords over and over.
Link Juice
When a link is created from one site to another, authority is given to the site receiving the link. This is known as link juice.
SERP
This is the abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page and is simply the listings that appear when you type in a phrase within a search engine.
2.0
This is a micro website that is often used as a blog type site to host content around a specific subject.
