SEO Classroom Glossary

Keyword Term

• multiple consecutive words (2 to 5 for SEO) directly related to your page content.
• an informative word (or phrase) used to indicate the content of a document.
• it's what you type in a search engine when you..."search". For SEO, what words do you think people would search to find what you have? Nobody searches just 1 word at a time.

Heading Tags

• A special code that is used for a "heading" or label.
• Headings can be H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 or H6. 1 is the largest - 6 is the smallest.
• Used to indicate to the search engines that a word or phrase is more important. H1 is most important and may be used only 1 time on any one page.
• Heading tags use specific sizes or colors and are usually bold.

Content

• Generally, content is only the text in a Web site page. This does not include images or anything other than text.

Secure Site

• One that uses a special "certificate" on the hosting server to prevent hackers. It's also protection against your personal information being stolen while using a Web site.
• Your Web site must be secure in order to assure you are able to attain a page 1 or page 2 search position.

Responsive

• A Web site that is designed to display on multiple devices properly is considered responsive.
• This is also known as "mobile friendly".

SERP

• Search Engine Results Pages

Target

• Keyword terms that you decided are "right" for your site are then targeted - used in the content of your site.

Bounce Rate

• If a user finds your Web site in the list of a search they just performed and clicks on your link, they come to your Web site. If the user finds the content of your Web site is not related to the search they performed, they leave - that's what's known as "bounce".
• If you use a keyword term that you know is not "highly" relevant to your page content, you will do more harm than good. A high bounce rate is recorded by the search engines, and if they feel your bounce rate is consistently high over a period of time (determined by the search engine), your site will be pushed back in the search engines. If the bounce rate is perhaps 100%, it won't take long before your site is pushed back beyond 10 pages or more.

ALT

• Every image has code that allows you to add a description for the image. The "alt" is an abbreviation for "alternative". Used in combination with an image, you then have an "alternative description" for the image. Also often called alt tag or alt description.
• The alt tag can have any text you wish. But, the alt tag was originally intended for the sight impaired so that they could have their page reader tell them what they are supposed to be seeing in that particular area where the image is found. So the alt tag intention is to have a highly relevant text description for images to those with sight impairments.
• Today, the alt tag is used more for what is considered illegal text than as the tag was intended. Many will use additional keyword terms instead of describing the image. That is considered illegal unless the image is highly relevant to the text used, which then may be a keyword term.

CMS

• Content Management System (CMS). This is what Joomla!, WordPress, Dupal and Magento are called. There are more, but those are the top 4 most popular. Drupal and Magento are more for those who prefer to do a lot of coding in Php or other languages because they are designed to permit the administrator to add, change or edit the code in the site for one reason or another. Joomla! and WordPress are designed to use "as-is" for the most part. You have to be a seasoned professional to edit the code in WordPress, and there are messages that come up when you attempt to edit the pages of WordPress code. Joomla! allows the editing by providing an "override" system so you can override something in a page and not touch the original file.

Keyword Density

• Very simply, this means: "How many times have you repeated 1 keyword term on 1 page?"
• The general rule is, a keyword term should be repeated not more than 3% of the content.

Header

• The "header" of your page is the top area where you find the name of the business and usually a navigation menu. It can be a header that remains at the top of the page when you scroll, or, it can be part of the page that disappears as you scroll.

Footer

• The "footer" is the bottom of your page. Usually your business name and address appear there along with a few navigation links and / or copyright information.

Bots

• Bots are the digital signals that search engines send out to Web sites. The bots are not sent to every site daily. In fact, some search engines take a month - or longer - before returning to the same site.
• Bots return the information they find to the search engines in order to be analyzed to determine where your Web site should appear in searches.

Relevant

• The term used to determine if your content is "about" what you state in your keyword terms, headings and meta tags. This is known as "relevant". How "relevant" to your tags is the actual content?

Meta Tags

• The meta tags are part of the coding in your site. If you "view page source" on your page with any browser (right click anywhere on the page then select view page source) you can see at the top of all that code and text where the meta tags appear. Each contains certain information important to both the functionality of the page and information for the search engines.

Weight or Prominence

• In SEO, weight / prominence means importance. How important is your content? That's determined by the heading tags and where the keyword terms appear in the content. If the terms are found in the beginning of the first sentence of your content, that's very, very important / prominent - it has as much weight as possible. For every space or character that your term appears "after" in your content, the less weight / important the term has / appears.
• If you apply your SEO correctly, you will have your keyword terms prominence at 60 or higher.

Title Tag

• The title is exactly that - the title of your page. The title should be "highly" relevant to your keyword term, but very brief. It's not a description, but just a few words (about 2 to 5 generally) which tell the user and the search engines what is "supposed" to be on the page.
• The title tag in Joomla! is found in 2 places - the menu item you create for the page, and the "Publishing" link above where you write your content. Only use 1 or the other, but not both. I prefer using the menu item for all the meta information and title. The menu item takes precedence over all other areas.

Alias

• The "alias" for a title is what the search engines see when looking through all of your page code. The alias may or may not be exactly the same as what you wrote for your page title. You have the ability to make the alias different from the title you used for the page. Without a lot of experience, however, that's not recommended.

CSS

• Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) is what controls all of the sizes, colors and more for the text and other things in your template. It's the main file to format the pages.