Key SEO Terminologies Every Business Owner Should Know

Whether you are briefing an agency, reading a report, or learning SEO yourself, knowing this SEO terminology helps. We have grouped them into search basics, links and authority, content, on-page elements, and the practices and updates that decide how well your pages rank.

Backlinks

Links from other websites that link to ours. Increases Domain Authority.

Domain Authority

Search engine ranking score that gives a measure of how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results.

Link Building

Process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site's authority in search engines.

Internal Links

Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman's terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website. (should be other articles for better SEO)

External Links

External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). In layman's terms, if another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. Similarly, if you link out to another website, this is also considered an external link.

Product Links

These are Internal Links that link to a product page or specific product link that is relevant to the article.

Anchor Texts

The word or phrase that a hyperlink (internal, external or product link) is attached to. Must be relevant to the link.

Image filename

Every image on the internet has a unique name given to it , this is called the image filename. You can also see the filename of an image when saved offline, on your computer. When you create, edit or save an image, you give it a filename.

Image Alt Tags

Definition: An alt tag, also known as "alt attribute" and "alt description," is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines. Applying images to alt tags such as product photos can positively impact an ecommerce store's search engine rankings.

SEO Title

This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the page title or SEO title. When you look something up in a search engine, you get a list of results that appear as snippets. Often, the SEO title is part of the snippet together with at least a URL and a meta description. (for better SEO, the SEO Title should be the Topic of the article plus the Website name with a dash in between them)

Slug (URL)

A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a particular page on a website in an easy-to-read form. In other words, it's the part of the URL that explains the page's content. EX: www.example.com.au/slug (for better SEO, the slug should be the exact keyword)

Meta Description

A meta description is an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a web page. A page's meta description tag is displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page (SERP) and is meant to give the user an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to their search query. (for better SEO, the keyword should be included here)