Search Engine Optimisation Terms Explained

If you’re looking into SEO for the first time, it can appear to be some kind of mystical hybrid of rocket science and magic. There are a number of buzzwords which are often liberally thrown around: PageRank, backlinks, keyword density – but what do they all mean?

Search Term – The words which a person searching the web puts into the search engine. So if a user is looking for someone to redesign their company’s website they might cast their net wide and put in ‘website design’ or ‘web design’ or they might be slightly more speficic with ‘corporate web design’, or they might prefer to go local and type in ‘website design dorset’.

Keywords – The website equivalent of a search term. So if you think your customers are going to be searching for ‘corporate website design’ you would list ‘corporate website design’ as a keyword on your website. You’d need to think about all the search terms which people might put in if they were looking for your specific products or service, so you’d also list various permutations, like ‘corporate web design’ ‘corporate site design’ ‘professional website design’ etc. You might even include mis-spellings if you think that words will be frequently mis-spelled in the searches (“corporate webstie desing”?).

Page optimisation – This is the practice of ensuring that the page looks important to a search engine for your particular keywords. Meta-data, image titles, link text , urls …. and also vitally the copy itself (sometimes overlooked). Search engines rank some elements as being more important than others, so having your keywords in your content is better than just in your meta data, and having the keywords in the title of the page and the content is better still.