List of Top Most SEO Terms, Aspects and Components

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

The term SEO was initially used in 1990 for Search Engines to find better web pages. But later in 1998 after Google’s introduction in web world, a number of algorithms were made for much improved and effective crawling and indexing of websites and their pages in search engines. Link analysis algorithms given a sharp edge to the ranking of websites on different search terms. This all brings SEO in its advance shape

What is On-Page SEO?

On Page SEO simply corresponds to the optimization of all kind of things which is within a website as per search engines guidelines. It includes the optimizing the design of the website incorporating the code i.e. HTML, CSS and JavaScript etc. navigation (linking structure), images, videos and texts.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Like the name suggests, Off Page SEO corresponds to the task of optimization you perform outside your website to promote it. For instance submitting your site to search engines, creating relevant backlinks, social bookmarking, forum posting, blog commenting, article submission, guest posting, social media posting, liking, sharing and commenting etc.

Title Tag

Title tag is a HTML tag and is one of the top most components which is used to define the title of a web page. Title appears in search engine results page and so it plays an important role in crawling and ranking of the web page.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are special HTML tags which are used by search engines crawlers to understand the content of the webpage like on what topic the page is written, who has written it etc. Commonly used Meta tags are: description, keywords, author, robots and generator. Meta tags are defined in the head section of a webpage and is only meant and served to search engines.

Headings

To define headings and sub-headings of a page six HTML tags are given: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. H1 and H2 tags are the most vital and must be defined carefully as it impact on ranking of the page for various search terms.

Keywords

Keywords are the search terms on which a webpage got ranked in search engine result pages. Keywords must be used wisely in title tag, Meta description tag, header tags like H1 and H2, and content of the web page.

Keyword Density

Keywords density corresponds to the number of times a keyword appears in an article. Keyword density should not be greater than 3% of the whole article. For instance if you are writing an article on “best football players in 2014”, where your prime keyword is “best football players in 2014” and you have written a 500 words article, then each word of the keyword must not appear more than 15 times in your article.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique which is used to cheat crawlers of search engines. Under this technique webmasters inserts huge no. of keywords in title tag, Meta tag, headers and content of the webpage.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another black hat SEO technique in which webmasters deceive crawlers by presenting them a content which is different from that presented to the visitors of the page. Under this technique webmaster hide the original content from the users and serve them something different which is a part of some marketing kind of things or hacking.

Search Engine Spiders/Robots/Crawlers

Spiders, Robots and Crawlers are same but with different names. They are actually search engine algorithm whose task is to detect new pages and to index them in search engine servers.

Internal Links

Internal Links are those links which points the browser within the same website or we can say that internal links make you move from one page to another page within the same domain. These links connects different pages, images, pdf and various things within the same website.

External Links or Outbound Links

External links and outbound links are the same and are those links who points the browser from one website to another one or we can say that these links make you move from one page of a domain to another page of another domain.

Inbound Links or Backlinks

If one of your webpage or your website link is given on some other website it is termed as inbound link. It’s also referred as backlink.

No Follow Links

No follow is the value of an attribute “rel” of the anchor tag (link tag in HTML) which tells the search engine crawler not to visit/follow this link. For instance if a website doesn’t want the crawler to visit and index a particular link, it simply assigns a nofollow value to the rel attribute.

Do Follow Links

Do follow is simply the reverse of No Follow. By default all links are do follow.

No Index

It’s another value of the same rel attribute inside the anchor tag which indicates the crawler that the link can be followed but the content not be indexed in search engine’s server.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are used by search engines to crawl and index webpages on a site. It acts as a collective resource for the search engines where they can find links of all pages created under a site and can crawl and index them on their server.

Robot.txt

Robot.txt is a text file which is created in the root directory of a domain. It provides instruction to the crawler about pages or directories not to be crawled. So if we want to restrict the crawler accessing a webpage or a directory we can put its link in robot.txt file.

Canonical URL

URLs which are same but with different versions and points to same page are termed as canonical URL’s. For instance to access the home page of a website there can be different URL’s- yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com/index.html, www.yourdomain.com/index.html. These URL’s may seem the same but search engine spiders act them as different URLs with duplicate content. So you must select which version of the URL will be set as a canonical URL.

404 Error Page

Whenever someone asks for a page which is not available on your website or the link is broken or dead, in this case an Error page occurs which displays a page not found message. This error page is termed as 404 error page.

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