What are the most important SEO terms? An overview

The topic of search engine op­ti­miza­tion is com­pli­cat­ed because as well as a long list of in­di­vid­ual dis­ci­plines and measures, you will also encounter many different SEO terms. If you’re new to the field, you probably won’t know what certain terms mean such as link juice, SERPs and backlinks. All will be revealed in our detailed SEO glossary.

Anchor text

The anchor text (also known as link text) is the clickable text of a hyperlink that is embedded in a website. An anchor text is usually high­light­ed and if you click on it, you will be forwarded to the target URL. The target URL and the anchor text are shown sep­a­rate­ly. The reader only sees the selected anchor text on the page, and not the URL.

The URL and anchor text are in­te­grat­ed into the source code like this:

<a href="http://www.anexamplewebsite.com">anchor text</a>

In this example, the visitor would only see the term “anchor text”.

In SEO, a dis­tinc­tion is made between:

• branded anchor text (brand or target domain in the name)
• money anchor text (contains a money keyword)
• compound anchor text (com­bi­na­tion of money keyword and brand)
• non-money-non-branded anchor text (doesn’t contain a brand, a company name, or money keywords. Many of these word com­bi­na­tions come across as more natural than money or compound anchor texts, which can seem more like ad­ver­tise­ments. Examples include “read more in­for­ma­tion here” or “click here”)

Backlink

The word backlink describes an inbound link, which leads from website A to website B. These inbound links are important for a website since they have a positive influence on the search engine ranking. A backlink from a topic-relevant and trust­wor­thy site (Google de­ter­mines the quality factor) is counted as a rec­om­men­da­tion by the search engine and increases the site’s trust value. The higher the trust value (also known as TrustRank), the more reliable Google rates the links that come from this website. A site’s backlink profile (amount and quality of links) is among the most important ranking factors for Google and other search engines and is a central point of search engine op­ti­miza­tion.

Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO describes the unethical use of search engine op­ti­miza­tion strate­gies. The term comes from the Western film genre where the villain wore a black hat and the hero, a white hat (see white hat SEO). This method of SEO involves ignoring the proper guide­lines of search engines, such as Google or Bing. Spam practices, as well as links generally bought from foreign websites, are used for link building. If you get caught doing this, your site will most likely be excluded from the search engine index.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a method of search engine op­ti­miza­tion that is not so popular with search engines. It deceives the crawler by dis­play­ing different versions of a website. While the search engine crawler gets to “see” one version of a website, normal visitors are shown a com­plete­ly different version. Cloaking is a form of black hat SEO and is punished by search engines.

Find out more about cloaking in our article, such as how it works and the various cloaking tech­niques.

Crawler

A web crawler (also known as a search bot or spider) au­to­mat­i­cal­ly browses internet sites in order to analyze them for certain criteria. The crawler operates in­de­pen­dent­ly and au­to­mat­i­cal­ly carries out its assigned tasks. Search engines, such as Google, use search bots to maintain their index by listing new sites, deleting non-existing sites, and updating the ones in the index.

Deep link

Deep links are a special form of backlink that link to a subpage on a website. They lead website visitors directly to a certain topic. Deep links are a component of off-page SEO and are part of a complete and good link profile.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is the name given to content that is very similar or identical to that found on other websites. Duplicate content has a negative influence on the search engine ranking so it’s best to avoid it. Google prefers high-quality and unique content. If the crawler finds identical content on different sites, the site with the most recently uploaded content will be ranked lower. SEO measures often involve searching for duplicate content and replacing it.

hreflang attribute

The hreflang attribute is an HTML attribute that provides in­for­ma­tion about the re­la­tion­ship between different language versions of a website. The attribute is primarily used so that the correct language version of a website is displayed to a user.

Internal links

Internal links take visitors to different subpages of the same website. Internal linking is one of the most important in­stru­ments of search engine op­ti­miza­tion. Useful links offer value to the reader since they help them find ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion faster. It also means that the website structure is better optimized thanks to the useful links. Google has relevant quality criteria when it comes to eval­u­at­ing a site. The Google bot reads the internal link structure and factors this into the ranking. Since link juice is also passed on via internal links, it’s possible to improve the ranking of subpages and category pages using it.

Keyword

Keywords are certain words or phrases that describe a page’s content. In the context of search engine op­ti­miza­tion they refer to the typical search terms that users enter into the search engine in order to find in­for­ma­tion relating to a par­tic­u­lar topic. Websites should be optimized for certain keywords so that the search engine sees how relevant the sites are for search queries. Your site will then appear higher up in the search results.

Landing page

Landing pages are pages created ex­clu­sive­ly for marketing or ad­ver­tis­ing purposes. The landing page is SEO-optimized so that it is displayed in the search results for relevant keywords. These types of pages can be con­sid­ered as digital ad­ver­tis­ing leaflets that are used to sell a specific product or service. Essential content, in­for­ma­tion and a direct call to action should be included.

Link building

Link building refers to the targeted con­struc­tion of a backlink profile. The aim is to increase the number and quality of backlinks. Since backlinks are external links, the op­ti­miza­tion takes place on third party sites, rather than on yours. Col­lect­ing these links for your own site is one of the most important tasks of off page search engine op­ti­miza­tion. Google and other search engines classify backlinks as rec­om­men­da­tions, meaning that they are a very important ranking factor.

Link juice

Link juice is de­ter­mined by the dis­tri­b­u­tion of backlinks through­out a website. The quality (strength, rep­u­ta­tion) of the links plays a role as well as the quantity. Link juice can be passed on from website A to website B via links. If the source of a backlink is rated well by Google, more link juice will be brought onto the site through the inbound link.

Meta de­scrip­tion

The meta de­scrip­tion is a short text (up to 156 char­ac­ters) that describes the website’s content to the user. The meta de­scrip­tion appears in the list of search results (SERPs) as part of the snippet beneath the title. If the webmaster doesn’t include their own de­scrip­tion, Google will generate its own from the first few lines of the website or from the sentences that include the keywords. During op­ti­miza­tion meta tags (con­sist­ing of meta de­scrip­tions, title tags, meta keywords) that are user-friendly as well as most fre­quent­ly searched for are placed in the header of an HTML document.

Money keyword

Key terms with high search volumes, and thus highly sought over, are known as money keywords (e.g. “buy shoes” or “cheap smart­phones”). Obviously most shops want to rank well for these keywords. If you appear high up in the search results list for relevant search queries, potential customers will find you more easily. Many of these keywords can give the user ideas as to what they’re looking for. The reason behind it is that if someone enters “buy shoes” into the search engine, it usually means there is a trans­ac­tion-ori­en­tat­ed buying motive. The searcher knows that they want to buy shoes, but just aren’t sure where to buy them from. When it comes to search engine ad­ver­tis­ing (SEA) money keywords generally achieve a high cost per click (CPC). You should exercise caution when using money keywords when op­ti­miz­ing your website. If these are overused, you could be penalized by Google.

“nofollow”

The nofollow attribute enables website owners to label links that they don’t want Google to index. The way to achieve this is to add the attribute rel="nofollow" next to the relevant link in the HTML code. This tells the Google bot not to track the link. The attribute was first in­tro­duced in 2005 and prompted website owners to mark all links that weren’t of an editorial nature with a "nofollow" tag. This also stops backlink profile from being ma­nip­u­lat­ed (e.g. people leaving their website URLs in guest book comments), and curbs link spam. Nofollow links are now part of a natural backlink profile and are taken into con­sid­er­a­tion during an SEO analysis.

On page SEO

On page SEO (also known as on page op­ti­miza­tion) describes all SEO measures that are directly linked to your own website. The op­ti­miza­tion lies in the hands of the website owner and has nothing to do with any third parties. It primarily involves content alignment (keyword research) and content op­ti­miza­tion. Struc­tur­al and technical aspects are also taken into account when it comes to on page SEO.

Off page SEO

Off page SEO (also known as off page op­ti­miza­tion) deals with all SEO measures outside of your own website. It relates to all external factors (es­pe­cial­ly backlinks) that influence the ranking of your website. Since backlink profiles are an important central ranking factor, the focus of off page efforts is on link building. Different strate­gies are used in the process in order to achieve the best result.

Read more on the topic of on page and off page SEO in our article on the basics of search engine op­ti­miza­tion.

Panda update

Google’s Panda update was executed in 2011. With it came a permanent change to Google’s ranking algorithm as well as the work of search engine op­ti­miza­tion. Due to the update, many poor-quality websites ended up with decreased rankings. Since its im­ple­men­ta­tion, eval­u­at­ing content quality has played a central role on top of factors such as backlink profile, bounce rate, and retention time. Whereas valuable and unique content provides more value for the reader, duplicate content and unnatural keyword stuffing is pun­ish­able. Since the update, the saying “content is king” has def­i­nite­ly become more ap­plic­a­ble as content quality now has an even stronger influence on the SERPs.

Penguin update

The penguin update consists of a series of Google algorithm updates, which took place between April 2012 and October 2014 and had a big influence on SEO analysis, just like the panda update did. Google’s aim with this update was to curb link spam and to prevent search engine ma­nip­u­la­tion. An algorithm was developed that could detect unnatural site op­ti­miza­tion (e.g. unusually quick link building, keyword stuffing, ir­rel­e­vant links). Google web master guide­lines prohibit these spam tech­niques. If you don’t conform to the guide­lines, you could receive penalties and be penalized by Google.

Penalties

Google penalties refer to actions taken by Google to penalize a website. These can be either manual or algorithm-based penalties. Breaching Google web master guide­lines leads to penalties, which can include a decline in the vis­i­bil­i­ty index and a lower placement in the SERPs.

robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file that is used to tell search engines which sub­di­rec­to­ries should be indexed. It should be noted that it only provides the search engine with a reference point for indexing. The robots.txt is located in the root directory of the domain.

SERPs

SERP is the acronym for “search engine result page”. The user will be shown results relating to their search query on the SERPs. These results are known as snippets and contain the title, link, and meta de­scrip­tion. The order depends on the relevance, which the search engine decides according to the different ranking factors such as user ratings, backlinks, and how long visitors stay on the site. The aim of all SEO measures is to obtain a higher position in the SERPs.

Title tag

The title tag specifies the title of a website and is shown in the browser as well as in Google’s search results. The user can reach the site by clicking on the title. Short, precise, and ex­plana­to­ry wording is very important for a good click rate. The title tag belongs to the Google ranking factors and is taken into con­sid­er­a­tion when it comes to search engine op­ti­miza­tion. For every single URL a unique title should be used and it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of it.

White hat SEO

White hat SEO, as you’ve probably guessed from the name, is the opposite of black hat SEO. On the contrary to black hat concepts, guide­lines are strictly adhered to and spam tactics are avoided. If a mix of both is used, it’s referred to as grey hat SEO and is the most often used concept when it comes to search engine op­ti­miza­tion. Web masters prin­ci­pal­ly stick to the search engine guide­lines and interpret them freely, but may oc­ca­sion­al­ly bend the rules a little.

The dos and don’ts of search engine op­ti­miza­tion

Various Google ranking factors are taken into account in search engine op­ti­miza­tion and there are a few things to bear in mind. In this video, you can find out which SEO mistakes should be avoided and which SEO tools are helpful: