A Newbie's Reference For Search Engine Optimisation Lingo

PPC? Natural traffic? Link building? For a newbie, not understanding the jargon and lingo frequently referenced in books and articles about search engine optimization can be one of the most frustrating aspects of trying to optimize a site. Here are some of the frequently used search engine optimization terms and their definitions:

1. Natural traffic - traffic that is naturally sent to your site by search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google without any effort on your part.

2. Pay-per-click (PPC) traffic - paid search engine traffic. Pay-per-click ads are found on the top and right hand side of major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Pay-per-click owners pay the respective search engine $1-$3 every time somebody clicks the ad.

3. Search engine optimization (SEO) - carefully organizing the tags and texts and other elements of a website. Thus, making it appear often on search engine results.

4. Linkbuilding - the method of making other websites link to your site. Search engine traffic increases as more and more sites link to your site.

5. Search engine analytics - the process of evaluating metrics such as how many visitors see your site every hour, how long they stay, and other information pertinent to your marketing strategy.

6. Search Engine ROI - search engine return on investment from marketing strategy. If you your ROI is 200 percent, that only means that for every $1 you invest on search engine ads, you get $3 in return.

7. Inbound links - links from other websites connected to your site.

8. Outbound links - your website links going to other websites.

9. Search engine indexing - the way search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) look for the quality content on your site and thereby finding it.

10. Search Engine Keywords -the meta-tags and keywords on your site that you want search engines to often see. An example is if your website talks about meditation, your keywords can be "Buddhist meditation" or "guided meditation."

11. White hat Search Engine Optimization strategies - tweaking techniques for making your website accepted by major search engines.

12. Black hat Search Engine Optimization strategies - tweaking techniques for making your website rejected by major search engines.

13. Keyword density - the number of times (usually referenced as a percentage) that a keyword appears in a document in comparison to the other keywords in the text.

14. Google adwords - Ads generated by the search engine Google that generally appear in areas such as the content of search engine searches and Gmail (e-mail accounts sponsored by Google) accounts. If you want to check examples of Google ads, type in "wedding favors" into the search bar on Google's homepage. Google will then show you the ads on the upper right side part of the page. You'll know if a piece of text is an ad because the words "sponsored links" will appear next to it.

Knowing the above definitions should help you understand articles and books about search engine optimization.