A SEO Glossary For Beginners & Small Business Owners | District Maven Marketing & Creative

When I first founded District Maven, most conversations with potential new clients (and current ones, for that matter) revolved around why one should engage in online marketing in the first place. Thankfully, the public's general understanding as grown alongside technology, ultimately leading to far more insightful, advanced conversations. However, just because more people know they need to utilize digital marketing strategies doesn't mean that they understand what any of it actually means. Even fewer people know to implement them -- and with good reason.

Although SEO (and its associated practices) isn't rocket science, it can often seem like it. In addition to being fairly complex, best practices change regularly and keeping up can be challenging. This is true for any beginning marketer or small business owner, especially those who can't afford to hire to a seasoned marketing agency to optimize for them.

To get you started, below is a list of basic terms one will definitely hear (and want to understand) when executing SEO strategies for their website, While a more complete list can be found on Search Engine Land's recent blog entry (here), the following are the most important to know from their list.

*Note: Explanations have been copied directly from Search Engine Land's article and therefore are credited with the specific language featured herein.

When it comes to optimizing for the search engines, every business will utilize slightly different methods depending on their unique needs. But for the restaurant and hospitality owner, it seems like every technique must be taken into account while implementing SEO strategy, and with good reason. When people search the Internet they are looking to do something -- roughly 80% of these individuals are doing research, whereas the remaining 20% are looking to make a purchase decision (almost always after doing research of some kind).

While you can find an endless amount of information listed throughout Google's search engine results pages, in the hospitality industry, only three things really matter: your website, social media profiles and online brand reputation. The last on that list may be the most important factor, as it is the customer review sites like Google Reviews, Yelp and TripAdvisor that will make the biggest impact on the purchase decision-making process.

Of course, it goes without saying that maintaining updated business listing citations on major review sites is important to local digital marketing. However, it is the diligent and thoughtful management of customer reviews that truly matters – with human visitors and search engines alike. Yes, I get that keeping up with what seems like an endless stream of negative comments is daunting, let alone responding to any of them, but it is absolutely required for any hospitality professional, restaurant or bar owner.

Algorithm – Often also referred to as an “algo,” this is a mathematical process or formula to execute a set of functions. For example, an algorithm determines which page in a search engine’s index is the best match for a given search query.

Analytics – The information resulting from a systematic analysis of data or statistics, such as the number of visitors to a site, where they landed, where they originated and where and when they exited.

Anchor Text – The clickable part of the link you see, often a keyword phrase, but can be a uniform resource locator (URL).

Backlink – An incoming link to a web page from another webpage.

Blackhat – Often followed by the word “SEO,” blackhat most commonly refers to practices which are specifically designed to fool search engines into seeing a website as having more value than it really does, almost always in violation of the search engines’ webmaster guidelines.

Bounce Rate – This refers to a percentage of visitors who leave a web page without interacting with it.

Bot – A piece of software which autonomously executes specific tasks according to preprogrammed inputs.

Breadcrumb – This is a textual “map” of where a page is located within the hierarchy of a website. Breadcrumbs are normally clickable links, which can aid users in backtracking their steps. For example: Home > About Us > Our Team.

Browser – This refers to a graphical user interface which displays HTML files and is used to navigate the Internet.

Cache – This is the storage of web content in memory, in order to be able to more readily serve them to a user. Caching commonly occurs on both servers and browsers.

Call To Action (CTA) – A portion of the marketing message that tries to get a user to perform a certain action.

Canonical – This is an HTML element that indicates the original or preferred version of a piece of content, in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

CTR – Stands for click-through rate, the percentage of users shown an advertisement, search result or hyperlink who click on it.

Conversion – The conversion of a lead or prospect refers to the successful enticement of the user to complete the desired action, such as a purchase, download or subscription.

Crawl – Web bots, also called crawlers or spiders, systematically crawl the internet, following links from one page to another, determining the connectivity that establishes the World Wide Web. If a page has no inbound links whatsoever, it will almost certainly never be found by the crawlers.

CSS – Refers to a cascading style sheet which is a file dedicated to telling browsers how a page should be displayed, in terms of font style, size and color. It also denotes the size, spacing and location of other HTML elements. It is a much more efficient method than inserting what may be highly repetitive data if inserted with each individual element.

Head – The head of a document contains elements such as the document’s title, metadata, scripts, styles and more. It will not contain any of the page’s content which is to be displayed.

Heading – In HTML, headings (H1 through H6) can be used to indicate the context of the content immediately following them in the hierarchy. They are generally used to emphasize titles or text on a page, with the H1 tag having the largest text.

.htaccess – This is a web server configuration file containing commands to direct the server’s behavior in certain circumstances. .htaccess is used by Apache servers and some other National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) compliant servers.

HTML – Hypertext markup language. This language is the heart of the Web, defining the content which is to be displayed and how it should be displayed.

HTTP – Hypertext transfer protocol. This is the protocol used across the World Wide Web, defining how messages are formatted and transmitted, as well as how servers and browsers should respond to various commands.

Hyperlink – This is a hypertext link between one point on the web and another. Clicking on a hyperlink will take the user to the destination point.

Keywords – These are words which appear in the content on your web pages and are used in search queries. As search engines have evolved, matching a query to a term found in a document has evolved from exact match terms to synonyms to contextually relevant terms.

KPI – Key performance indicator. This is a measurable value that indicates the effectiveness of a business operation. It may include such factors as gross profit margin, cash flow, market share, inventory turnover and more.

Nofollow – At times, it may be considered necessary or even helpful to link out to a resource which is of questionable veracity or dubious quality. Adding a nofollow attribute to a hypertext link essentially tells the search engines that you don’t vouch for the target page.

Noindex – This meta tag can be added in a document’s head to tell the search engine that the page should not be allowed to appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Page Rank – This is a calculation to determine the overall quality of a page, based upon many factors, the most important of which is still considered to be inbound links.

Panda – This was a new search algorithm, launched in February of 2011, which focuses on detecting low-quality or “thin” content.

Penguin – This algorithm, launched in April of 2012, focuses on the quality of inbound links.

Reciprocal Link – Two web pages on two different sites link to each other on purpose. Large numbers of reciprocal links can be seen as manipulative linking schemes if the links are placed for the sole purpose of influencing the way a web page ranks.

Redirect – This is a technique by which a hyperlink to a destination URL is redirected to a different URL. The most commonly used redirects are 301 (permanent) and 302 (temporary), although there are others which are rarely used. (See Status Codes)

Responsive – One method of site design which resizes the displayed elements to suit the viewport of the device viewing the site. Thus, a site can be easily viewed and read from a desktop, tablet or phone.

Rich Snippet – By using structured data markup, such as schema, micro-formats or Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa), small samples of a site’s content can be shown in the SERPs, often enticing more users to click through to the site.

Schema – This is a semantic markup involving specific ontologies which classify objects and shows the relationships between them.

Search Console – previously called Google Webmaster tools, is a suite of free services from Google to check indexing status and optimize a site’s visibility.

SERP – Search Engine Results Pages. Web pages of ranked results provided in response to a search query.

Site Links – These appear in some results in the SERPs, where numerous internal links are provided, making it easier for users to navigate directly to the portion of the site that interests them.

Sitemap – A hierarchical model of a website’s content, typically constructed in HTML, to aid users in navigating the site to inform the search engines of the site’s content.

Site-wide – This refers to linking and navigational structure that is employed on every page of the website, such as in the sidebar or footer.

SSL – Abbreviation for Secure Sockets Layer. This is the standard technology for establishing an encrypted pipeline between the client (browser or email client) and the server.

Subdomain – An internet domain which is part of a primary domain.

Taxonomy – this refers to a system of classification and is particularly important in faceted navigation such as is normally present in an e-commerce site.

Title Tag – HTML that creates the title of a web page and generally tells humans and search engines what the page is about. It is located in the section of a web page and what (usually) shows up in the search engines organic results.

TLD – Top-level domain. This is the general classification of all domains under the TLD. For instance, .com, .net, .org and .edu are all TLDs, although there are now many others.

UGC – User-generated content. Content on a web page which is created by users, rather than by the site owner or webmaster. Forums and blog comments are both forms of user-generated content.

Unique Visitors – People (searchers) who have visited a web page once during a specific period of time.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator. Sometimes called the web address. For this site’s home page, the URL is https://districtmaven.com. However, that’s not the actual address. The URL is translated to our IP address, 208.80.6.139, by the domain name server.

Webmaster Guidelines – These are guidelines are published by search engines, describing behaviors and practices which the search engine considers to be acceptable. Failing to comply with those guidelines can result in a loss of rankings or punitive action.

White Hat – This is commonly believed to imply following only practices which are deemed acceptable under the published Webmaster Guidelines.

Widget – An element of a graphical rather than a textual user interface that prompts users to act or displays information. It is usually a stand-alone element that can be embedded in a web page as an advertisement or interactive experience.