If you are a small business owner with a grasp of what it takes to make your site rank for the search terms your potential customers use, great! But if you’re not, don’t despair. Many small business owners struggle with one or more aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), and for good reason.
While SEO is neither magic nor rocket science, it’s still fairly complex and getting more so every day. The vernacular can be somewhat confusing to everyone practicing SEO. Canonical, hreflang, schema, cache, robots.txt, .htaccess — these are just a handful of the many terms you’ll come across as you build, manage and market your website.
In this first of a three-part series, we’ll list and define some of the most common terms you’re likely to encounter while practicing SEO for a small business.
A
Above the fold – This is the content that’s visible to a website’s visitors before they scroll down. Obviously, it can vary, depending upon the device the visitor is using.
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.
Alt attribute – This is the alternative text, encoded into a page’s hypertext markup language (HTML) or EXtensible hypertext markup language (XHTML), which should be displayed if an image or another element cannot be rendered in the browser.
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). Author Doc Sheldon is anchor text, as is www.searchengineland.com.
B
B2B– Business-to-business, when a business’s customers are other businesses.
B2C – Business-to-consumer, when a business’s customers are end-users.
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.
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