9 Basic SEO Terms You Should Know: Backlinks, Keyword & More
Reading Time: ~3 Mins | Written By: Jason Serafica
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about driving organic traffic to your website. The process includes many components that require a long term and consistent SEO strategy. Today, we’re covering SEO terms every beginner should know.
9 Essential SEO Terms To Know
Domain Rating (DR)
Domain rating is a metric that measures the strength of your overall website on a scale from 1 to 100, higher being the strongest. Domain rating is measured by the overall relevance and authority of your website in the industry, which is determined by following SEO best practices; gaining quality backlinks, visitors, and content strategy.
The better you can improve your domain rating, the easier you’ll be able to rank higher on the results page, which leads to gaining more website traffic.
URL Rating
URL Rating is very similar to Domain Rating. It measures the strength of a single URL on a scale from 1 to 100. URL Rating is also determined by the amount of backlinks, content quality, and overall authority in the certain subject.
Pages with strong URL ratings will also rank higher on the search engine results page. Therefore, the more pages you have with a strong URL rating the more it’ll benefit your SEO performance.
Referring Domains
Referring domains are the websites that are linking to your website, essentially referring to you as a source. The strength of a referring domain is also measured by domain rating, URL rating and industry relevance.
For example, if you get a link from The New York Times (DR:94/100), your domain strength will improve because of the overall strength of the referring domain.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the external links that come from a referring domain. For example, a referring domain may link to you multiple times which gives you multiple backlinks for your website. The quality of a backlink is also measured by domain rating, URL rating and overall relevance.
Keyword
Keywords define the topic of your content. The better you can optimize for keyword targeting, the higher the chances are that you’ll become visible when somebody searches for a relevant term. Better visibility increases the chances of website visitors, and generating awareness for the business.
SEO Title
The SEO title specifies the title of a specific page in no more than 60 characters. SEO titles usually have the targeted keyword in the beginning. Additionally, it is important to write a title that will entice people to click and visit the page on the website.
It is important to know that the page title will appear in the following:
Search engine results page
Web browsers
Shared social networks
Meta Description
The meta description is the text that appears below the SEO title. It describes what the topic is about in 155 characters. It provides an opportunity to further entice searchers to click, and potentially visit your website; increasing click through rate and generating more website traffic.
Alt Tags
The alt tag is a description of an image on your website. It helps with user accessibility and allows search engines to better understand the page. Alt tags should be concise and descriptive. If applicable, you can also incorporate keywords within the alt tag. Incorporating proper alt tags can also increase traffic as it can show up on the image results page.
Go to the backend of your website and simply click on the image. An option to add an “Image Alt Text” should show up.
Recommendation: There are many SEO tools you can use to analyze the terms mentioned above, such as Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, & SEMrush.
Indexing
The process of search engines organizing information to better serve the most relevant results based on a search query. Ensure that search engines can properly index your page for better visibility, by submitting an index request using a free tool called, Google Search Console.
In Summary
By grasping these essential SEO terms, you’ll gain the ability to assess and communicate how well your website is performing in search engines.
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