SEO is essential in having your website draw traffic from search engine rankings. Almost 95% of online experiences start with a search engine search. Whether you are doing SEO on your website on your own or working with developers, you need to know some of the terms used in this industry. The better you know the terms, the easier it is for you to communicate what you need done on your website, or to understand what your developer is doing.
Here are a few important terms to know so that you are more knowledgeable about SEO.
Do you have an old url that you are no longer updating or using? There’s nothing worse than traffic coming to a dead end, thus never knowing what you had to offer! There’s a good chance that this old url has been linked by others, whether in a blog or on social media. To make sure those heading to the old URL are taken to your new one is a 301 redirect. This way, the flow of traffic never stops and is redirected to the new url.
We’re sure you have heard of this term before. CSS is code that tells a browser how to arrange your website, such as where the header and footer go and what is in it, where images are appearing, and the look of font and its location.
When you are researching keywords for your SEO, you want both short and long-tailed keywords. We tend to forget about the latter. Long-tailed keywords are usually 2-3 words or a phrase that people will search to find solutions to their problems. A short keyword would be “web designer” and the long-tailed keyword for that could be “web designer in Austin Texas”. Finding these can also help you rank higher on search engines result pages.
Meta descriptions are incredibly vital to enticing someone to visit your page. These are usually appearing below the webpage on search engine result pages. These are usually less than 160 characters that giving a brief description of what people can find on the page. You can also have a CTA (Call to Action) to encourage them to click and visit.
Are you just creating subpar content in hopes of getting people to your website for traffic hits? Panda is there to penalize you! This is a Google update that marks websites that used mediocre content to boost its keyword count. Mediocre content is anything that has absolutely no value for the visitor. Never try to create content without value or your website is going to rank so far down the results page, it will never see the light of day.
The more you know about SEO terms, the better you can optimize your website to where you need it to be, which is drawing in traffic and increasing your search engine ranking!
Do you need a web designer in Austin? Send us a message today to see how we can help with your online business!
