If you have a website you have likely started to hear about SEO and know of its importance. What you may not know is many of the common terms associated with SEO and search algorithms. The following are some key terms that you should know before diving head first into the realm of SEO and online marketing.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Put simply, SEO is the optimization of your website for users to find you based on key terms that they may enter in search engines to find your website. Optimizing a website for SEO can range from how you write your web content, how the website is built and numerous other factor that impact your overall SEO efforts.

Key Words

Key words are words which a user may enter into a search engine. When referring to key words relating to SEO these are the words that your users will be searching for to find your service, business or product. Key words are an important factors in your online marketing because without them you may not come up when users search for terms you may be associated with.

Organic Search Results

Organic search results are unpaid results that show up on a search engine when you enter in a search term.

Page Rank

Page Rank is a term coined by Larry Page, one of the founder’s of Google. Its goal is to determine how important your web page is and where it will be displayed in the search results.

Paid Search Results 

Paid search results are exactly what they sound like. Advertisers for a website will pay a search engine to have a link to their website show up higher in the search engine often in a designated ad section for key words their customers may be searching for.

PPC or Pay Per Click

This is the name given to ad campaigns that charges by the click for the keywords that your customers may be searching for. Each click for a key word has a price associated with it. This price may vary on an average day based on a variety of factors, one being how many others are advertising for that keyword as well.

Link Building

Link building means getting other websites to link back to your website. The reason this is is important because the more links you have to your website the more importation the content of it must be. Well, at least that’s the theory. It is important to be wary of these practices because if the links are not legitimate they can negatively affect your SEO ranking and be seen as spam by Google.

Indexed Pages

These are the number of pages that a search engine has successfully indexed from your website. A higher number of indexed pages is a good thing because it shows you have a lot of information for users on your website.