Search engine optimisation (short SEO) is itself already difficult to grasp. All the technical terms that are used in this context do not exactly make the whole situation much more pleasant. So for you to not lose the overview, we put together the definitions of the most important SEO terms from A to Z right here.
A as in bounce rate
The bounce rate provides information about how often website visitors leave the website immediately after viewing the homepage or only one subpage.
B as in backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own. Search engines interpret such links as positive, provided they come from trustworthy and relevant third-party sites.
C as in crawler
Search engines use software called crawlers to search the internet and analyse its content.
D as in duplicate content
If a text on a website is found on several sub-pages or if content is copied from a completely foreign website and published on one's own page, this is called duplicate content. From an SEO point of view, both should always be avoided.
G as in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the widely used website analysis tool from Google. It tracks the behaviour of website users and helps monitor the success of search engine optimisation.
H as in headlines
Headlines are the titles of a website. As a rule, they follow a hierarchy visually and in the code, whereby the top heading is called H1, the second highest H2, and so on. Search engines derive the content and the importance of the content from the headlines.
I as in image size
If images (and videos) are placed on a website as large files, they can negatively influence the loading time of a page. It is therefore advisable to always keep the size of images (and videos) as small as possible.
K as in keywords
Keywords are the search terms that Internet users search for in search engines. While doing SEO, the desired keywords are integrated into the content of a website.
L as in loading time
The loading time of a website is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. The faster a website loads, the better. This is especially true for loading on mobile devices.
M as in meta tags
Meta tags include the title tag (the title of a web page), the meta description (the description of a page) and the meta keywords (the search terms of a page) – although the latter is hardly important for SEO any more. These tags are stored in the source text of a website and determine which title and which text about a website appear in the search engine results.
O as in on-page and off-page optimisation
SEO can be done directly on one's own website, for example in the content or in the code, and is then called on-page optimisations. Off-page optimisations, on the other hand, do not take place on one's own website. This includes, for example, «link building» – i.e. actively searching for and obtaining qualitative backlinks.
R as in robots.txt
The robots.txt file is added to the code of a website in a similar way to the xml-sitemap and tells search engines which pages they may and may not search or display in their results.
S as in search results
All information that is displayed after entering a keyword in a search engine is called search results. In this context, we often speak of «SERPs» short for «search engine result pages». The order in which this content appears is called ranking.
V as in voice search
Read in this blog posts what this is all about and which 5 tips help with optimisation.
X as in xml-sitemap
The xml sitemap is, so to speak, the content specification of a website and is added to the code of a page. Search engine crawlers use sitemaps to quickly get an overview of the content of a page.
This brings us to the end of our SEO ABC. Can you think of any important technical terms for the missing letters that we have omitted? Send us an email or comment directly below this post.
