The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Alphabet for Beginners

SEO, Search Engine Optimisation is one of the key segments of Internet Marketing as it vastly improves search engine rankings. Simply, (and rather basically) SEO is an activity that ensures your website can be found in search engines using words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering and what the visitor is searching for. This type of traffic is referred to as organic traffic.

For beginners SEO may sound a complicated topic and take several long hours attempting to understand, but simply put it can be defined by the easy explanation below:

Imagine that you are librarian and people depend on you every day to help them find exactly what they need. For that you need to know every book, what is inside of them and how books are related to each other. Your system has to ingest a lot of information and choose the best answers for the given questions. In this case Google is the librarian who collects information of every page on the web so they can help people find exactly what they are looking for. Every search engine has its own secret recipe called an algorithm that presents the information into useful search results.

The key to higher rankings is making sure your website meets all the requirements and have the necessary ingredients search engines require. The list is not exhaustive but includes using the right words (keywords), page titles, links between websites and words in links (anchor text).

The team at Blu Mint Digital found this useful and colourful infographic based on mental maps from successfulblogging.com that explains the key terms in a funnier way teaching SEO basics.

Before you dive into the life of colours and words, here is a quick summary:

A — Anchor text, AdWords, Algorithm, Alt text;

B — Backlink, Bounce Rate, Blog, Bing, Black Hat;

C — Content, Conversion, CTR, CPC, CPM, Crawler;

D — Deep linking, Directory, Duplicate Content;

E — External links;

F — Fresh Content, Feed, Filter;

G — Google Search, Gateway page;

H — Headings, hits, HTML, .htaccess;

I — Internal links, inbound links, impressions;

J — Javascript;

K — Keyword, keyword density, keyword research;

L — Link building, long tail keywords, landing page, lsi;

M — Meta description, metrics;

N — Niche, no follow, negative SEO;

O — Organic search results, outbound links;

P — Penalty, PPC, PageRank;

Q — Quality over Quantity;

R — redirect, ROI, robots.txt

S — Social Media, Sitemap, Spam, Serp;

T — Trust Rank,Title, Trackback;

U — URL, unique visitors, usability;

V — Visits, viral marketing;

W — WordPress, white hat;

X — XHTML, XML;

Y — Yahoo, Youtube;

Z — Zopim Chat.

David is the Managing Director of Blu Mint Digital; and writes about Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

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