SEO Basics #1: Definitions

In this series of articles, I'm going to introduce you to natural search engine optimization, focusing on the web development side.

The idea isn't to be exhaustive and turn you into experts, but simply to let you know what there is to know as a web developer so that good practices become automatic over time!

Let's start with the most commonly used terms in SEO that you'll come across throughout this series, along with their definitions.

Vocabulary

SEO

SEO is an acronym for "Search Engine Optimization," but it's also often called organic ranking (in French, "référencement naturel").

Unlike paid search advertising (SEA), SEO consists of a set of free techniques to implement in order to improve and optimize a website's position (a set of web pages) in search engine results for a set of keywords.

SERP

Standing for "Search engine results page," a SERP simply represents a search results page, but be careful because every SERP is unique.

A SERP is defined by a particular search engine, the keywords searched by the user, and sometimes the user's own data.

Note that we mostly talk about Google when discussing search engines because it holds the majority of market share in France, but other engines exist:

• Google (91.4%)
• Bing (4.01%)
• Yahoo! (1.53%)
• Ecosia (1.23%)
• Qwant (0.78%)
• DuckDuckGo (0.35%)

Source: https://www.leptidigital.fr/webmarketing/seo/parts-marche-moteurs-recherche-france-monde-11049/

Crawler

A crawler is a bot mandated by a search engine to browse through all websites in order to index them (add them to the search engine's results).

Some search engines use data crawled by others, as is the case with Ecosia, which for example uses data collected by Bing.

The crawler's goal is to gather as much relevant information about the site as possible while spending as little time as possible in order to be as efficient as possible, all while moving from one site to another by following all the links present on a page (with some exceptions).

Their code holds inestimable value because SEO experts fight to figure out how they work in order to optimize as much as possible the information present on their pages.

Backlink

A Backlink is a link leading to a particular site; it is thanks to these links that the site in question can be indexed.

A site with no backlinks at all will be invisible to crawlers, whereas a site with a large number of backlinks will be considered "popular" and will therefore rank higher in search results.

The backlink is the cornerstone of organic SEO.

Pagerank

Pagerank is the algorithm patented by Google that was behind its search engine, it is no longer used as such but has evolved into an extremely complex algorithm whose specifics experts discover little by little.

The algorithm was based on two principles for evaluating the relevance of a website: its number of backlinks and the authority of the sites behind those backlinks.

TrustRank

Today, hundreds (if not thousands) of criteria are taken into account to assess a site's relevance, including TrustRank, which represents not a site's popularity, but its level of trust.

A site's level of trust can be measured through the quality of its code, the age of its domain name, the absence of spam or duplicate content, but also the site's accessibility.

Generating backlinks pointing to a site is often a task falling under marketing, whereas optimizing TrustRank is more of a task to be carried out by the development team.

Accessibility (A11Y)

Optimizing accessibility means ensuring that as many people as possible can access your content from as many devices as possible without suffering from a lack of information or navigation issues. This is a very important but also very broad topic that includes, for example, the following points:

• Adapted for visually impaired or blind people (audio readers, contrasts, element sizes, etc...)
• Responsive for all screen sizes
• Loading time
• Compliance with HTML standards
• ...

Link Juice

The more backlinks we acquire and the higher our site's trust level, the more beneficial the external links we point to other sites will be to them, this is what's called Link Juice.

If I have two backlinks, one from an unknown site and the other from a blog considered THE reference in my industry, the second link will bring me much more "Juice" than the first, and will therefore greatly improve my SEO.

Metadata

Metadata is data that isn't present within my content but around my content, such as the title and description of my page, invisible to a reader but visible on search engines.

Consistency between the content's data and the metadata is very important, on one hand for SEO so that people can come to your site, but also so that they stay, because if the hook (title + description) doesn't match the content, visitors are likely to leave quickly!

CTR

Click through rate is the ratio of clicks to the number of impressions of your site in search results; it can be optimized, for example, by tweaking the page's title and description to make users more inclined to visit it.

I hope you enjoyed this article, you'll find the link to the rest of the series once the next articles have been published! See you soon on the blog.