SEO Index, SEO Dictionary, SEO Bible – Call it What You Want, I Explain Things Everyone Wants to Know

Quite a daring title I must say, but I just finished creating the SEO dictionary on my blog because I am sick and tired of people being misinformed and not knowing the basic SEO terms. So these are the thing everyone wants to know if they are in SEO waters, so the dictionary is quite large and I couldn’t put it here, so I will just focus on the top 10 SEO terms taken from my new SEO dictionary that everyone wants to know and most people get confused about.

It’s quite simple, here are the top 10 SEO terms as I found them to be confusing for most, for everything else you can read my SEO dictionary at my SEO blog. Less talk more action, so here is the shortened top 10 SEO dictionary:

1. Anchor Text – Actually I thought everyone knew this one, but I guess I was wrong. I’m sure that there are people here on HubPages that constantly use Anchor Text links but have no idea what they are called. An Anchor text is the clickable part of the text, usually a keyword that is hyperlinked pointing to another website that is related to the keyword. On HubPages you can add an anchor text link using the editor, but for most websites like Ezine or your personal website you will have to use the HTML code, which would go like this:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>Anchor Text Keyword</a>

2. Backlink – Again, I was surprised to see how many people actually ask what a backlink is. Backlink is a link on one site pointing to another, the use of backlinks in SEO can vary. In most cases it is used to provide a reader with a way to get to the original content, product etc. But most people use it to build relevant links that will give the site they are pointing to some authority and rank. Two important aspects of a backlink are the anchor text used to describe the site to which it is pointing and the relevancy of the website from where the backlink is coming from.

3. Cloaking – Finally a term that is normal for most people not to know what it means. Cloaking is a Black hat SEO technique that is used to display one web page to the search engines and one to the visitors; of course we are talking about the same page. This is done so that the users will see what they need to see while at the same time showing a different page to the search engines that is created especially to their liking, full of keywords, good placement of keywords etc. This will get you penalized if you don’t know what you are doing. Personally I see these pages all the time, some people have gotten so good at it that the search engine bots can’t catch up to them.

4. Doorway Page – Also considered as Black hat SEO, doorway page is a page well optimized for the search engines that is used to attract visitors and then direct them to another page. This is not well supported by the search engines and I would suggest avoiding it.

5. Link Bait – I already explained this several times, but I guess I’m going to explain it a few hundred times more. Link bait is the Holy Grail of SEO in my book, this is the perfect method to drive traffic and get free links back to your site, so what is Link Bait? It is a high quality document, tool, app, ebook or any other useful thing that will make people like your website and come back again while linking to it and referring others.

6. Link Farm – I thought this term was self explanatory, but again, most people have no clue what link farm is, they think it’s related to Facebook games for crying out loud! Link farm is a web page or a web site that has far too many outbound links on it that are intended to increase a certain websites rank. I don’t need to say that this is a Black hat SEO technique, but I need to mention that the effect of link farms is close to zero, so stay away from them, they are not worth the risk!

7. Link Popularity – This is a good one, most people know what this means but they don’t know the factors that determine the popularity of a link. This is used to determine the popularity of a website or a web page by the number and quality of links pointing to the page. The number does count, but what really counts is the relevancy of the page from which the links are coming from, the age of the page and its rank as well as the age of the link itself. Also, the authority of that page and if it’s trustworthy, good neighborhood, carries a great weight.

8. Page Rank – PR – PR is a numerical rank of a website or a webpage assigned by Google’s algorithm. The rank signifies the importance and the authority of the page; it can go from 0 to 10, the higher the number the more important is the website in the eyes of Google.

9. Reciprocal Link – I found this to be a no brainer, but again, people have no clue what this means. This is an agreement between two website owners or administrators to exchange links to each other’s websites. Simple as that.

10. Search Engine Results Page – SERP – I can actually understand this one, SEO’s tend to use terms for everything, I do. So you can see SERP being mentioned here and there and people have no clue what a SERP is! You can see for yourself, SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page, in other words, once you type a query into the search engine box the results you get for the keyword types in is the SERP.