March 6th, 2010 by Susie

Starting out in search engine optimisation can be daunting. Like any technical discipline, the literature is filled with acronyms, abbreviations, and jargon. In this post we want to introduce you to some of the most common ones. It should make SEO documentation and guidance notes easier to read and use.

SMM stands for Social Media Marketing. It’s all about getting the good word about your website spread through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and social bookmarking websites like Delicious. Getting into blogs also falls under this heading. SMO is Social Media Optimisation, which is the same kind of thing.

Linkbaiting is the art of creating content people will want to link to, and encouraging them to do so by any number of different means.

Keywords can be thought of as the search terms to keep in mind when performing SEO on your site. They should be chosen and used very carefully, because they’ll have a big impact on how your site works and ranks for particular searches.

PPC is Pay Per Click, a type of advertising where you pay by the click, when users go through to your site from an advert.

Deep links are those that go to a particular place on a page, not just to the page itself. Using them is generally a good idea, especially between the different parts of your website. It makes the content a user lands on more relevant to their immediate needs and search engines like them.

PageRank is a Google algorithm to, well, rank pages. Quite a lot is known about how it works these days, although it is pretty complicated. Basically, PageRank is a measure of how likely it is to stumble upon a website by clicking randomly through a network- a measure of overall interconnectivity. Google doesn’t rely on it as heavily as they once did (if at all), probably because so much is understood about how it works and how it can be fooled. There are a number of SEO tools that can be used to investigate a site’s PageRank value, but the latest information from Google strongly implies PageRank is no longer very important.

TrustRank is an evolution of the PageRank concept that is less open to manipulation. It relies on linkages with websites that are known to be good and trustworthy. It’s related to the concept of Authority. Sites that are known to be of high value, clean of spam and important in the wider scheme of the internet have high authority, while unknown entities and websites that use unethical tricks to seem better than they are have low authority.

SERPs are Search Engine Result Pages, or what you see after clicking the ‘search now’ button.

Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions are pieces of html code that don’t show up when a casual user looks at the web page. They contain information that search engines use, but take care- stuffing them full of keywords is a bad idea.

Those are just a few of the terms and acronyms found in SEO literature, but hopefully they will help you understand the literature that’s out there.

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