If you’re new to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you may find much of the terminology quite daunting at first. The following content will explain some common SEO terminology to help give you a better understanding of Search Engine Optimisation.

Blog – This term is short for ‘web blog’ and can be also used as a verb, ‘to blog’. It consists of a website that includes posts commonly on topics such as experiences, expert information, hobbies, interests or diaries. Blogs contain a whole host of multi-media content such as podcasts, videos and images. Blogs are free to setup and easy to use.

Bot – Short for the phrase ‘software robot’. These robots are deployed by search engines to explore the World Wide Web and record page content and link data for use on the Search Engine Results Page. A bots exploring of the web is known as ‘crawling’.

CSS – Stands for Cascading Style Sheets – these provide website information regarding layout, colours, backgrounds and the format of web pages.

Hyperlink – This will link two hypertext files together. These are almost always the type of links applied to webpages.

Knoll – This is Google’s answer to Wikipedia, a database of knowledge written by expert authors within their various fields. Knoll has not made a great impact on the web yet but is one to watch.

nofollow – this is an instruction that is given to bots to disregard a hyperlink so it will not contribute to benefiting the search engine’s ranking of the link’s target.

PageRank – This is Google’s method of determining the importance of websites. The rank is based on a score out of 10, with 10 being the most important. The PageRank was invented by Larry Page and Sergery Brin, the founders of Google.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is the process of increasing the volume and quality of traffic to a website to improve its standing within the eyes of the Search Engines. It can also be used as a term of someone who carries out SEO, as in a Search Engine Optimiser.

Sitelinks –links shown below certain search results within Google that will show a list of the most important pages within the site.

Sitemaps – this is a protocol that is used by webmasters to inform search engines about the pages that make up a specific website and what importance is attributed to each page.

URL – all addressees on the internet have a uniform resource locator which will act as an address to point to retrieve the files of any website or web content.