Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
It’s 2011 and the Internet is constantly evolving. Things just aren’t the same anymore and online marketing just isn’t as simple as it used to be. But, that’s actually a good thing. Anyway, SEO is ever-changing and as an Internet Marketer, it’s your job to keep up to date with the latest SEO terms. It’s important to know this stuff as otherwise; you won’t have a clue what people are talking about when they talk about SEO. So here’s a list of the top 20 SEO terms you absolutely must know:
In this guide
1. SERP
SERP stands for search engine results page. It’s used by a lot of marketers all over the place. A search engine results page is basically a page you’re brought to right after searching a keyword on Google or any other search engine. You’ll hear a lot of marketers using this term saying things like “you can use method X to boost your site in the SERPS”.
2. Backlinks
This is the most well known term of all; you’d be stupid not to already know this one. A backlink is essentially a hyperlink on another website that links to yours. In super newb terms, clickable text that links to a website. Backlinks are everything in SEO. The more you have, the better you’ll rank in the SERPS.
3. Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a backlink. Anchor text will dictate where Google ranks you for certain search terms. It’s vital that you use your keyword as anchor text. Whatever you want to rank your site for, you must use as anchor text when building backlinks. Say I wanted to rank this blog for “MLM Training”, the anchor text would be:
<a href=”https://workwithdavidwood.com”>MLM Training</a>
That would then become a backlink to my site if posted it elsewhere and… It should give me a small boost in the SERPS for “MLM Training”.
4. Page Rank
Page Rank is something Google gives to every page indexed in its search engine. I actually wrote a full length post on Page Rank, which you can read about here.
5. Internal Link Hub
This is a relatively new term that was recently discovered. An Internal link hub is a page on your site that has a ton of backlinks that you use as a hub. From those hub pages you link to other pages on your site. This helps balance out the authority and Page Rank of your entire site.
6. Linkbait
This one’s a classic; it really is one of the oldest terms in the book. Linkbait is essentially a really nice piece of content or page on your site that is used to “naturally” attract lots of backlinks. I honestly think Linkbait is dead, but it sometimes works. When creating blog posts with lists, “The Top 5 Internet Entrepreneurs”, stuff like that… it can get syndicated like crazy across social networks and bookmarking sites. That post would get referred to as linkbait.
7. Google Algorithm
This is another famous term you’ll hear all the time in the SEO world. You must have heard it at one time or another. You know… “Oh shit, the Google algorithm is changing”. Fundamentally, Google uses an algorithm to rank webs pages for different keywords. The algorithm has hundreds of different factors and at the core… is backlinks, on-page optimization and site authority. Also stuff like Page Rank, number of external links and so on.
8. Link Farm
In the early days of the search engines and SEO, marketers would use link farms to artificially boost site Page Rank and literally dominate the search engines. Now… not so much. Link farming barely works and is seen as spamming. It’s basically where you build a load of websites and link them together. In the hope that they all boost each other’s Page Rank and rankings. They’re also used as link building networks. Marketers would create a single piece of content, spin it and submit it to their entire farm linking to other sites.
9. Money Site
This isn’t necessarily an SEO term, but you’ll still here it a lot. A money site is your own website which you use for the purpose of making money. Not for linking to other sites or any SEO stuff, just to build an email list, convert CPA offers or sell general products. The term is pretty self explanatory.
10. Sandbox
The notorious sandbox is known for swooping in and tossing websites to the bottom of the SERPS. Holding them in an imaginary “sandbox”. When Google sees some unnatural link building going on, your site can be tossed into the Google sandbox meaning to the bottom of the SERPS. It can happen and while some marketers say there’s no such thing, I have over 4 sites in the sandbox right now. Not to worry, they always come out and usually stronger than ever before.
11. No-Follow
Nofollow is a link attribute used by marketers to inform Google that they don’t want to “endorse” the site they’re linking to. It basically tells Google not to use that link in its algorithm to rank the site or give away Page Rank. It’s really useful as it lets you control who you actually link to. As every external link on your site gives away Page Rank.
12. 301 Redirect
301 redirects are ways of redirecting pages to new locations. You can do some real sneaky stuff with 301 redirects. If a page on your site has tens of thousands of backlinks, you can use a 301 redirect to channel all that link juice to a new location. A sneaky trick: You can buy a domain and build tens of thousands of links to it in a matter of weeks. Using some sneaky black hat SEO tools… Like Scrapebox and Xrumer. Then after a few weeks and 100,000+ links later, you redirect the URL to one of your money sites and kazam… your money site will instantly get boosted in the SERPS resulting in top rankings for crazy competition keywords. But only for a short while. Days or even hours. Keep that one quite. Shhh….
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. If you’d like to learn exactly how I put my search engine optimization on total autopilot and completely dominate the search engines, put your name and email in the form below this page.
Comments
Mike, January 19 2012, 22:48
Thank you for this post, it helped clear a few things up!
Pj, January 19 2012, 22:48
Wow dude! Once again love your post! This taught me a lot! I’m a total noob with SEO and sometimes the letters itself are kind of intimidating. I’m open to learning this super powerful skill set tho. Anything it takes, I’ll go for it. Thanks man! Keep it up!
bbrian017, January 19 2012, 22:48
Hi David, What a great idea for a post. I’ve been following the blogopshere for three years now and haven’t seen an article touch these terms to this extent! very good idea I’m sure this post will be very popular! When I first started blogging I would have loved to have a nice easy wrap up of these terms like this but information wasn’t so readily available as it is today.
Sarah, January 20 2012, 10:05
This post is really helpful, especially for beginners like me. Thanks, David!
John Doe, January 20 2012, 11:23
I appreciate the detailed explanations of each term. This will definitely help me improve my SEO strategies.
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Term 12 buries the real number in the fine print: the boost from that redirect trick lasts hours to days before the penalty hits, but the domain and link building setup takes weeks. For the rare case where the timing lines up before Google catches it, sure, it can work. For most people trying it, the ratio of effort to reward runs the other direction, and the piece doesn’t say that part with the same enthusiasm.
In plain English: buy an unused website, trick Google into thinking it’s popular, point it at your real site for a few hours before you get caught. That’s not a marketing term. That’s a scam with extra vocabulary.
The strongest case against Hector’s ratio is that the effort estimate is backwards. Setting up one throwaway domain and pointing a script at it is a few hours of work now, not weeks — the weeks quoted here are 2011-era manual link building. If the setup cost is actually low, the math tilts back toward ‘worth trying’ even accounting for the short window before the penalty.
Term 10 asserts sites always come out of the sandbox stronger than before, stated as settled fact with a personal anecdote as the only support. ‘Stronger’ isn’t defined — stronger rankings for the same keywords, more total indexed pages, more backlinks accumulated during the penalty period? Those are different mechanisms and would need different evidence. An anecdote about four sites currently in the sandbox tells us nothing about what happens when they come out, only that they haven’t yet.