You keep hearing how important it is to optimize your site for search engines. While people tell you how important it is, they use terms that may seem foreign to you. It is hard to know what to do, when you are do not understand the words.
Search Engine Optimization
This is a term for optimizing your website for search engines. Search Engine Optimization is called SEO. You work with your website to make it rank well in the organic search listings.
Back Links
These are links from other websites that are linked back to your website. Some search engines use these and the quality of these links as part of your ranking.
Keywords
These are words that a search engine uses to determine the topic of given web page. You can look for a keyword tool, to look for keywords related to your niche. To help your search ranking, you can write posts related to those terms.
Keyword Density
This term relates to how often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a given web page. The writing on your page needs to be reader friendly. Repeating the same keywords over and over may give it a high density but your web page could be penalized for using it too much.
Link Building
You use link building to get more back links to your website. This is the act of sharing your link with various sites. Link building with sites that are related helps your ranking.
Niche
This is the topic of interest for your website. This is typically a smaller or more specific area of a market. A website should be focused on one niche so visitors know what to expect.
Organic Search
While some sites pay to be on search engines, this is an expensive way to stay on the front page of search listings. With organic search, these pages come up naturally under the keywords that are used on your website.
Ranking
Your website has a rank on search engines. You want your website to move up in ranking so it is on the first page of search listings. Search engines use complex algorithms to decide on your ranking.
Spiders
Used by search engines, spiders scour the web for information. They automatically index web pages, check for spam and what type information is on a page. These are also called web robots, web crawlers, and internet bots.
Tags
Each of your web pages and blog posts should have a title tag. You can use tags on your blog posts. Tags in blogs are words related to your blog post, when you use tags visitors know what posts are similar. Both of these can be used to help your ranking. There are more terms related to SEO, but hopefully this will help you understand some of the common terms.