Elements Of SEO

As you move into the world of digital marketing and SEO, people will start throwing around terms and phrases that you don’t understand. With all that jargon, it helps to have a quick glossary of SEO elements and terms. Here are some of the most common:

1. Audience: Audience, sometimes referred to as the target audience, is “a group of consumers characterized by behavior and specific demographics. Target audiences are a pillar of most businesses influencing decision making for marketing strategy, such as where to spend money on ads, how to appeal to customers, and even what product to build next.” Determining the target audience will influence nearly every other aspect of SEO.
2. Searcher Intent: This term is used interchangeably with user intent and audience intent, and it refers to the purpose of an online search. There are four types of searcher intent:
   1. Informational intent
   2. Navigational intent
   3. Transactional intent
   4. Commercial investigation
3. Keywords: Keywords are “any search term entered into Google (or another search engine) that has a results page where websites are listed.” The term is slightly misleading, as a keyword can be a singular word or a phrase that has multiple words in it. Keywords are used by marketers to optimize website content to help sites and pages rank higher.
4. Meta Description: Meta descriptions get a bit more into the technical aspect of search engines, but they greatly influence SERPs. Meta descriptions are “an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a web page. A page’s meta description tag is displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page (SERP) and is meant to give the user an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to their search query.”
5. Content: Just as it sounds, content is any text, audio or visual material that appears on your website. Believe it or not, all of those components can be improved with SEO tactics. Content is king is an overused phrase in the world of digital marketing, but it’s actually true. Content is the main ingredient of any website, and it should be the central focus of SEO strategy and improvements.
6. Backlinks: Backlinks are sometimes referred to as inbound and incoming links, and they are part of any off-page SEO strategy. Backlinks are created when one website links back to another — in the case of improving SEO, you want to have as many backlinks as you can. Backlinks show Google that you are an authority on a particular topic and essentially work as a “vote of confidence” from one website to another.
7. Site Architecture: Site architecture is “the hierarchical structure of your website pages. This structure is reflected through internal linking. Your website’s structure should help users easily find information and help search engine crawlers understand the relationship between different pages.” Google and other search engines take into account how well — or how poorly — your site is organized. The easier it is for a user to navigate, the higher it will likely rank.
8. Site Speed: Just as it sounds, site speed is “how quickly users are able to see and interact with content.” As we’ve mentioned before, the path between the user and your content needs to be as direct as possible, and speed plays an important role. If your site is slow to load, loads in stages or returns a 404 message (this is the worst case scenario), search engines will ding you for that. Optimizing search speed is an important element of good SEO and can mean the difference between ranking on page one and page two.
9. Schema: Another more technical aspect of SEO is schema. Schema is “a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand the info on your website in order to serve rich results. These markups allow search engines to see the meaning and relationships behind entities mentioned on your site. For this reason, schema markup has become a hot topic of SEO.”