If you’ve been researching ways to drive more traffic to your site, it’s likely that you’ve come across a few terms over and over again like SEO, social media, RSS feeds, and permalinks. But do you really know what all of those terms mean?
Following are a few definitions to help you get started.
SEO
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It describes specific techniques used to improve the ranking of your site in a search engine, like Google and Yahoo, or to increase the volume of traffic to your site.
SEO can also refer to Search Engine Optimizer, which is a job title for a person or company that helps you improve traffic to your site by using techniques that are attractive to search engines. These can include all of the above practices plus changes to the underlying code or design of your website.
Links, Permalinks, and Anchor Links
As you may already know, a link is text or a graphic that you can click and be taken to another site for more information. On a blog, each post has a link that is permanently associated with it. This is called a permalink. The blog itself will have a URL, like http://myblog.blogspot.com While you are on the blog, if you click the title of any post, you will be redirected to another page that shows only that post. That is the permalink and will look something like this:
http://www.myblog.com/title-of-post
You can use the permalink to direct folks to specific posts on your blog.
An anchor link is much the same, however, it redirects the viewer to a specific place on a website page. You’ve likely seen these on a FAQs page, where there are multiple links at the top of the page and clicking on one takes you to that specific information further down the page.
Some folks are beginning to use the term anchor link to mean links that use specific keywords. For instance, if you make a blog post and want to send folks to an article that you have written, instead of using the words “more info” for your link, you should use the title of your article.
For more information, read the full article Online Marketing Lingo Explained. You’ll find more helpful articles on the Resources page.