I thought I can avoid it, too–these complex rules and confusing techniques that many bloggers and website owners are straining their resources to implement. But it’s almost inevitable. I realized I will have to learn it sooner or later, might as well learn SEO today.

That is how I felt before I decided to delve into pages and pages of online SEO resources. I was trying to push aside learning SEO for the longest time because I thought I can do away with it (and yes, because it seemed too much work). But it continuously crept up on my online work, prodding me to take a look and read about it. In the end, I resigned to the fact that I have to have some degree of SEO knowledge if I want to pursue my goal, which is to earn BIG money online.

Well, I’m no SEO guru and there are other sites or bloggers out there who are more authoritative in this field. But sometimes, these experts’ advice can make SEO look so complicated and have us, blogging and SEO newbies, pulling our hair in exasperation. Aside from that, because SEO is a changing and dynamic practice, some advice become outdated overtime and will probably do more harm than good when implemented today.

Because of this, I decided to round up the most sensible and effective SEO techniques that I’ve learned and create a series of posts that will discuss all things SEO in a simple and clear-cut manner that is guaranteed newbie and non-techie friendly. I have to stress however, that this is not a complete and definitive guide, but more like a primer–something to make the learning curve less steeper.

So from one newbie to another, here’s the first installment of my Learn SEO for Beginners Guide. Hope you learn something from it.

Learn SEO: Basic Terminologies

SEO and SERP

By now, I assume that you know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The objective is to optimize your site or a page in your site to rank high on the search engines,  particularly on the 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

SERP, on the other hand, is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. Search engine results is a list of websites that the search engine ‘thinks’ is relevant to the word or words that you are looking for and is often broken down into pages, depending on how long the list is. The length of the list depends on how many webpages are related to your search query.

Sometimes, being on page 1 of Google is enough to bring significant traffic to the site. There are cases however when you  need at least to be on the top 3 of the SERP to get a substantial traffic share. That’s why, some SEO personnel are more concerned with their SERP ranking than anything else. SERP rank is your rank or position on the search engine results. The higher the SERP rank, the better.

For example, when I googled the term SEO, the website www.seo.com came up third on my search result, hence www.seo.com‘s SERP rank for the keyword SEO is third.

Others also define SERP as Search Engine Ranking Position which is just equivalent to SERP rank.

PageRank

Not to be confused with SERP rank, the simplest definition of PageRank or PR is the measure of the site’s authority, importance or popularity.

Keyword or Keyword Phrase

Keyword is a word or a group of words that best describes what you’re searching for. For instance, if you want to know what is SEO, you’ll most likely enter “seo” in the search engine. If you want to know about basic SEO, you’ll probably enter “seo for beginners“.

“seo” is a single keyword

“seo for beginners” is a keyword phrase or keyphrase

Most use just keyword when they’re referring to either keyword or keyword phrase for purpose of simplicity. Some prefer to be more precise and use keyword for a single word and keyword phrase for more than one word.

Links

A link is created when a page points to another page as a reference to something that was mentioned in the post or article. In SEO terms, it is seen as a vote of importance or popularity. Link is a very important SEO metric and is currently believed to be the most influential factor that can affect your SERP ranking.

(Note: This is just part one of the Learn SEO for beginners series. You click on the link below to proceed to part two. All posts in this series will include links to the topics that came before and after them.)

Next Topic: PageRank

keyword, learn seo, PageRank, PR, SEO, SERP SEO, Tips