In this instructional video, the presenter walks viewers through 26 essential SEO terms and concepts that are crucial for improving search engine rankings. Starting with basic definitions like SERP and keyword research, the video progresses to more technical elements such as keyword difficulty, density, and proximity. It distinguishes on‑page versus off‑page SEO and details on‑page elements including title tags, heading hierarchy, image alt attributes, and meta tags. The presenter explains link strategies—backlinks, internal and external links, dofollow vs. nofollow, and anchor text—followed by metrics like bounce rate, domain and page authority, and the importance of local SEO. Site‑wide components such as sitemaps, content clusters (pillar‑and‑spoke), schema markup, and robots.txt are covered. Page‑load performance is highlighted with First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint, along with practical speed‑optimization tips. Finally, the video warns about Google’s March 2024 algorithm update targeting “scaled content abuse,” urging creators to use AI responsibly and add genuine value. Throughout, the speaker offers practical advice and best‑practice recommendations for each term, aiming to equip website owners and marketers with a concise SEO vocabulary and actionable steps to boost rankings.
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In this video, I'm going to share with you 26 important SEO terms that you need to know. This is like a video SEO glossary, and it'll help you understand the terminology behind getting higher rankings. It'll help you learn to speak SEO. Let's get started. I'm going to share some of the more common terms first. So if you want to fast forward to go to the more technical terms, go ahead. The first one is SERP. Now, you already know what this is. This is the actual search engine results page that you see. But oftentimes SEO companies talk about it as SERP. That's what they mean by the search engine result page. The next one is keyword research. Now, keyword research refers to identifying keywords and phrases that are related to your products and services. This is one of the most important steps in search engine optimization. Without proper keyword research, you may be just going after terms that aren't really going to help advance your rankings. Next up is keyword difficulty. This is a number between 0 and 100. It's a percentage. That tells you how hard it is to get ranked on a specific term. The lower the percentage, the easier it is for your site to get ranked. What you want to find are terms that are under, say, about 20%. That gives you the best chance of ranking. The terms that are in the 50% and above percent are much harder because they are competitive terms that Google has already done a good job indexing. Finding a term that's got high search volume and low keyword difficulty is a little bit difficult, but it can be done. And that's where the keyword research part of the equation for SEO comes in really handy. Another term related to keywords is density. This is how many times a word appears on a page. The more times it appears, the more dense that keyword is for that specific page. You don't want to overuse the term because if it's got more than a 1% keyword density, Google might look at it and say you're trying to over-index on that specific term and that can deprecate your rankings. The next one is keyword proximity, and this refers to how close close words are together. So for example, real estate in the New York area and vicinity is a little bit different than New York City real estate. Based on the way the terms are phrased, Google may find that one page aligns better with what someone is searching for than another page. Now let's talk about on-page SEO. This refers to all of the techniques that you do on your specific website. This is on the page itself, such as tagging with titles, headings, and so on, which I'll go into in just a minute. Off-page refers to things that you do outside of that specific page, and that could be going to other websites and trying to request them to link back to you, which is a backlink, and then other things like social media marketing or other tactics. Now let's go into some of the elements of the page itself. These are on-page things that you would do. The first one is a title tag. Title tag refers to the title that's part of your page. When you look at the tab inside Chrome or something, you'll see some text related to that page. That's the title tag. This is the most important signal that you can give Google. So you want to put your keywords inside that title tag. Now related to your title tag are your heading tags. The most important one is your H1 tags, and you only want to have one H1 header inside your page. You can have multiple H2 and H3 tags, but the H1, you just want to have one of them. And that's basically the heading of your page. Oftentimes that aligns closely with what the title tag is, but not always identical text. Next up is the image alt tag. When you hover over an image, you probably see some text, not always. And those are pages that don't have image alt tags, and it's a missed opportunity. What you want to do is include your keyword inside the image alt tag. That enhances Google's understanding of what your page is about because your images relate to the keyword as well. Other tags you want to put on your page are meta tags. Now these could include your meta description, meta titles, other things that are related to the page. If you're using a tool like WordPress, you'll see boxes where you can enter this information and it's fairly straightforward. You want to include some of your keywords inside these tags as well. Now let's talk about links. A backlink is a link from another site pointing to your site. This adds a lot of value because it helps build up your site's authority. When you have many inbound links coming from other sites, especially the reputable sites, that's a signal to Google that your site carries weight with specific keywords that are linked from the terms that are being linked to you. Another important piece of link strategy is internal and external links. Now, these are the links that you put on your page itself. Internal links are links that go to other articles on your site. External links are links that go to articles on other sites. So for example, if you're linking to a definition, you might have a definition of a specific term from your page. To a Wikipedia entry or Investopedia or maybe a Forbes article. Those are good external links. And it shows Google that you're not only getting inbound links, but you're also giving external links too. There are a couple of different types of links that you put on your page itself. So one's called a dofollow, which is the default, and another one is nofollow. It's a tag that basically determines whether Google should follow that link or not. If Google does follow a link, the dofollow, which is the default, It basically means that link that you're sending out is like a backlink to that other site. If you have a nofollow tag, that means you're telling Google not to follow that link. It will not count toward that other site's authority. So which of these types of links should you use? For the most part, you're going to use dofollow links. If you link to sponsors or affiliate programs, you want those to be nofollow. Otherwise, dofollow is usually best practice. The actual text that you link is called Anchor text. This is pretty important because that generally serves as the keyword related to the link. So when you're linking to one of your own internal pages or linking to another site, Google will look at that keyword that you've linked and say, that's the term that you believe to be relevant for that link. When someone visits your web page and just goes away back to some other site or back to Google, that's called a bounce. And so your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after they only view one page. And that basically is an indicator that your site or that your page is not very engaging. So how does Google know whether your page is worth ranking, whether your site's actually worth ranking? It's a score called Domain Authority. Now Google uses their own terms, they call it Page Authority. They want to know if your page actually has lots of, say, inbound links pointing to it. Does it have good quality content on the page? Is it helpful? Is it unique? All of that is used to determine your page authority. And so that helps you elevate your rankings. You want to get that as high as you possibly can. And the way you do that is you produce unique, high-quality content. Next up is local SEO. Local SEO is how you get ranked for localized searches. So for example, if you're in Washington, D.C. and you want to get found for data backup services, so data backup service Washington, D.C. would be a localized search. And there are things that you can do on your website as well as enhancements to your Google Business Profile, which is designed for local businesses. To help you get higher rankings on these local searches. Now let's talk about some of the other components that are related to SEO. A sitemap's basically an index of all of the content that's on your site. The articles, the posts, the videos, the images, all of that is indexed in different files on your sitemap. Now WordPress and some other tools that publish websites automatically include a sitemap. You don't generally have to update your sitemap by yourself. It will usually happen all automatically if you set up WordPress properly. The sitemap is what Google looks at to see what's changed on your site. Now, this is one of my favorite parts of SEO, and it's called a content cluster. A content cluster is basically a group of content that's related. So you can think of it as a hub and spoke, like a bicycle tire. Now, the hub is going to be content that you would call pillar content, the really important juicy stuff that's really long detailed information that you want pages pointing to. And then Around that, you've got spoke content, which is content that's related to your website. So when you do this, you're creating this cluster effect of different types of core content with related terms, which allows you to create lots of different content. And it shows Google what your site's all about. Another thing that can help your site get indexed better is to use schema markup. A lot of SEO companies still say it's a good idea to map your schema to the type of content you're producing. So for example, You may have articles on your site, so you would use an article schema. If you have videos on a page, you would use a video schema. And all that does is it tells Google different components of the page that are relevant for that type of content. It helps it index your site a little bit better. You may have heard of this one, the robots.txt file. It's the file that tells the search engine crawlers like Google and Bing which pages are allowed to be crawled, which ones are not allowed to be crawled. So you might be thinking, well, I want everything to be crawled, but some cases you actually don't want specific pages to be accessed. For example, if you have some private information or for logged in users and you don't want that to be found from Google, you can specifically state you want those pages omitted from being crawled and it will skip over those. Here's a really important one. In fact, page load speed is one of the most important factors in how Google will rank your site. It wants to provide a really good experience for its visitors. So imagine someone typing in a search term onto Google and then it taking a long time to load your page. Well, that's not a great experience. When your page loads faster, you're giving the user a better experience. That's what Google wants to see. So it inches up your rankings just by having page load a bit faster. There are a couple of terms Google uses to figure out how fast your page is loading. The first one is First Contentful Paint. Basically, this is the time between when a page starts to load and any of its content is rendered on the screen. Ideally, you want this to be a fraction of a second. Think of it as a delay time between the time someone requests your page to get loaded and time you actually start to load the page. That's what Google wants to know, is really wicked fast. A related term to this is Largest Contentful Paint. What this is, is basically the time between when a page starts to load and the first image or block of text that is actually visible on your page. So it's the experience that people get. How fast is that page load time? Now, in today's environment where people want to click a button and just see something display super fast, all that plays a role in the page experience you're giving to people. So you want your site to load really fast. There's several things you can do to improve your page load speed, such as hosting it on a high-quality server where they don't put tons of different other websites that also causes load speeds to go down. Reduce image file size makes your pages load a lot faster because the image file size is smaller. Caching techniques and others improve your page load speed, and that will help inch up your rankings too. So the last term I'm going to talk about in this video is scaled content abuse. Back in March 2024, Google completely redid their algorithm to stop all of those pages that were solely written by AI from getting ranked. The companies and pages and websites that were using AI only to write their content without adding any value, adding any content that was really useful for people, it was basically regurgitated ChatGPT information. Those pages got destroyed, those sites got destroyed, and they are no longer ranked well at all on Google. So be mindful of how you create content. You can still use AI to produce your content. That's perfectly fine, but you have to use it in a very structured and strategic way, not let it do the thinking for you. Do that using your ideas and converting them into thought leadership content with AI. It's a combination that works brilliantly and gets people ranked in Google. Give it a try.
