If you wish to know about search engine optimization or SEO, you need to know about it's various topics or terms.
Some of the significant terms of SEO are - backlinks, outbound links, cloaking etc. Below I will provide explanation of some important terms.
Backlink
If there is a link of your site on another site, it is a backlink for your site. This link could be a link of your site's homepage or any other page. Backlinks are also called incoming links or inbound links. For example, if I write a post on Medium about Hive and provide a link of Hive blog; that means I created a backlink for Hive Blog on Medium.
Outbound link
An outbound link is the opposite of a backlink, meaning a link to another site if you have one. Outbound link is also called Out-going link.
For example, just the opposite of previous example. If you post a link of Medium on Hive Blog, you are creating an outbound link for Hive.
White hat SEO
If you do SEO without violating search engine guidelines or policies, then this type of optimization is called white hat SEO. The most important of these guidelines is to create a website for people that is not for the benefit of search engines.
Other policies include backlink popularity, keyword research, link building, etc. White hat SEO is also called Ethical SEO.
Black hat SEO
This is the opposite of white hat, meaning that it is optimized without following the rules given by the search engines. Black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, invisible text, and more. It can also be called Unethical SEO.
Keyword Stuffing
It's part of Black-Hat SEO. Filling the page with such keywords that the user can search by typing means keyword overloading. Many times such keywords are inserted in the input tag with hidden attributes so that the text is invisible to the user and the search engine has to read it. Again, the color of the page is the same as the color of the text, so the user can not see but the search engine can. Keyword stuffing is often called Keyword Loading.
You should stop from doing this. If the search engine finds out, it will kick out the site.
Okay, may be you are still confused. Let's see an example. Look at the picture below -
Their article tag is "SEO course", and they used the tag so many times which was unnecessary. That means, they are forcing the search engine to index their article. Which is called Keyword Stuffing in the term of SEO.
Search Engine doesn't like keyword stuffing. I will talk about "Keyword Stuffing" in details on another post.
Link Popularity
This is to determine the quality of a site. It is based on qualified inbound links (backlinks). Search engines build their algorithms based on link popularity to determine where a site will be on the search engine results page (SERP).
The only difference between quality backlinks and backlinks is that quality backlinks will be on a site that is similar to your site. For example, if Hive.blog has a link to medium.com, it is a quality backlink and if it is on Facebook, it will be just a backlink.
Link farm
The link farm means, you can open several websites and give the link of each site to another site. As a result, the backlinks of each site increased. But if these are caught, search engines will rank your site as spamdexing. That means your page rank will decrease.
Spamdexing is when search engines mark your site as if you have violated their guidelines. If search engine spamdexing your site then your whole SEO will end in failure. Spamdexing your site can be done for various reasons such as doing link farms, keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages, cloaking i.e. black hat SEO.
Doorway page
This is to build pages where there are very few lines and these lines contain only keywords so that search engines can find a lot of keywords. This leads to keywords but there is not much information for users. If you go to this page, there will be a link to another page or you will be redirected to another page. It is called entry page, portal page, jump page, bridge page etc.
Cloaking
It is a method that shows the search engine one type of content, and the user another type of content.
In this method, when a request for a page goes to the server, the IP address or user agent looks at it and understands whether it is a search engine bot / crawler / spider or a human. Spider shows one type of page when sees and another type of page when human sees.
Well, I know this term is little bit confusing for you. Let's see an example. Look at the screenshot below -
I need a medicine and I searched on Google "Buy Tramadol Online". On first page I got this website and clicked, as I can pay by mastercard.
Now look at the following screenshot. When I checked the page, there's nothing about Tramadol! It's kind of cheating!
That means, it's showing user one kind of result and search engine spider another kind of result. This is called cloaking in the term of SEO.
And here spider isn't real spider, it's a web crawler bot by Google.
Internal Link
This is a link from one page to another on your site. It is very important. For example, if you have a series of tutorials on your site, you will link to the previous page with anchor text to go from one page to the next.
This will serve as a backlink to your site. This increases the page rank. You will see on Wikipedia site how many links to their site are in each line.
Well I am also going to provide an internal link of my previous post here.
Read Also - How to do keyword research
Traffic
How many visits a site is getting is the traffic of that site. The traffic of a site is increasing which means the visitors of that site are increasing.
So here are some basic terms of SEO. Actually, I am not going to lie. It's just very few terms of SEO. In my next post I want to talk about more terms like Meta tag, Title tag, Heading, Keyword research, Site navigation, alexa ranking and so on. It actually depends on the response of this post. If I get enough response than I will continue like a series.
Learning SEO is like swimming in the ocean. If you take SEO as a fun work than learning will be so easy for you.