Do you know the meaning of the term SEO? This article will provide you with all the information on SEO from its definition to its usage and more!
-
Kevin
-
January 24, 2022
-
Common Questions
Your writing, at its best
Compose bold, clear, mistake-free, writing with Grammarly's AI-powered writing assistant
What Does the Term SEO Mean?
You’ve probably heard about the term SEO more than enough times — now it’s time to ask, “What is the meaning of the term SEO?”
Simply stated, the term SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, this refers to the process or practice in which a person can orient their website to rank higher on a search engine results page (or SERP), in turn receiving more traffic.
The Origin of SEO
Before SEO became the official name, other monikers were used, such as:
- Search engine placement
- Search engine positioning
- Search engine ranking
- Search engine submission
- Search engine registration
- Website promotion
The first recorded usage of the acronym “SEO” can be found dating back to 1997. Although its history is a bit fuzzy, industry analyst Danny Sullivan credits Bruce Clas as one of the first individuals to popularize the term
Throughout the 90s, the search engine landscape was extremely competitive. You had your choice of search engines — both crawler-based listings as well as human-powered directories — including AltaVista, Excite, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Infoseek, and Yahoo.
In the early days, the only way to perform any kind of SEO was through on-page activities, which included optimizing factors, such as:
- Ensuring the content was relevant and easy-to-read
- There was substantial text
- You had outbound links and internal links
- Your HTML tags were correct
To do well in this era, the trick was to basically just repeat your keywords enough times throughout your title tags and web pages. Want to outrank a competitive page that uses a keyword 200 times? Simply use the keyword 300 times! Today, this practice is referred to as spamming.
Let’s Get Down to Basics: How Does SEO Work?
If someone were to mention the topic SEO, we would now be able to safely say they are referring to search engine optimization.
When adopting search engine marketing, while you are clearly optimizing your site for search engines, you inadvertently are optimizing your site for people as well. SEO marketing refers to the action of optimizing your website for multiple search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, and Bing).
Why the Focus on Google?
Primarily the goal for most is to be able to rank on the first page of Google results in all search terms that you deem most relevant for your target audience. The simple reason for this is that for most, the term “search engine” is interchangeable with Google and Google search console (Google currently holds approximately 92% of the search engine market globally).
Due to the clear-cut fact of Google being the dominant search engine, SEO typically revolves around Google analytics.
With all that being said, you can now begin to grasp that an SEO — while being very much about the technical aspect and nature of how to configure your website — also depends greatly on you being able to understand the needs and wants of your target audience.
Terminology You Should Know
While learning about SEO, you’ve likely picked up on the vast vocabulary and confusing jargon associated with SEO. To help combat any confusion, we’ve compiled a list of terms to better help you understand the world of search engine optimization:
- Black Hat SEO practices that violate Google’s quality guidelines.
- Indexing stands for the organization and storing of all content found while crawling.
- KPI is an acronym that stands for “key performance indicator” and is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.
- SERP Features when results are displayed via any nonstandard format
- Organic refers to earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.
- SERP refers to the page you see following a search or “search engine results page.”
- Search Query is defined as the words that are typed into a search bar.
- Image Carousels references when an image search result displays the images in scrollable form from left to right.
- 10 Blue Links refers to the format in which search engines display their search results
- Crawling stands for the process search engines use to discover your web pages.
- Google My Business Listening refers to the free listing that is currently available to all local businesses.
- Ranking refers to the process of ordering search results by relevance to the query.
- Local Pack typically consists of a group of local business listings which appear for local intent searches.
- Intent refers to what users truly want from the words they type into the search bar.
- De-indexed if a group of pages or singular page is removed from Google’s index.
Recap
So, What Does the acronym SEO stand for?
Simply put, SEO is a commonly used acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization — it is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page so that you can drive in more traffic and in turn, sales.
Traffic that comes via SEO is often referred to as “organic search traffic” to differentiate it from traffic that comes through paid search, which is often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) or PPC.
Learning about search engine optimization may seem a bit daunting, but we hope this guide helped clear up some confusion and brought you a step closer to being an SEO expert!
Sources:
- Search Engine Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats
- What Does SEO Mean? 7 Things Every Marketer Should Know | WebFx
- What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? | Search Engine Land
- The Historical Development of Search Engine Optimization | The Historical Development of Search Engine Optimization
