Welcome back to the SEO Simplified blog series! If you missed the first post on the four fundamentals of SEO, click here to catch up. You’ll want a solid understanding of those core concepts before diving into this week’s post.
Now let’s tackle something that trips up a lot of website owners: SEO jargon.
If terms like “SERP” and “backlinks” make your eyes glaze over, you’re not alone. SEO can feel like learning a new language—but by the end of this post, you’ll understand the lingo and be one step closer to optimizing your site like a pro!
The Top 15 SEO Terms You Need To Know in 2025
While the SEO world keeps evolving, these terms are still foundational. If you’re building or updating a website this year, these are the definitions you’ll want under your belt.
- SEO
- Algorithm
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Helpful Content System
- SERP
- Keywords
- Backlinks
- Meta Tags
- Crawlability
- Indexing
- Mobile Optimization
- User Experience (UX)
- Domain Authority
Feeling lost already? Take a deep breath, and read on!
Below, I’ll explain what each term means but without complicated lingo or industry jargon. So if you’re an SEO newbie, this guide is for you!
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of optimizing your website’s structure, design, and content in order to show up in search results and reach your ideal audience.
There are four main components of SEO: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Content. You can dig deeper into these elements in the first blog post of the SEO Simplified series: The 4 Fundamentals of SEO.
Algorithm
An algorithm is a set of rules the search engine uses to decide what content shows up first in the results.
These algorithms are always changing to serve their users better, so it’s important to stay up to date on the changes. A good way to ensure you never miss an important algorithm update is by following trusted sources like Search Engine Journal, Moz, or Google’s own Search Central blog.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the technical side of your website and how it’s structured. This includes ensuring clean website code, analyzing your website for broken links, optimizing images, optimizing CSS and JavaScript, and assessing the overall functionality of your website.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is the page structure optimization that happens ON the page design (not the backend foundational structure of your website). Things like page load speed, content structure, HTML tags, meta descriptions, mobile-optimized design, etc) are all examples of On-Page SEO best practices.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is the process of establishing your website’s online authority as a high-quality website. This includes strategies like acquiring high-quality backlinks from other websites (aka, websites that link back to your website) and guest blogging.
Helpful Content System
In 2023, Google announced a change to how they’ll rank search results by using their new Helpful Content System. This new ranking system will prioritize content that’s written by people for people. With the rise of AI tools, it’s good to know they’re taking steps to boost unique, helpful content written by humans.
That means:
- Ditching fluff and filler
- Writing for your actual audience, not just for keywords
- Avoiding AI regurgitation
In short, helpful content wins.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page, which is the page of search results displayed after a user conducts a search via a search engine. These results are called organic or non-paid search results. Paid advertisements or paid results appear at the top or bottom of the search results page.
Keywords
Keywords are the backbone of SEO and play an essential role in helping your site rank higher and helping potential clients find your website.
Keywords are the words or phrases someone types into a search engine to find your website. So, if they’re looking for help with healing from past trauma, they may type in “mental health trauma therapist” to find a website like yours.
Knowing what your ideal clients are typing into search engines to find websites like yours or your competitor’s website is valuable insight you can use when writing your website content.
Keyword Research is the act of researching what your ideal clients are typing into search engines to land on a website like yours.
You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Answer The Public, and more to find out what keywords related to your industry are being used the most in search queries.
Short-Tail Keywords vs. Long-Tail Keywords.
Short-tail keywords are search queries consisting of 1-2 words that are broad in scope (for example: “therapist” or “mental health”).
Long-tail keywords are search queries containing longer phrases of three or more words that help narrow down a search and provide more specific information about what a user is looking for (for example: “trauma therapist for adolescents”).
Backlinks
Backlinks are links on other websites that are linking back to your website (they’re also known as incoming links or inbound links). Backlinks help to establish your website’s authority by signaling to search engines that your website has valuable content because look how many people are linking to it! High-quality backlinks help you get in Google’s good graces and give you internet street cred.
However, not all backlinks are created equal. Backlinks on websites that are related to your niche and have their own established authority (aka internet street cred) are GREAT backlinks for your website. However, backlinks that come from spam sites, unrelated sites, or outdated sites can hurt your credibility.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are HTML elements on your page (like title tags, image alt tags, and meta descriptions) that tell search engine crawls what that specific page is about.
Meta Tags are a critical element of On-Page SEO, and they play a crucial role in improving a website’s SEO ranking.
A title tag is the title of a webpage and is used to tell search engines and website users what that page is about via a concise and relevant description of the page’s content.
A description tag, aka a meta description, provides a brief summary of the content on your page. This description is often found right below your website’s title when it shows up in search results. Description tags should be concise, compelling, and accurately describe the content of your page while also including relevant keywords. They should be between 150-160 characters long.
An image alt tag is where you can write a description of a photo on your website that is not visible on the front end but only visible to search engine crawlers. Since crawlers can only read HTML, providing image descriptors in the image alt tag is another way you can tell the search engine crawler what your website is about and what this image is. I addition, image alt tags will show when images are not loading. So even if your images fail to load, your visitors will know what was supposed to be there.
Crawlability
Search engines use crawlers (bots that can read code) to read website pages and review content. Your website’s crawlability indicates whether or not your website was easy to crawl, meaning easy to access and navigate your website’s content.
To ensure good crawlability, your website needs to be well organized and properly structured and include elements like a Robots.txt file, XML sitemap, and fast page load speeds.
Indexing
Once a search engine crawls your website, it indexes your website into its brain (aka, it files away your website like an index card in a Filofax). Indexing is the process by which search engines collect and store information about your website pages so that it can quickly retrieve and display relevant results on search engine results pages.
Mobile Optimization
These days, if your website design isn’t mobile responsive, then it’s not going to rank well in search results. Google practices mobile-first indexing, which means that when their crawlers go to crawl your site, it’s going to crawl the mobile version first. Therefore, if your website doesn’t work properly on mobile devices, it’s going to impact your search rankings even if your desktop version works perfectly. Not to mention, website designs that don’t adapt to every screen size run the high risk of alienating their website visitors with hard-to-read text, a frustrating experience, and a bad first impression of your business.
User Experience (UX)
UX refers to the experience a user has on your website. Was it slow to load? Was the text hard to read? God forbid, was their music that auto-played?! You can define your website’s UX by asking how do I want people to feel when they land on my website? What do I want the experience for them to be like?
There are several UX factors that affect website SEO, like page speed, mobile-responsive design, readability, content quality, navigation, ease of use, bounce rate, dwell time, site security, and more.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) refers to a website’s overall authority and credibility on the internet. It’s a metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority should not be confused with PageRank. PageRank, created by Google, ranks individual pages, whereas Domain Authority assesses and reflects the overall performance of an entire website.
Let’s Wrap This Up
The first step in gaining a new skill is understanding the language. Now that you have a good grasp on common SEO terms, you’re ability to absorb more technical SEO info just got a whole lot easier!
Thank you for joining me for the second installment of the SEO Simplified blog series. I hope you are finding this incredibly useful! My goal is for you to feel empowered and educated when it comes to SEO so that you can take this new knowledge and put it to WORK on your website in order to boost your business.
Next up? How to conduct an SEO audit of your website. Get on my email list so you don’t miss a post!
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