SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, helps visitors find your web page via Internet search engines. Usually, designers work with SEO experts on optimizing their web content. However, it’s incredibly useful for designers to grasp the SEO fundamentals.

In this article, we cover the key SEO terms and their importance. If you really want to dig into SEO, then HOWU has informative SEO courses and workshops. In fact, none other than HOW’s Content Director Jessica Zafarris teaches two of them. Her workshop, SEO Best Practices, begins on Feb. 6th. Her second course is Optimizing Content: SEO Strategies for Designers. Both of these courses by our very own SEO expert are reasonably priced to boot.

Let’s begin by covering the basic SEO terminology.

10 Key SEO Terms Designers Need to Know:

1. Keyword: A word or phrase users type into search engines. You want to add lucrative keywords to your webpage content because it will make your site easier to discover via search engines.
2. Keyword Density: The percentage of how often the keyword is used on a web page. If the keyword density is high, then it will affect your Pagerank negatively.
3. KCI: KCI is short for Keyword Competitive Index. This measures the average monthly searches for a keyword compared to the demand (competition) for the keyword. Ideally, you want a keyword with high search volume and with a low competition factor.
4. Link Building: Getting external sites to link to your webpage. This increases trust, which in turn increases your Pagerank.
5. Pagerank: Google determines a link’s trust and popularity by assigning a number between 0 and 1. Learn more about how to rank in Google with this in-depth course, Master SEO Rankings.
6. Meta Description: The description about your website that shows on the search engine results page.
7. 301 Redirect: A permanent server redirect. This is great for removing duplicated content.
8. Index: As a noun, it means the database of web pages and their content. As a verb, it means to add a web page to a search engine index.
9. Alt Text: Is a description that’s added to a graphic. This helps with discoverability as the image will show up in image search results.
10. Bot (robot, spider, crawler): A program that scans a webpage’s content. This is how search engines determine where to list web pages on search results, and how search engines find penalty-worthy SEO errors that affect Pagerank.

Optimizing a website requires a significant amount of time, research and implementation. If you want to add SEO skills to the services you provide to clients, consider enrolling in one of HOWU’s SEO courses. Also, keep a look out as an SEO Certificate for Designers will be coming to HOWU in 2017.