Keywords are the words and phrases that define a piece of content posted online. They’re used frequently within the content, and are often the words and phrases for which the writer wants the content to rank highly on in search engines.
Several years ago, having the right keywords in the meta description (meta tags) of a website would alert the search engines of the importance of those keywords in your content. Later, simply repeating those keywords within the content of the site would show their importance. These days, after the Google Penguin updates, it’s harder to control which specific keywords a page ranks for, though keywords are still relevant.
Finding the right set of keywords to try to rank for will make the best use of the time and energy put into designing a site. If a keyword has a high search volume on the search engines, but there aren’t many sites writing about it, then there are a lot of potential visitors available if you create the right piece of content to fill that niche.
Keywords also come into play in hashtags on supported platforms.
Link building is coercing other websites to link to yours, for the sake of the click-through traffic from visitors to that site, as well as to convince the search engines that your site is more important than comparable sites and that it should rank higher in search results.
Link building can take many forms. Common ways include posting to social networks, article sites, and video sites. As well as issuing press releases, guest blogging, and commenting on other blogs.
Ideally, good content on a website will naturally attract links, and a good syndication network will help that along. But in an attempt to game the search engines for artificial high rankings, some site owners will create large numbers of low quality using automated tools in spammy ways. While there are good arguments for some level of automation, pushing the limits of link building tools without the content can back it up is not only an ethical issue, but can lead to sites getting banned from the search engines.
The use of hacking or spam of low quality content to rank a site (often in a pump-and-dump scheme) is considered black hat link building, as opposed to traditional and approved white hat link building. It generally involves abusing tools such as SENuke, Scrapebox and XRumer to post huge amount of junk content.
The rank is the numerical position for which a webpage show up in a search engine results page (SERP) for a specific keyword.
If Bob’s Pizza in Santa Monica were to target the keyword “pizza santa monica” in Google, and the results for that search were:
1. Jim’s Pizza2. West Coast Pizza
3. Bob’s Pizza
Their rank would be number 3 for that keyword in Google.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of refining a website so that it gets as many useful visits from search engines as possible. It can involve adding or restructuring content, changing the way it’s displayed, focusing on different keywords, or improving the code that runs behind the scenes.
The goals of SEO can be to rank highly when specific keywords are searched, to rank highly across a great number of long-tail keywords, to rank higher for keywords that are more specific to a niche, or to change the appearance of the site on search engines to make it more appealing.
While in the strictest definition SEO refers to on-site changes, most people think of it as an umbrella that includes link building and social media presence.
White hat, in regards to search engine optimization, refers to any techniques not specifically banned by the major search engines. Generally, unless you’re going out of your way or playing around with automation, you don’t have to worry about breaking the rules. If you post your own content on your own accounts, run your own social media accounts, and don’t send bulk emails, you’ll be just fine.