A lot of people have considered running a website at one moment or another. Whether you’re interested in sharing your thoughts with a wide audience or creating an online business, there are various things you can do online.
Although it has never been so easy to create a website, running a domain is a completely different thing. Aside from the daily grind, you should also get acquainted with the basic terminology. Now, you don’t necessarily have to know what is ransomware, JavaScript, or metadata, but you should at least be aware of the basic phrases such as website traffic and SEO.
1. Website traffic
This is the most important phrase, which you will use on a daily basis. Website traffic refers to the number of visitors you get on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly level. The best way to check this stat is through Google Analytics. Given that this data comes directly from the Google search engine, you can always rest assured that it’s valid.
Of course, every website owner wants to maximize the traffic. However, not every visitor is regarded as a quality visitor. Some of them might reach your pages by chance and are barely interested in your content. Reaching the right type of audience can affect the next entry on our list: conversion.
2. Conversion rate
Conversation or conversion rate refers to the number of people who interact with your website in a certain way. It is an important parameter for web stores as it shows how many visitors purchased from the shop. However, it can be used for almost anything such as filling forms, subscribing to newsletters, downloading free content, etc.
If you have a high conversion rate, this often indicates that your website is able to attract the right audience. But it can also mean that you have many loyal customers who continuously visit your store to make a purchase.
3. Search engine optimization
Although most people understand terms such as Social Media Marketing or SMM, only a handful know what optimization or SEO is.
This is a practice where you modify content, website elements, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and so on, making them better for Google. Well-optimized pages are more likely to reach the top spots within this search engine. In other words, optimization can help you get more organic web traffic.
SEO is a slow process that takes months and months. However, it is also one of the best ways of branding for online companies.
4. Mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendly is a term we use to describe websites that are properly optimized for mobile devices. Initially, everything on a site is optimized for desktop. Unfortunately, some owners forget to do the same for mobile devices. When you open the same pages on your cell phone, the elements might be out of place, and you might not see certain parts of the text.
Optimizing a website for mobile devices is crucial as there are more mobile users nowadays than desktop users. A well-optimized site provides a better experience for users but will also rank higher in search engines.
5. Traffic sources
Traffic source is a bit less relevant term, but you should know it nevertheless. As the name implies, it refers to the source of our web traffic or where the visitors come from. We can classify all traffic in to six groups: organic, direct, referrals, paid, email, and social media.
Depending on your long-term strategy, you can use this data to either increase the traffic from specific sources or to try and increase traffic from other sources.
6. Content
In terms of websites, content usually refers to written posts. Even when a video is the focus of a page, there will be a short textual description that comes with it.
Having written text on a page is crucial for search engines. As they cannot understand images and videos, they need text to tell them what’s the page all about. So, the ability to create good articles is usually the thing that separates successful from unsuccessful websites.
7. Backlinks
Backlinks, hyperlinks, or simply links are commonly used terms among website owners.
If you’ve just created your first website, you probably don’t have to know what links are. At the same time, they are both important and unimportant. However, given how frequently people use this phase, it is better to know what it means.
You can have a nice blog without ever putting a link in it. However, the links are the thing that connects everything together. As you create more and more posts, you should start leading visitors to your other pages (especially product pages).
External links (links pointing to our site from other sites) are important for optimization. In fact, they are the most important factor that helps Google determine the relevancy of a page. As such, they are crucial for reaching top spots in the Google search engine.
