With all the SEO buzz that’s on the Internet these days, it’s easy to get caught up in all the jargon and “secret” insider conversations happening on blogs and other sites. If you’re heavily involved in SEO, those terms are your lifeblood. But, if you’re a company simply looking to hire a content copywriter who understand SEO, most of the topics and definitions aren’t worth the time it takes you to learn them.

Remember, I said ‘most.’ There are some terms out there that you should know before you have a conversation with a content copywriter like me. Knowing these terms will help you better understand a content copywriter’s services, how they arrive at their prices and the rationale behind the copy and content they provide for you.

Here’s my list:

“Bot” (AKA: “robot”, “spider”, “crawler”) -This is a program that search engines use to find and add web pages to their indexed searches. However, search engines aren’t the only ones who use bots. Spammers use bots to ’scrape’ content in order to plagiarize it and use it as their own content.

“CMS” (Content Management System) - These are programs which allow publishers of online content to focus less on webmaster and coding tasks and more on publishing their content. WordPress is an excellent example of a CMS.

Long Tail - Longer, more specific search engine queries that are usually less targeted than shorter, broad queries. For example, a search for “Copywriter” is a very broad term with millions of results. “Content Copywriter in NC” would give you far fewer results. Long tail terms typicaly have three or more terms within them.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) - Just a fancy term used to describe the way search engines index commonly associated words in a document. Most SEO experts refer to these groups as “long tail.” (See above) The significance is that while it might be next to impossible to rank a new website on page 1 for a term like “Student Loans”, it is fairly easy rank on page 1 for a “long tail” term like “Student Loans for Underwater Basket Weaving Classes”.

META Tags - Statements of HTML page located in the HEAD section that give browsers and search engines information about an individual page. Some META tags are visible in search engines and in your browser (like titles), while some are not (like publisher info). It’s vital to have unique META title and description tags because search engines rely on these things to (a) determine what a particular web page is about and (b) give information about you page to search-engine users.

Static Page - A static page is a web page with no dynamic content or variables (such as session IDs) in the URL. Static pages are great for SEO. They’re inviting to search engine spiders and are fairly easy to create.

URL - Universal Resource Locator - Just a fancy name for a web address.

Widget - A small application or program used on web pages to provide a specific function. The link to my copywriter job board in the upper-left of this page is a widget provided by Job-a-matic. It’s also a generic term borrowed from economics that represents and product or commodity. Thanks for teaching me that, Mr. Holmes.

Site Map - A page or group of pages that link to every accessible page on a website and is intended to improve site usability by simplifying the structure of the site for users. It also helps search engine spiders find all the pages on a site.

SEO - Maybe this term should have been at the top, but if you’re here, chances are you understand at least a little about how SEO works and why it’s important. SEO is the process of increasing visitors to your site by ranking higher in the search engines. The theory is that, the higher you rank, the more people will visit your site since search-engine users typically don’t click past the first few pages of results.

Landing Page - Generally referred to as the page a user lands on when they click a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad. It can be used to harvest email addresses, track campaign results and promote specific products or services.

These ten terms just scratch the surface of the SEO dictionary. But if you understand these ten, you’re probably ready to have a conversation with a content copywriter who’s ready to write your next website, blog, press release or article…like this one.