Building on our web jargon series, this week we’re looking at what HTML, CSS, SEO, and organic visitors mean.
HTML
HTML stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language”. It is a series of tags that defines the layout and structure of a website. Your web browser knows how to read these tags and put them together to create the layout of the page you’re viewing on the screen. Without these basic building blocks you wouldn’t have a website. It’s typically used in conjunction with CSS.
CSS
CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets”. It’s used alongside HTML to change how something looks online. In very layman’s terms, CSS makes your website look nice. It’s the colours on the page, the font you use, the margins on your text.
CMS
CMS stands for “Content Management System.” It’s a tool to help you create digital content. A CMS can help you build out a website without actually having to write any code, or it can just be what you use to create a blog post each week (like us!).
There are a few different CMS platforms available; one of the most popular CMS systems is WordPress, which around 40% of the web is on!
SEO
SEO is probably one of the more common bits of web jargon you’ll come across online; it stands for “Search Engine Optimisation.” SEO is a way of optimising your website so that search engines like it. This then improves the quantity and quality of site visitors who arrive at your site organically (defined below) via search engines such as Google or Bing.
A great SEO tool you can use, if you need a bit more support with it, is Yoast.
Organic traffic or organic visitors
Organic, when used in this context, means “unpaid”. You can generate more clicks to your website by running adverts, such as Google or Facebook ads. But you can also get more visitors to your site by improving your SEO, which is generally free. Website visitors who find you this way are called “organic.”
Is there something confusing you?
If there’s web jargon you keep coming across that you don’t understand, why not drop us a line and we’ll look to include it in one of our next posts in this series.