If you want to talk the talk, you need to first know the buzzwords that will turn you into an SEO expert (or at least sound like one). Here’s the lowdown on Search Engine Optimization lingo:

• Organic/Natural – Organic, or natural, refers to the 1-10 search results in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They are the unpaid, not sponsored, results that you will be targeting in your SEO campaign.
• Paid Listings – Paid listings, or sponsored results, are ads that people buy to market their products online. They usually appear alongside the organic results.
• SERP – SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, or the list of organic results that comes up in a search engine like Google.
• SMO – SMO is Social Media Optimization, the latest SEO technique. SMO involves getting your site and fresh content noticed by social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
• White Hat/Black Hat – White Hat SEO refers to SEO that typically plays nice and doesn’t violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Black Hat specialists aren’t donning devil horns, but they know how to beat the system. Yet, there’s a chance of being penalized by the search engines for black hat techniques.
• Keywords – When you type a term into that little white box on Google, the words you’re typing in are called “keywords” in SEO land. SEO specialists optimize sites for specific keywords.
• Long Tail Keywords – These are keywords that came out of the womb with an extra appendage. Joking. Long Tail Keywords are usually keywords that are more than three words long. These keywords are usually easier to rank for than short 1-2 word keywords. Many SEO specialists who promise results will optimize your site for long tail keywords because the competition isn’t as great for these words. Yet, few people may be searching for these terms, so be careful if an SEO specialist does this.
• Link Building – The part of your SEO campaign that will most likely cause you the most frustration. Think of getting your site ranked with Google as an election that you want to win. Every relevant site that links to you is a vote. The more votes you have from reputable sites, the more likely you are to “win” by getting your site ranked higher.
• One-Way Links - Google is now thought to reward “one-way links” rather than reciprocal links. One way links occur when a site links to your site without you first linking to them.
• PageRank – When looking for relevant links, looks for sites that have a high PageRank. PageRank is Google’s system for determining how much weight a site has. Great sites have a PageRank of 7 or higher. Download the Google Toolbar to see the PageRank for all the sites you visit.
• WTF?! – The cry of a frustrated SEO specialist. *Pat on the back.* It’ll be okay.

This is only a handful of SEO lingo. Leave a comment to post your own!