SEO Terms Glossary
MEANINGS OF SEO TERMS
If you've been reading our beginner's guide to SEO and are perplexed by some of the phrases you've come across, don't worry! We understand that understanding the intricacies of SEO lingo and jargon might feel like learning a new language. To help you understand all of the new jargon we're throwing at you, we've put together a chapter-by-chapter SEO glossary complete with definitions and helpful links. You should save this page for future reference!
SEO 101(Chapter 1)
10 blue links: This is the format in which search engines display search results; ten organic results all appear in the same format.
Black hat SEO methods are those that violate Google's quality rules.
Crawling is the technique by which search engines find your website's pages.
De-indexed: A page or set of pages that have been removed from Google's index.
Featured snippets: Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of search engine results pages for specific searches.
Google My Business is a free listing service for local businesses.
Image carousels: Image results that scroll from left to right in various SERPs.
Indexing is the process of storing and organizing items discovered during crawling.
In the context of SEO, intent refers to what users truly want from the search terms they entered.
A "key performance indicator" (KPI) is a quantitative statistic that indicates how well an action accomplishes a goal.
Local pack: A group of three local company listings that display for searches with a local purpose, such as "oil change near me."
Organic: As contrast to sponsored advertisements, organic placement in search results is earned.
People Also Ask boxes: A box in some SERPs that displays a collection of questions and answers relevant to the query.
Words placed into the search bar constitute a query.
Ranking: Sorting search results based on their relevance to the query.
A search engine is an information retrieval program that searches a database for items that match the user's request. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are a few examples.
SERP characteristics: Results are displayed in a non-standard format.
SERP: "search engine results page" — the page that appears after completing a search.
Visits to a website are referred to as traffic.
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are the online addresses or locations for distinct pieces of content.
Webmaster guidelines: These are guidelines released by search engines such as Google and Bing to assist site owners in creating material that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results.
White hat SEO: Search engine optimization techniques that adhere to Google's quality requirements.
Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking in Search Engines(Chapter 2)
Status codes 2xx: A set of status codes indicating that a page request has been successful.
4xx status codes: A type of status code that indicates that a page request resulted in an error.
5xx status codes: A set of status codes indicating the server's inability to fulfill the request.
Advanced search operators: Special characters and commands that you can enter into the search field to narrow down your search.
Algorithms: A procedure or formula for retrieving and ordering stored information in meaningful ways.
Backlinks (sometimes known as "inbound links") are links from other websites that point to your website.
Bots: Also known as "crawlers" or "spiders," these are the programs that search the Internet for content.
Caching: A copy of your website that has been saved.
Caffeine refers to Google's web indexing technology. Caffeine is the index, or collection of web information, whereas Googlebot is the crawler that searches for it.
Citations: A citation, often known as a "business listing," is a web-based reference to the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a local business.
Cloaking is the practice of displaying different material to search engines than to human visitors.
Crawl budget: The average number of pages crawled by a search engine bot on your site.
Crawler directives: Tell the crawler what you want it to crawl and index on your site.
Distance: In the context of the local pack, distance refers to proximity, or the searcher's and/or the query's location.
Engagement: Information on how searchers interact with your site as a result of their search results.
Google Quality standards: Google's publicly available standards outlining practices that are prohibited because they are harmful and/or designed to manipulate search results.
Google Search Console: A free Google application that allows site owners to monitor how their site performs in search results.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is the language used to construct web pages.
Index Coverage report: A Google Search Console report that displays the indexation status of your site's pages.
Index: A massive database containing all of the content discovered by search engine crawlers and deemed suitable for serving to searchers.
Internal links are links on your own website that lead to other sites on the same website.
JavaScript: A programming language for dynamically adding items to static web pages.
Login forms: These are sites that need a visitor to log in before they can access the content.
A Google "Manual Action" is when a human reviewer determines that specific pages on your site violate Google's quality rules.
Meta robots tags: Code that instructs crawlers on how to crawl or index web page content.
Navigation : A list of links that allow visitors to browse to other pages on your site. These are frequently displayed in a list at the top of your website ("top navigation"), on your website's side column ("side navigation"), or at the bottom of your website ("footer navigation").
The NoIndex meta tag instructs a search engine not to index the page it is on.
PageRank is a part of Google's core algorithm. It is a link analysis application that calculates the relevance of a web page by analyzing the number and quality of links heading to it.
Personalization: The process by which a search engine modifies a person's results based on information unique to them, such as location and search history.
Prominence: In the context of the local pack, prominence refers to well-known and well-liked enterprises in the real world.
RankBrain: Google's core algorithm's machine learning component that alters ranking by promoting the most relevant, useful results.
Relevance: In the context of the local pack, relevance refers to how well a local business matches the searcher's criteria.
Robots.txt: Files that tell search engines which parts of your site they should and should not crawl.
Search forms: Search capabilities or search bars on a website that assist users in locating pages on that website.
Guidelines for Search Quality Raters: These are guidelines for human raters who work for Google to judge the quality of real web pages.
A sitemap is a collection of URLs on your website that crawlers can use to find and index your content.
Spammy methods: Similar to "black hat," spammy approaches violate search engine quality criteria.
URL folders: Website sections that appear after the TLD (".com") and are separated by slashes ("/"). For example, in "moz.com/blog," "/blog" is a folder.
URL parameters: Information applied to a URL after a question mark to change the page's content (active parameter) or track information (passive parameter).
X-robots-tag: Similar to meta robots tags, this tag instructs crawlers on how to crawl or index web page content.
Keyword Research(Chapter 3)
Ambiguous intent: A search phrase in which the searcher's intention is unclear and requires more clarification.
Commercial investigation questions: These are queries in which the searcher wishes to compare items in order to identify the one that best meets their needs.
Informational queries: When a searcher is looking for information, such as the answer to a question, they use an informational query.
Keyword Difficulty: According to experts, Keyword Difficulty is an assessment of how tough it is for a site to outrank its competition in the form of a number score.
Keyword Explorer is a Moz tool for conducting extensive keyword research and discovery.
Local queries: Searches for anything in a specific location, such as "coffee shops near me" or "gyms in Brooklyn."
Long-tail keywords are longer inquiries that contain more than three words. They are frequently more particular than short-tail questions, owing to their length.
A navigational query is one in which the searcher is attempting to find a specific site, such as the Moz blog (query = "Dreamsiteco blog").
Regional keywords: These are keywords that are peculiar to a particular location. Use Google Trends to see if "pop" or "soda" is the more common term in Kansas.
Seasonal volume : The number of times a keyword has been searched. Many keyword research tools provide a monthly search volume estimate.
Seasonal trends: The popularity of terms over time, for example, "Halloween costumes" is most common the week before October 31.
Seed keywords: These are the fundamental terms that describe the product or service you offer.
Transactional queries: The searcher wishes to perform an action, such as purchasing something. Transactional queries would be at the bottom of the marketing funnel if keyword kinds were arranged in a funnel.
On-Site Optimization (Chapter 4)
Alt text: The text in HTML code that explains the images on web pages is known as alternative text.
Anchor text: The text used to link to other pages.
Content that is generated automatically rather than by humans is referred to as auto-generated content.
Duplicate content: Content shared across domains or across numerous pages within a single domain.
Geographic modifiers are words or phrases that describe a certain place or service area. For instance, the word "pizza" is not geo-modified, but "pizza in Seattle" is.
Header tags are HTML elements that are used to identify headings on your website.
Image compression: The act of speeding up web pages by reducing image file sizes without sacrificing image quality.
Image sitemap: A sitemap that solely contains image URLs on a website.
Keyword stuffing: A spamming practice in which important keywords and their variants are overused in your content and links.
Link accessibility refers to how easily a link can be found by humans or crawlers.
Link equity is the amount of value or authority that a link can convey to its destination.
Link volume: The number of links on a page is referred to as its link volume.
Local business schema: Structured data markup that is placed on a web page to assist search engines in understanding information about a business.
Meta descriptions are HTML elements that explain the contents of the page on which they are shown. These are sometimes used as the description line in search result snippets by Google.
Panda was a Google algorithm upgrade that focused on low-quality content.
Protocol: The "http" or "https" that appears before your domain name. This specifies how data is passed between the server and the browser.
Redirection: When a URL is redirected from one location to another. The majority of the time, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).
Rel=canonical: A tag that tells Google which version of a web page is the original and which are duplicates.
Scraped content: Taking content from websites that you do not own and republishing it on your own site without authorization.
SSL certificate: A "Secure Sockets Layer" certificate is used to encrypt data sent between the web server and the searcher's browser.
Thin content: Information that provides little to no value to the visitor.
Thumbnail: Image thumbnails are a tiny version of a larger image.
Title tag: An HTML element that specifies a web page's title.
Technical Optimization (Chapter 5)
AMP: Also known as "diet HTML," accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are designed to make mobile visitors' viewing experience lightning fast.
Async: An abbreviation for "asynchronous," async means that the browser does not have to wait for one job to complete before going on to the next while constructing your web page.
A web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, is software that allows you to access information on the internet. When you type a URL into your browser (for example, "google.com"), you're instructing it to retrieve the resources needed to render that website on your device.
Bundling is the process of combining many resources into a single resource.
ccTLD: abbreviated for "country code top level domain," Domains connected with countries are referred to as ccTLDs. For example, the accepted ccTLD for Russia is.ru.
Client-side and server-side rendering: These terms refer to where the code is executed. Client-side refers to the file being executed within the browser. Server-side indicates that the files are executed on the server and then sent to the browser completely displayed.
The series of actions that a browser takes to transform HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a visible web page.
CSS: A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is the code that determines how a website looks (for example, fonts and colors).
DNS: A Domain Name Server (DNS) connects domain names (for example, "moz.com") to IP addresses (for example, "127.0.0.1"). DNS converts domain names into IP addresses so that browsers can access the page's resources.
The Document Object Model (DOM) is the structure of an HTML document; it governs how that document may be accessed and updated using tools such as JavaScript.
A domain name registrar is a business that handles the registration of internet domain names. Take, for example, GoDaddy.
Faceted navigation: Often used on e-commerce websites, faceted navigations provide visitors with a variety of sorting and filtering tools to assist them find the URL they're looking for among thousands or even millions of URLs. You could, for example, organize a clothes page by price: cheap to high, or filter the page to show only small sizes.
Fetch and Render tool: A Google Search Console tool that allows you to see a web page as Google sees it.
File compression is the technique of encoding information with fewer bits in order to reduce file size. There are numerous compression techniques.
Hreflang: A tag that tells Google what language the content is written in. This allows Google to serve the correct language version of your page to those who search in that language.
An internet protocol (IP) address is a string of integers that is unique to each website. We attach domain names to IP addresses because they are easier for humans to remember (for example, "dreamsiteco.com"), but the internet relies on these numbers to locate websites.
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a data structuring format. For example, schema.org can be implemented in a variety of forms, including JSON-LD, which is the standard recommended by Google.
Lazy loading is a technique for postponing the loading of an object until it is required. This technique is frequently used to enhance page speed.
Minification is the process of removing as many superfluous characters from source code as feasible without affecting functionality. Whereas compression reduces the size of something, minification eliminates it.
Mobile-first indexing: In 2018, Google began gradually transitioning websites to mobile-first indexing. Google now scans and indexes your pages depending on their mobile version rather than their desktop version.
Pagination: A website owner can choose to split a page into many portions in a sequential order, comparable to book pages. This is very useful on large sites. The rel="next" and rel="prev" tags, which indicate where each page falls in the larger sequence, are the distinguishing features of a paginated page. These tags instruct Google that the pages should have consolidated link characteristics and that searchers should be directed to the first page in the sequence.
Programming language: The process of writing instructions in a language that a computer can understand. JavaScript, for example, is a computer language that adds dynamic (not static) elements to a web page.
Rendering: The process by which a browser converts the code of a website into a viewable page.
Render-blocking scripts: These are scripts that cause your browser to wait for the page to be fetched before it can be rendered. Render-blocking scripts can cause your browser to do additional round trips before it can properly render a page.
Responsive design: Google's preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, responsive design allows the website to adjust to the device being viewed on.
Rich snippet: A rich snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines display for URLs on their results pages. A "rich" snippet is thus an improved variant of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by using structured data markup, such as review markup, which appears as rating stars next to URLs in search results.
Schema.org: Code that "wraps around" aspects of your web page to give the search engine more information about it. Data created with schema.org is referred to as "structured" rather than "unstructured" – that is, organized rather than unorganized.
SRCSET: Similar to responsive image design, SRCSET tells which version of the picture to show in different conditions.
Structured Data: An alternative term for "organized" data (as opposed to unorganized data). Schema.org is a means to arrange your data, such as by labeling it with additional information that will assist the search engine interpret it.
Creating Links and Establishing Authority(CHAPTER 6)
10x content: Rand Fishkin coined the phrase "10x better" to characterize content that is "10x better" than everything else on the web for the same topic.
Amplification is the process of spreading the word about your company using social media, paid adverts, and influencer marketing.
Domain Authority (DA) is a Dreamsiteco measure that predicts a domain's ranking ability; it is best used as a comparative metric (for example, comparing a website's DA score to that of its direct competitors).
Deindexed: When a URL, part of URLs, or an entire domain is deleted from the index of a search engine. This can occur for a variety of reasons, including receiving a manual penalty for breaking Google's quality criteria.
Directory links: In the context of local SEO, a "directory" is an aggregate list of local businesses that often includes each business's name, address, phone number (NAP), and other information such as their website. "Directory" can also refer to a form of artificial connection that is prohibited by Google: "low-quality directory or bookmark site links."
Editorial links are those that are gained naturally and supplied out of an author's own will (rather than paid for or compelled).
Follow: A link's default state, "follow" links pass PageRank.
Google Analytics: A free (with the option to pay for additional capabilities) application that provides website owners with information about how visitors interact with their site. Google Analytics reports include acquisition reports, which show which channels your visitors are coming from, and conversion reports, which show the rate at which users are fulfilling goals (for example, form fills) on your website.
Google search operators: Special text that can be appended to your query to narrow down the types of results you want. Adding "site:" before a domain name, for example, can produce a list of all (or many) indexed pages on that domain.
Guest blogging is a popular link-building tactic that entails pitching an article (or an idea for an article) to a magazine in the hopes that they would feature your material and allow you to include a link back to your website. However, exercise caution. Google's quality criteria prohibit large-scale guest posting operations with keyword-rich anchor text links.
Building links: While the term "building" implies that you are constructing links to your website, it actually refers to the process of earning links to your site in order to increase the authority of your site in search engines.
Link exchanges, often known as reciprocal linking, entail "you link to me, and I'll link to you" strategies. Google's quality rules prohibit excessive link exchanges.
Link Explorer is Moz's link discovery and analyzing tool.
A link profile is a word that describes all inbound links to a specific domain, subdomain, or URL.
Unstructured linked citations: References to a company's whole or partial contact information on a non-directory site (such as online news, blogs, best-of lists, and so on).
NoFollow: Links with the rel="nofollow" attribute do not convey PageRank. In some cases, such as when a link has been paid for, Google encourages the use of them.
Page Authority (PA), like DA, forecasts an individual page's ranking ability.
Purchased links: The exchange of money or something of value for a link. If a link is paid, it is considered advertising and should be treated with a nofollow tag to prevent it from passing PageRank.
Qualified traffic: When traffic is "qualified," it usually means that the visitor is interested in the page's intended topic, and so the visitor is more likely to find it useful and convert.
Referral traffic is traffic that is directed to a website from another website. For example, if individuals visit your website after clicking on a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as "facebook.com / referral" in the Source/Medium report.
Resource pages: Typically used for link building, resource pages offer a list of useful links to other websites. If your company sells email marketing software, you might look for marketing intitle:"resources" and contact the site owners to ask if they would include a link to your website on their page.
Sentiment: How people perceive your brand.
Spam Score: A Moz statistic that uses a series of flags that are highly connected with penalized sites to estimate a domain's relative risk of penalization.
Unnatural links: According to Google, unnatural links are "creating links that weren't editorially placed or vouched for by the site's owner on a page." This is a breach of company policies and may result in a penalty against the infringing website.
SEO Measuring, Prioritizing, and Execution(CHAPTER 7)
API: An application programming interface (API) enables the development of applications by gaining access to features or data from another service, such as an operating system or application.
Bounce rate: The percentage of all visitors that did not result in a secondary action on your site is known as the bounce rate. A bounced session would occur if someone viewed your home page and then left without viewing any other pages.
Channel: The various vehicles via which you might gain attention and traffic, such as organic search and social media.
The ratio of impressions to clicks on your URLs is known as the click-through rate.
Conversion rate: The ratio of visits to conversions is known as the conversion rate. How many of my website visitors are filling out forms, calling, joining up for my newsletter, and so on?
Qualified lead: A "lead" is any contact you receive if you use your website to attract potential customers to contact you via phone call or form. Not all of those leads will become customers, but "qualified" leads are prospects who are likely to become paying customers.
Google Analytics objectives: What activities do you want people to do on your website? Whatever your response, you can use Google Analytics to track your conversion rate by creating targets.
Google Tag Manager is a centralized location for handling numerous website tracking codes.
Googlebot / Bingbot: How major search engines, such as Google and Bing, trawl the web; their "crawlers" or "spiders."
Kanban is a method of scheduling.
Pages per session: Pages per session, also known as "page depth," represents the average number of pages customers view on your website in a single session.
Page speed is made up of several equally significant characteristics, such as initial contently/meaningful paint and time to interactivity.
Pruning: In an SEO context, pruning often refers to the removal of low-quality pages in order to improve the overall quality of the site.
Scroll depth: A means of tracking how far down your site visitors scroll.
Scrum board: A means of keeping track of tasks that must be done in order to achieve a broader goal.
Search traffic: Visits to your website from search engines such as Google are referred to as search traffic.
Time on page: The length of time a visitor spends on your page before moving on to the next. Because Google Analytics measures time on page based on when a user clicks to the next page, bounced sessions will have a time on page of 0.
UTM code: A UTM code is a simple code that you may apply to the end of your URL to monitor additional information about the click, such as its source, medium, and campaign name.
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