There’s a reason non-SEO people’s eyes gloss over when we nerd out about schemas and local citations. Search engine optimization is a jargon-heavy industry.
For this reason, we’ve compiled a list of just about every SEO term you’d need to know to help you navigate SEO land as a beginner.
A
Above the Fold
Above the fold is a term used to describe all the content visible on a webpage before scrolling.
This is the content that determines users’ first impressions of your website.
Absolute Link
AKA: absolute path or absolute URL.
Absolute links are the URLs that show the full path to an item you link to within your website. They’re used for internal linking and look like this:
https://www.flyingcatmarketing.com/seo/
Algorithm
An algorithm is the computer program that a search engine uses to collect data for search results. These complex formulas are used to generate the ranked results on SERPs according to certain factors and signals depending on each specific query.
An algorithm penalty occurs when elements of your website do not follow the search engine guidelines. This will result in your page being smothered and the traffic and rank decreasing.
Alt tag
AKA: alt text or alt attribute
An alt tag is the HTML code that describes an image to screen readers and search engines.
Including alt text for your images enables greater accessibility to your content. Using keywords in the alt text for your image can help with SEO on engines like Google.
AMP
AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. AMP is a way to build static content for webpages so that pages load faster than regular HMTL.
AMP was originally created by Google and launched in 2015.
Analytics
Analytics is when data from previous searches and engagement is collected and analyzed to improve engagement in the future.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the text that you can click in a post that will redirect to a new page. It will usually take users to a page that is relevant but goes more in-depth into a specific topic, signaled by the keywords.
For SEO purposes, it is best to generate anchor text that fits organically with your narrative style.
Sample anchor text
Async
Async functions allow for the browsers to work on more than one task simultaneously for your page instead of having to wait for one to finish in order to work on the next.
Authority
Authority in SEO is how search engines will evaluate web pages for ranking purposes. Websites that have higher authority will have an easier time ranking faster.
B
B2B
B2B stands for business to business operations, meaning that an organization’s customer is another organization or company, not an individual.
SEO for B2B is a long-term marketing strategy companies use to rank, without having to rely heavily on paid ads or PPC.
B2B SEO tends to have low search volumes and a more specific target audience than B2C SEO, making the buying cycle longer.
B2C
B2C is short for business-to-consumer operations. SEO for B2C has a simple marketing funnel and reaches a broader audience than SEO for B2B.
Backlink
AKA: inbound link, incoming link, or citation
A backlink is when another website includes a link to redirect back to your website. The more backlinks to your website, the better your page will rank.
Backlink authority describes the influence each external link has on a website’s rank. The higher the quality of the content from the site linking back to your own, the better.
In SEO, marketers will work to build backlinks by link building and networking with other content creators.
Baidu
Baidu is a Chinese search engine that was founded in 2000. It offers similar services to Google, but dominates the Chinese market and censors search results and content according to Chinese regulations.
Bait and Switch
AKA: code swapping
Bait and switch is a black hat SEO tactic that involves putting content on a webpage so that it ranks high and then switching it out for a different piece of content.
Banner blindness
AKA: banner noise or ad blindness
Banner blindness is a term that refers to people’s tendency to ignore banner-like information and page advertisements, whether unconsciously or on purpose.
Below the Fold
Below the fold content is anything that appears on a webpage after a visitor scrolls past what initially shows.
Bing
Bing is a web search engine that launched in 2009 by Microsoft. It is the second largest search engine in the world, with 2.71% market share.
Black box
Black box is a term used to describe a system with a confidential implementation process, even though the inputs and outputs are visible.
Google’s algorithm is an example of a black box system.
Black hat SEO
Black hat SEO are the SEO tactics used to improve a webpage’s ranking on the results page that violate search engine guidelines.
Blog
A blog is a published website with informal text entries that are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent appearing at the top of the webpage.
Maintaining a blog is great for SEO since it provides a space to consistently upload content and maintain high authority in search engines.
Bots
AKA: crawlers, spider, web crawler, or Google bots
Bots are the programs used by search engines to analyze a website’s content and code.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of a website is a metric that shows how many people came to your site and immediately left without interacting whatsoever.
The lower a page’s bounce rate the better, since high bounce rates indicate issues with your on-page SEO.
Brand mention link building
Brand mention link building is a kind of link building strategy.
Marketers perform an organic search for your brand and pages that mention it without backlinking to your site and reach out to these sites to request a citation that redirects to your page.
Branded Keywords
AKA: brand keyword or brand term
Branded keywords are the keywords and phrases that include your brand name.
For example, our branded keywords include “Flying Cat Marketing” and “FCM”.
Breadcrumb
A breadcrumb is an element that easily shows users where they are in a website’s structure.
Breadcrumb navigation, or breadcrumb trail, is a navigation bar that makes it easy for users to see the breadcrumbs they’ve followed and easily go back to previous pages.
Breadcrumb navigation helps improve internal link structures and improve user and crawler experience.
An example of the breadcrumb navigation on the Ikea website.
Broad Match Keyword (Google Ads)
Broad match keyword is a feature in Google ads. It allows your ad to show for not only the provided searches with the designated keywords but also those containing similar keywords.
For example, for the keyword ‘sale,’ broad match keyword will also show your ad to searches for ‘discount’ or ‘promotion’.
Broken link
AKA: dead link
A broken link is a link that fails to redirect to a page that doesn’t exist. This can be because the page has moved without updating the link or a page has been deleted.
Broken links can harm your SEO since search engines are wasting resources by crawling to dead ends.
C
Cache
A cache is technology that will store web content temporarily to reduce the loading time on a page.
Cached pages are the snapshots taken of a webpage when it was last crawled.
These are useful when websites that are no longer available contained relevant, difficult-to-find content you wish to retrieve.
Call to Action (CTA)
A call to action is an element on a website designed to get an immediate response from visitors. CTAs use persuasive language to encourage users to act in a certain way, such as buy or sign up.
We created a guide to interviewing customers for content that resonates with them
CREATE CONTENT FOR GROWTH
Canonical URL
AKA: canonical tag or rel=canonical
A canonical URL is the part of an HTML code that makes it easy to tell which version of a web page is the original or preferred when multiple URLs have similar or duplicate content.
ccTLD
An abbreviation for country-code top-level domain, ccTLD are two letters long and show where a top company is based.
Example: www.example.co.es, with es (Spain) as the ccTLD.
Churn and Burn SEO
AKA: rank n’ bank
Churn and burn is a black hat SEO strategy where you spam a website with huge amounts of sketchy links so it’ll rank high quickly. Until the website gets penalized and deleted, it will earn revenue.
This method rarely works anymore with Google’s new algorithms prioritizing quality and relevant links over just any link.
Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is a ratio that shows the percentage of the number of clicks by total impressions. Meaning what percentage of people who see your page on the SERP click on it.
Generally, the higher you rank on a search engine, the higher your CTR.
Clickbait
Clickbait refers to links that use anchor text or flashy headlines to lure users in, but don’t necessarily live up to the expectations set.
Cloaking
AKA: page cloaking, IP cloaking, or website cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat SEO tactic where a site owner will show different content to search engines than it will to visitors so that poor quality content ranks much higher than it should.
Co-citation
A co-citation shows how often two websites are referred to together by a third site. Co-citations make it easier for search engines to tell which pages have similar content.
Comment spam
Comment spam are spammy, poorly written comments posted by bots to try and get a free link.
Competition
Competition in SEO occurs between websites that are trying to reach the same audience by ranking for and driving traffic from the same keywords.
A competitor analysis is an evaluation of your competitors who are ranking and which tactics they use. This will help you understand which elements to focus on and where your priorities should be to outrank your competitors.
Content
Your content is everything available on your website: images, text, videos, and whatever else appears on your page. Having quality content plays a paramount role in increasing traffic to your site.
‘Content is King’
“Content is King” is a sentiment often expressed in relation to SEO to show how important the quality of your content is for digital marketing and search engine optimization.
Prioritizing content and keeping this expression in mind is one of the best practices to adopt for your SEO strategy.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content management systems are dynamic websites that provide structure for people to create, upload, and edit content.
With a CMS you aren’t given much control over the website code (aside from the additional plugins you can choose to install), but they are easy to use.
Examples of CMS include WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy that focuses on the quality and value of your content in order to be labeled a reliable source by search engines.
Content silo
AKA: SEO silo or silo web structure
A content silo is a way of organizing content in a website by categories so that it is easier for visitors and crawlers to navigate.
Content Spinning
Content spinning is a black hat SEO tactic where an article is taken from the internet and rewritten with only the bare minimum changed so that the content is not flagged as duplicated.
Content Syndication
AKA: syndicated content or article syndication
Content syndication is a form of duplicate content where the same content is uploaded onto different sites in order to reach a broader audience.
It can sometimes be rewarding in generating greater traffic, but also runs the risk of having the secondary site rank better than the original.
Conversion
A conversion is when a visitor will perform a desired call to action on your website. Subscribing to a newsletter or completing a purchase are examples of conversions.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate shows the percentage of visitors that have completed a call to action out of all the visitors who have seen your CTA.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization focuses on increasing the number of visitors that complete a call to action when on your webpage.
CRO strategies focus on conversions and generating revenue for your site, and data from the CRO can be useful in improving your SEO.
Correlation
Correlation describes how much of commonality there is between elements. In SEO, correlation is used to show the similarities between rankings on SERPs. This is done to try and understand black box algorithmic processes.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
AKA: cost per action, pay per action, or pay per acquisition
Cost per acquisition is a marketing metric and pricing model that represents the aggregate cost to gain a paying customer through a campaign or specific channel.
Cost per Click (CPC)
AKA: pay per click (PPC)
Cost per click is a marketing metric and pricing model where advertisements are paid for depending on how many people click on it.
For example, if Google Ads may charge ten cents for each time an ad is clicked. If ten people click on the ad, it’ll cost the marketer a dollar.
Cost per Mille (CPM)
AKA: cost per thousand impressions
Cost per mille is a marketing metric and pricing model where you are charged for an advertisement every thousand times your ad is shown to users.
Crawl
A crawl is when a search engine will analyze the code and content of a website. Crawlers will check all internal and external links to collect data and index your website.
Crawl budget
A crawl budget shows how many URLs on a website will be crawled in a set time period.
The crawl demand is the part of the budget that indicated how important a search engine thinks a specific URL is.
Pages get less important the deeper into the link structure they are. So a page that is 5 clicks away from the homepage will have a lower crawl demand than one that is only two clicks from the homepage.
Crawl depth
The crawl depth is how far into a website a search engine will index.
Crawl error
A crawl error occurs when there are URLs that give a status code error or that bots are just unable to crawl.
Crawl rate
The crawl rate is a part of the crawl budget that represents the number of pages a bot will index on a given day.
Cross-linking
Cross-linking is when an organization owns more than one domain and links between them.
So long as the different sites have related content this can help with link building, but content shouldn’t appear to be duplicated or be oversaturated with cross-links.
CSS
CSS, an abbreviation for cascading style sheets, explains how different elements are supposed to appear on webpages.
Things like font style, sizing, and backgrounds are adapted by the CSS to appear differently on different screens.
Customer Journey
AKA: buying process, customer experience, marketing funnel, purchase funnel, consumer decision journey, or path to purchase.
A customer journey describes the overall experience a consumer has in the consumption process. The customer journey includes the three stages of buying–before, during, and after–and factors in the sensory, cognitive, and behavioral responses.
Curated Content
Curated content is the content that you do not create but still include in your site since it is useful to visitors.
D
Data
Data are the statistics and information collected to conduct an analysis. It is used in SEO to assess a site’s visitors and the way they engage with the content.
Dead End Page
A dead-end page is any page on your site that doesn’t contain links to other pages, forcing visitors and spiders to leave your site once they’ve finished with the page.
Dead-end pages can easily be avoided by including a navigation bar or links suggesting other steps for users to take.
Deep Link
A deep link is a link that points to content in a mobile app or any webpage that isn’t the website’s homepage.
De-index
AKA: delist
To de-index is to make a page disappear from the SERPs by deleting it from the index. By using the meta tag ‘noindex’, webmasters can de-index a webpage.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is when a visitor reaches a website without going through a referral URL.
An example of this is when a user directly types your site’s URL into a search engine’s navigation bar.
Directory
AKA: link directory or web directory
A directory is a list of websites that fit a specific category. Directories can be a way of link building and generating exposure for your site.
Disavow
The Google disavow tool gives webmasters control over which backlinks Google should pay attention to and which ones should be ignored. The links that Google ignores are then called disavow links.
This tool is helpful for SEO since spammy and suspicious links can harm your ranking, especially if you can’t get them removed since they’re coming from sites you have no control over.
Dofollow
Dofollow links are the links that Google will follow and add link equity. You can tell Google not to follow the link if you tag it as ‘nofollow’. By default, all links are dofollow until otherwise specified.
Domain
A domain is a part of the URL structure that shows the site’s IP address and top-level domain (.com, .org, etc).
For example, flyingcatmarketing.com is the domain for this blog post.
Domain Authority (DA)
Domain authority is a score given to a website by various keyword tools like Ahrefs or Moz to represent the site’s ‘strength’.
It is between 0-100 and built over time to predict the rankability of sites in SERPs.
Each tool has its own denominational DA ranking.
Domain Name Registrar
A domain name registrar is a company that manages all reserved domain names online. Two well-known domain name registrars are Bluehost and GoDaddy.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is an online search engine that was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg. It focuses on protecting the privacy of users and minimizing personalized search results.
DuckDuckGo processes 98.79 million searches a day and differentiates by showing all users the same results for any given term.
Duplicate Content
AKA: copied content
Duplicate content is identical content that appears on more than one page or website.
Dwell Time
AKA: time spent on page
Dwell time describes how much time a visitor spends on your site after arriving from the SERP. If visitors have short dwell times on your site, this can be a sign of poor content to the search engine.
Dynamic Link
AKA: dynamic URL
A dynamic link is a link that results from a search in a website’s database. They are usually auto-generated and contain special characters that are unhelpful to on-page SEO.
E
E-A-T
E-A-T is an acronym for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google uses E-A-T to determine how useful your page will be to users.
E-commerce
E-commerce is the act of electronically buying or selling products online.
Ego-bait
An ego-bait is a link building strategy where you link to an individual or organization and then reach out to them to tell them about it. This hopefully results in a backlink to your original post that they share with their audience.
Email outreach
AKA: link outreach or blogger outreach
Email outreach is the process of reaching out to people by emailing them to find backlink opportunities.
Engagement metrics
AKA: SEO metrics
Engagement metrics are the indicators a company tracks on their website to assess how well its content performs.
Different metrics provide insight into different elements of your SEO performance.
Exact match anchor text
Exact match anchor text is when the anchor text describes exactly what the page it links to is about.
Exact Match keyword
Exact match keyword is a feature in Google Ads that matches keywords that are written the exact same way as they are in the query.
F
Favicon
A favicon is a small icon displayed on browser tabs or bookmark lists that allow users to visually identify your brand.
Flying Cat Marketing’s favicon in an open browser tab.
Featured snippets
AKA: rich answer, position zero or direct answer
Featured snippets are the special answers Google provides above the organic results for some searches.
Findability
The findability of a piece of content is how easy it is to see in a website.
Footer link
A footer link is one which appears at the bottom of all the pages in a website.
The footer links on the Flying Cat Marketing website.
Free for All (FFA)
AKA: link farm
A free for all is a group of websites that will all link to one another or to sites that have paid in order to rank higher on SERPs.
Usually, link farms are automated programs and not operated by hand.
Freshness Factor
The freshness factor of a website is a score that Google uses to determine how new or up-to-date content is.
There are some areas where content doesn’t need to be updated consistently to be useful to searchers, so the freshness factor isn’t considered by Google for all keywords.
G
Geotargeting
Geotargeting is a strategy where users are targeted according to geographical location.
It is helpful for your local SEO strategy or showing different content to users depending on country, city, zip code, IP address, and more.
Google is the largest search engine in the world, with over 85% market share. It also offers a wide array of SEO tools, such as Google Ads.
Google Ads
Google Ads is an online advertising service where users can bid on keywords and spaces to display their advertisements on Google.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a service that detects change in content and notifies users of new Google results that match the specified content terms.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free SEO tool that provides web analytics and website traffic.
It provides insightful data on your audience, acquisition, and traffic. It also helps you track conversion goals and your ROI for different channels.
Google Autocomplete
Google Autocomplete is the element that offers suggestions to users as they type a query into the Google search box. The suggested searches generated can help you to discover long-tail keywords to use for your content.
Google Bombing
Google bombing is when someone tries to get a completely irrelevant website to rank high for a search by linking heavily.
Google bowling
Google bowling is a black hat SEO strategy where somebody creates lots of backlinks to their competitor on sketchy, unrelated websites in an attempt to get them penalized.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free Google Ads tool that helps with keyword research for search campaigns. It helps you find different keywords for your page and how much it will cost to target them.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and application provided by Google.
It is a useful local SEO tool since having your company listed on Maps makes it easier for people in your area to discover your business.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a service Google provides that lets users check how mobile-friendly their website is.
Test results include a screenshot of what the site looks like on mobile devices and a list of any of the usability issues that it finds.
Google my Business
Google my Business is a free tool that allows businesses to easily manage their presence on Google Search and Google Maps.
It makes it easier for customers to find and interact with your business, and it makes it easier for you to quickly update and edit information.
Google pagespeed insights
AKA: Google pagespeed tools
Google pagespeed insights are a set of tools that analyze a site’s content to help optimize performance.
Google Search Console (GSC)
Previously known as: Google Webmaster Tools
Google search console is a free web service that allows webmasters to track website performance and check for penalties and indexing.
Google trends
Google trends is a website that lets users check the popularity of keywords across regions and languages. It provides graphs to compare top search queries and their search volume over time.
Google’s Related Searches
The Google related searches are the suggested searches that appear at the bottom of a Google SERP with similar queries that have also been Googled.
This can be a helpful way of finding new long-tail keywords relevant to your content.
Gray Hat SEO
Gray hat SEO practices are those which are questionable but do not technically violate the search engine guidelines.
You will not get penalized using gray hat SEO, but it is considered poor practice to adopt these SEO strategies. An example of gray hat SEO is buying likes and promotions for your social media pages.
Guest Blogging
AKA: guest posting
Guest blogging is a link-building tactic where you write a blog post or contribute in some way in order to get a backlink to your webpage.
Guest blogging is a way of collecting quality links back to your website if you make sure to contribute to sites that discuss similar topics and have good domain authority.
Guestographic
A guestographic is a link-building strategy where you create infographics on certain topics and reach out to websites that would benefit from featuring your infographic in their content.
In turn, your website will receive a backlink.
H
Hidden text
The use of hidden text is a black hat SEO tactic where text is sneakily included in a post so that users don’t see it in order to manipulate search rankings.
Usually, hidden text is camouflaged with the background or encoded to be pushed off-screen, stuffed with keywords to better rank content that is low quality.
Hit
A hit is a request to your website server for a file. There can be several hits per page visit since a single page can contain multiple files like buttons or images.
.htaccess file
A .htaccess file is a powerful file that lets you make changes to your website’s configuration without editing the specific server files.
Homepage
Your website’s homepage is the default page of your site.
Holistic SEO
Holistic SEO are SEO practices that focus on long-term positioning and fulfilling users’ needs on every level.
Hreflang Attribute
A hreflang attribute is the attribute that makes sure a page is displayed in the right language for a query on multilingual websites.
Hreflang attributes help with duplicate content and showing elements like the correct currency in different regions and optimizing for different languages.
HTML Heading
HTML headings are the tags used in HTML to organize content into headings and subheadings and to emphasize text.
HTML headings are structured from 1 to 6 with the importance decreasing as you move closer to H6.
HTML sitemap
An HTML sitemap is a file listing all the important pages you want visitors to see. It organizes your internal links and makes navigating your website easier for users.
HTML source code
HTML source code is the format of HTML that we are able to understand so that we can modify code before it appears in the browser.
The HTML source code can be seen on any website by right-clicking and choosing to inspect or view the page source.
HTTP
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and explains how data moves from a computer to a web browser.
HTTPS
HTTPS is a type of HTTP that uses a secure sockets layer to encrypt the data moving between websites and browsers.
Hub page
A hub page is a central introductory page that focuses on a specific topic. It is a ‘hub’ where visitors can find information and content on a subject as well as links to additional detailed pages.
Hyperlink
A hyperlink is text or media that users can click on that will take them to another page or part of a page.
I
Image compression
Image compression is when you make a picture’s file size smaller without losing any quality in order to speed up a webpage.
Image filename
Image filename is a way to identify an image in your organizational system. It is your chance to show crawlers how to read the image.
Image SEO
Image SEO is a way of optimizing your media relevance on a website, with search engine visibility and screen reader accessibility.
Image sitemap
Image sitemap is an XML file that stores all the images from your website to be crawled and indexed.
Impression
An impression refers to each time a user is shown your ad or site displayed to them.
Index
An index is a search engine database that stores all the information crawlers collect on your website.
The process of indexing is when a website is added to the search engine’s database. This can be done by building backlinks from other sites and allowing crawlers to arrive to your site that way.
Indexability
The indexability of a website refers to how accessible a web page is to bots. The greater indexability your website has, the easier it is for bots to crawl your pages and catalog them in the search engine database.
Infographic
An infographic is a way of presenting information visually so that visitors have an easier time understanding a concept.
Since humans are visual creatures, infographics can make complex data more accessible to wider audiences.
It also has a greater chance of being shared more and creating more links back to your content.
Information Architecture (IA)
Information architecture is the way that a website’s navigational elements are organized.
Informational SEO
AKA: informational search query
Informational SEO describes search queries with keywords that cover a broad topic. These searches are done in order to learn about a topic and the users currently have no interest in buying a product.
Informational SEO is for audiences at the beginning of the marketing funnel and offers space for you to help visitors learn something and remember who you are further along the buyer journey.
Internal links
Internal links are the links found on a webpage that will take visitors to a new webage within the same site.
International SEO
International SEO is the optimization of your website for visibility and growth in other countries.
International SEO helps search engines realize which language you use for business and the specific countries you are targeting.
Interstitials
Interstitials are webpages displayed before or after the content that a user expects to see.
Interstitials are usually advertisements or age confirmations and act as disruptive to the overall user experience.
IP address
AKA: Internet Protocol address
An IP address is a numerical label given to each device that connects to a computer network.
IP addresses can host websites in a server and provide your location addressing.
J
JavaScript (JS)
JavaScript is a high-level, multi-paradigm programming language. JavaScript makes it easy to dynamically insert elements into websites.
K
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A key performance indicator is a measurement used to track your website’s success.
KPIs track how effective your activities are and your progress towards reaching different set objectives.
Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase that people look up in search engines that will help them find your website.
Using keywords wisely helps crawlers understand what your content discusses and when to show users your page.
Keyword (not provided)
Keyword (not provided) is a keyword status in Google Analytics that occurs when Google keeps certain keyword data from you.
For example, someone might find your site by searching a phrase that included ‘fresh bread’ but Google won’t tell you the whole phrase.
This is done to protect the user’s privacy and the phrase is keyword (not provided).
Keyword analysis
A keyword analysis is when you evaluate the performance of your keywords and do keyword research to find new keywords to use as well.
Keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you’re ranking for the same keywords across different pages across your site.
Keyword cannibalization results in your pages competing amongst themselves to rank for the same keywords.
Keyword categorization
Keywords categorization is the organizing of keywords according to context and user intent.
It helps understand which keywords people search at different stages of the buying process so your content can guide them towards conversion along the way.
Keyword competition
AKA: keyword difficulty or keyword SEO difficulty
Keyword competition is a metric that shows how difficult it is to compete for ranking on a specific keyword.
Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword is included in a webpage in comparison to the total word count.
It can be used to determine how relevant a webpage is to a specific query in a search engine.
Keyword frequency is the same as keyword density but does not take into consideration the total word count on the page. Instead, it only counts how frequently a keyword appears in your content.
Keyword funnel
A keyword funnel is a way of measuring a customer’s stage in the buyer journey according to their search queries.
Keyword funnels help you optimize your landing pages for each step of the marketing funnel to increase your conversion rates.
Keyword prominence
Keyword prominence is how noticeable or important a keyword is. Keyword prominence depends on attributes like the placement in a piece of content.
Keyword rank
Keyword rank describes your position for a keyword on the search engine results page.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the practice of finding new search terms and keywords relevant to your business.
Keyword research should also reveal the terms with the search volume and competition levels that best suit your business.
Keyword stemming
Keyword stemming is a way of finding new keywords by branching off the base of the keywords you already have.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO tactic where a webmaster will repeat the same few keywords over and over to trick search engines into thinking the content on that page is relevant.
Usually, pages that have been stuffed with keywords are practically useless to searchers since the content is low-quality and the keywords are used unnaturally in the text.
L
Landing Page
AKA: lead capture page, single property page, static page, or destination page
A landing page is the page that appears after visitors click on the link to your site.
Landing pages are used for marketing campaigns and intended for promotion and conversion.
Latent Semantic Indexing Keyword (LSI Keyword)
Latent semantic indexing keywords are terms that are similar to your webpage’s target keyword.
LSI keywords help search engines have a better understanding of your page’s content.
Lead
A lead is a potential client for your business. Leads will share their personal content information with you for something that your website provides that they see as valuable.
Lead magnet
A lead magnet is usually a long-form piece of content, like an e-book or template, that offers value to your readers.
Lead magnets are used to convince leads to give you their contact information for future content.
Link-building
Link-building describes the strategies used by webmasters to collect references from other websites that link back to their own content.
The links formed through link-building (backlinks) are one of Google’s most important ranking signals.
Link burst
A link burst is when you receive a large number of backlinks in a short time period, whether through black-hat SEO practices or going viral.
Link diversity
Link diversity is a link-building strategy used to get links from different kinds of pages (like directories or news links) and domains.
Link equity
AKA: link authority, backlink authority, link juice, or link value
Link equity describes the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority of inbound links.
Link hoarding
Link hoarding is when a website gathers a large number of inbound links but offers very few links that are outbound.
It is usually done to increase link popularity and traffic but can backfire if the search engines suspect you’re being manipulative of the algorithm.
Link popularity
Link popularity is the number of backlinks that point to your website. For link popularity, each link is counted separately and works to raise your popularity.
Link profile
A link profile is the total impact of links directing to your site. If these are mostly high-quality links, you’ll have a good link profile.
Link reclamation
Link reclamation is when you retrieve links you had previously lost.
Link relevancy
Link relevancy shows how similar and related the content on two websites linking to one another is.
Link rot
Link rot is when your pages get too old and you do not check up on them regularly so they get archived or deleted.
Link velocity
Link velocity shows how quickly a website obtains backlinks. Natural growth periods are best, since growing too quickly can make search engines suspect malpractice.
Local citation
A local citation is whenever a local business’ information is mentioned and helps make these businesses more discoverable.
Local citations can be the name of the company, the physical address, or any contact information.
Local pack
A local pack is an element on the first page of a Google result with a map pinpointing three local businesses relevant to the search term.
Local search
A local search is a search that has been geographically limited to businesses that satisfy the query and are located near the user.
Local SEO
Local SEO is the optimization based on geographic location. It is done to improve customer traffic in your area.
Log file
A log file is a folder that stores user information like their browser, IP address, date/time stamp of visit, and number of clicks.
A log file analysis is when you process that data to find trends or gather information on audience demographics. A log file analysis can also be done to see how spiders are crawling and indexing your site.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are search terms made of 3 or more words, so they have a lower search volume than short-tail keywords. This makes them easier to rank for.
Long-tail keywords are also more specific queries than one or two-word queries.
M
Machine learning
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that explains when computer algorithms automatically improve through the use of data and past experience.
Manual actions
AKA: Google manual actions penalties or penalties
A manual action penalty occurs when Google penalizes a website after a Google employee decides that your site violates the Google webmaster quality guidelines.
Websites with manual actions taken against them can be severely penalized or even removed entirely.
Meta description
A meta description is the text that appears right underneath the title of a webpage on the search engine results page.
Google will sometimes choose its own meta description, but having one set is still a good practice to follow for your CTR.
Meta keywords
Meta keywords are a kind of meta tag in the HTML code of a page that tells bots what the page content is about.
Meta refresh
AKA: meta redirect
A meta refresh is a tag that tells a browser to refresh a page after a certain amount of time has passed. Meta refreshes can be helpful to your users but also run the risk of slowing down your website and harming your UX.
Meta tags
AKA: meta directives or robots meta tag
Meta tags are code snippets that give instructions to crawlers on how to index or crawl the page’s content. These tags can’t be seen by users, and the most common meta tags used are the meta description and title tag.
Metadata
Metadata is the data that provides information on other data on your website. Metadata can give descriptive, structural, administrative, or other information about your website.
Mirror site
A mirror site is an exact replica of a website that already exists, simply under a new URL.
They are helpful in serving audiences in different locations and when the website being replicated generates more traffic than the server can support.
Mirror sites are helpful with improving page load speed and offering a good user experience.
Mobile optimization
Mobile optimization is the process of modifying a website’s content so that visitors from mobile devices have a layout and navigation that caters to their smaller screen size.
Mobile-first indexing
Mobile-first indexing is a way of indexing so that the mobile version of a website is crawled and indexed first, before the desktop version.
Mobile-friendly website
A mobile-friendly website is one that has been optimized for visits from mobile devices like smartphones.
Morningscore
A morningscore is a metric used by the Morningscore SEO tool that scores your website based on CTR, traffic volume, organic traffic, and CPC.
N
Natural link
AKA: editorial link or organic link
A natural link is a link that your website gets without reaching out to request it or paying for it.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a black hat SEO strategy where someone will webspam a competitor’s website to negatively influence their ranking.
Niche
A niche is a specialized, smaller market composed of a very passionate segment of the market.
Noarchive tag
A noarchive tag is the meta tag that keeps search engines from storing a cached copy of your webpage.
Nofollow attribute
Nofollow attribute is a meta tag to stop search engines from following a specific link out of your website.
This is used when a webmaster doesn’t want to pass authority to the webpage they’re linking to.
Noindex tag
A noindex tag is a meta tag that stops search engines from indexing a particular webpage.
Nosnippet tag
A nosnippet tag is a meta tag that you use to keep search engines from showing a description with your webpage’s listing.
O
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to tactics outside of your website that help improve your ranking on search engines.
Off-page SEO focuses on improving the credibility and relevance of your site through activities like link building or social media and offline marketing.
On-page SEO
AKA: onsite SEO
On-page SEO is when you optimize your webpage to increase organic traffic and SERP rank. One example of an on-page SEO strategy is to consistently upload quality content to your site.
Online reputation management (ORM)
AKA: reputation management
Online reputation management describes how you manage your brand perception online. ORM helps build trust and respect for your public image.
Opt-in
An opt-in is when users give you permission to send emails or other messages directly to them.
Opt-ins are helpful since different parts of the world have strict legislation on unsolicited commercial messages.
Opt-ins also help you understand your audience better since you can directly see which users want consistent content alerts.
Opt-out
An opt-out is when users clearly state they would like to be removed from a mailing list.
Organic rank
Organic rank is your website’s position in the SERPs, achieved through SEO.
Organic search results
The organic search results are the SERP listings that appear naturally as a result of search engine optimization strategies.
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is the traffic that comes from a search engine but isn’t paid for.
Whenever a visitor sees your website naturally appear in the SERPs and clicks onto your page, that’s organic traffic.
Orphan page
An orphan page is a page that doesn’t have any links pointing to it. Since the orphan page has no backlinks, bots don’t crawl the page and it doesn’t contribute to your SEO.
Outbound link
AKA: outgoing link or external link
Outbound links are links that lead to a new page outside of your website.
Outbound links help SEO because they make your content more trustworthy and help search engines understand your particular niche.
Outreach marketing
AKA: influencer marketing
Outreach marketing is a strategy where you reach out to thought leaders and influencers in your target audience so that they help you promote your product or service.
Over-optimization
Over-optimization occurs when you optimize your content with only the search engine in mind.
With SEO It is important to keep your content both user-friendly and bot-friendly or else your website might get penalized
P
Page authority (PA)
Page authority is a score given by Moz to a page that predicts how well it will rank on the SERP. A PA score can be anywhere from 1-100, and the higher the score is, the better Moz assumes you’ll rank.
Page impression
AKA: pageview
Page impressions are requests to load specific HTML files (webpages).
Page speed
AKA: page load speed, page response time, or page load time
Page speed describes how long it takes for all the content on a webpage to be displayed in the browser.
Page speed is an element of on-page SEO and affects the UX and your rank.
Page title
AKA: title tag
A page title is the headline users can click on on the results page in order to arrive at your site. It is an important element of SEO since it is the most visible element to searchers.
PageRank (PR)
PageRank is the algorithm used by Google to ranks pages on the SERP that works by counting the number of quality links to the page.
By doing this, PageRank has a rough estimate of how important the website it, and where it should rank.
Pages per session
Pages per session represent the average number of pages on your website that a user will visit during a single session.
Paid links
AKA: link buying
Paid links are backlinks acquired by giving someone money for a link back to your content.
Sometimes paid links are also obtained by giving free products to influencers or other thought leaders for a backlink.
Paid search engine result
Paid search engine results are a feature on Google that allows you to pay for a sponsored ad at the top or bottom of the SERPs.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic is any traffic your website gets from visitors clicking on your advertisements from platforms like Google or Facebook.
People also ask
People also ask is a section of the SERPs for a query that shows related questions and answers.
Persona
AKA: marketing persona or buyer persona
A persona is part of a user-centered approach to marketing where a fictional character represents your ideal customer or user.
Personas are built using market segmentation, with each segment having its own persona of a different demographic.
Personas also have a set of behaviors, needs, motivations, and goals which are determined using actual consumer data.
Personalization
Personalization is when search engines will customize search results to each user through their web browsing history, geographic location, search history, and relationships.
PHP
PHP is a scripting language that works well for web development and allows users to create dynamic web content for their website.
Pogo-sticking
Pogo-sticking is when a searcher will bounce back and forth between different pages listed on the SERP after searching something.
Poison words
AKA: forbidden words
Poison words are words known to lower your ranking if a search engine finds them in your title, description, or URL. Words that would usually be censored in films can be considered poison words.
They won’t kill your page, but they will bury them very low in the rankings.
Portal page
AKA: doorway page, jump page, gateway page, entry page, web portal or bridge page
A portal page is a page that generates revenue from affiliate links and advertisements by ranking for specific keywords and redirecting users to different websites.
Primary keyword
AKA: head keyword or main keyword
Primary keywords are the most important keywords you want to try and rank for. A primary keyword is one you should use the most in your webpage to try and drive traffic.
It should be included in your title, headline, URL, and first paragraph, but make sure you don’t keyword stuff.
Pull channel
A pull channel is a channel like a search engine or database that you use to attract customers.
Pull marketing
Pull marketing is a promotional strategy that uses advertisements to create and encourage customer demand.
Push channel
A push channel is a channel that exposes potential customers to your advertisements or product regardless of if they ask to see it.
Push marketing
Push marketing is a promotional strategy where sellers take their products to customers in order to create a desire. An example of this is trade shows and trade show promotions.
Q
Quality content
Quality content is content that contains insight and useful information for users. Quality content is also grammatically correct, properly formatted, and easy to read.
Publishing content that is consistently high is one of the best SEO practices you can adopt.
Quality link
Quality links are backlinks to your page that come from relevant, authoritative, and trusted websites.
Query
AKA: search query or search term
A query is a word or phrase that someone types into a search box to find matching information.
Query deserves diversity (QDD)
Query deserves diversity is a ranking algorithm that Google uses to match user intent.
QDD will display broad match results and track behavior to find search patterns that show where users found relevant results and where they didn’t.
Query deserves freshness (QDF)
Query deserves freshness is a ranking algorithm that Google uses to provide the most up-to-date search results for specific queries.
R
Rank
AKA: position
A webpage’s rank describes it’s placement in the SERPs for a specific search term or query.
Ranking factor
A ranking factor is a component that helps search engines sort results returned for a search query so that the most relevant results appear first.
Reciprocal linking
Reciprocal linking occurs when two websites agree to exchange backlinks with each other.
Reconsideration request
AKA: reinclusion
A reconsideration request is an appeal sent to Google asking for them to reinclude your site after you have addressed a manual action penalty or security issue.
Redirect
AKA: status code, HTTP status code, HTTP response status code, URL redirection, or browser error code
A redirect is a server response when a user attempts to open a URL page and a different URL page opens instead.
A redirect 301 is for pages that are permanently removed and a redirect 302 is a page that is temporarily unavailable.
Redirect 403 is shown whenever a user is forbidden access to a page, and redirect 404 are for pages that the server can’t find.
Referral traffic
Referral traffic is the traffic from visitors who arrive at your site from a backlink on a different domain.
Relevance
Relevance is a measurement that search engines use to assess how related a webpage’s content is to a search query.
Relative path
AKA: relative link or relative URL
A relative path is a shortcut to a file for internal linking purposes and does not have a protocol or domain name.
Responsive website
AKA: responsive design
A responsive design is a web design that automatically adapts to different screen sizes depending on the device a user visits on.
Return on Investment (ROI)
AKA: return on costs
Return on investment refers to the ratio of net income to investment. The ROI is used to assess how efficient an investment is.
Rich result
AKA: rich card or rich snippet
Rich results are boxes of information found at the top of Google results pages. Rich results have either integrated visuals or interactive features.
Robots.txt
AKA: robots exclusion standard or robots exclusion protocol
Robots.txt is a standard text file used by websites to communicate with bots so that they correctly process and scan your webpages.
S
Schema
AKA: structured data
A schema is a markup of semantic vocabulary microdata that improves the way search engines read and display your page in the SERPs.
Schemas are added to the HTML of your website and show the significance and relationship between different elements in your site.
Scraped content
Scraped content is the content or data that is stolen from your site to be used on someone else’s.
Scraping someone’s content is a black-hat SEO strategy and can penalize your website.
Screaming frog
Screaming frog is a free SEO tool that is used to quickly audit a large number of website pages and find any errors you need to address.
Search engine
A search engine is a software program that carries out web searches. Search engines take user queries and collect information from their index in order to provide useful, relevant results.
Search engine advertising
AKA: search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine advertising is the promotion of websites by paying for advertisements in the SERPs.
Search engine algorithm
A search engine algorithm is the process search engines use to determine the relevance of a webpage.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the different strategies taken to improve a website’s traffic that stems from search engines.
SEO focuses on improving quality and quantity and on unpaid traffic instead of traffic that is paid for.
Search engine spam
AKA: search engine poisoning, spamdexing, search spam, or webspam
Search engine spam is a black-hat SEO strategy where hackers embed backlinks to their own content into your site.
Search engine spamming is done to the top-ranking pages in the SERP and temporarily improves the ranking of their low-quality website.
Search engine results page (SERP)
The search engine results page is the page that search engines generate as a response to a search query.
Search history
Search history is the entirety of a user’s previous activity in a search engine and is used to personalize their results.
Search intent
AKA: user intent
Search intent is the reason a user has to search a specific query. The search intent can be to learn something, entertain themselves, or buy something.
Search result snippet
A search result snippet is where your meta description appears in your webpage’s listing on the SERP.
Search visibility
AKA: SEO visibility or search engine visibility
Search visibility is the traffic your site receives as a result of it’s rank in the SERPs.
Your visibility score is based on the keywords that your webpage ranks for.
Search volume
Search volume describes the total search queries a term gets in a set period of time.
Search volume helps webmasters decide on which keywords to focus on ranking for.
Secondary keywords
Secondary keywords are the terms that provide additional information to your primary keywords.
An example would be the search ‘vegan hotdogs,’ where hotdogs is the primary keyword and vegan the secondary.
Seed keywords
Seed keywords are the short-tail keywords that are most relevant to your business.
Seed keywords never have modifiers and garner high monthly search volumes and high competition.
SEO-friendly URL
An SEO-friendly URL is a web address that has been optimized to help your page rank, give a synopsis of the page’s content at a glance, and create structure around your site.
SEO service
AKA: SEO service provider or SEO agency
An SEO service is the service provided by a marketing agency to help increase the organic traffic quality and volume to your website.
SEO site audit
AKA: site audit or SEO audit
An SEO site audit is an analysis done to see how visible your website is in the SERPs.
There are technical site audits and content audits, and they both help you find the issues with your SEO strategy that you can improve.
SERP shaker
A SERP shaker is a black-hat SEO strategy that uses software to create websites and content that is meant to rank high for long-tail keywords.
After achieving a high rank, these sites are used solely to generate money and the SERP shaker will host ads or paid backlinks.
Session
AKA: visit
A session is the sum of a user’s interactions with your website in the span of the time spent on your website.
Short-tail keywords
Short-tail keywords are search terms made of 3 or fewer words that generate a high search volume.
Short-tail keywords refer to broad topics and are more difficult to rank for than long-tail keywords.
Site speed
Site speed is a measurement of how quickly the pages in your website load.
Site structure
Site structure describes how the content in your website is categorized. The homepage is at the top of the structure, with all subsequent pages organized based on how far they are from your top page.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are the links chosen by the algorithm to appear underneath the listing for a top-ranked search result. Usually, there are six.
Sitewide links
Sitewide links are the links that appear on every page in a website, usually along one of the borders of the screen.
Skyscraper SEO
AKA: skyscraping or skyscraper technique
Skyscraper SEO is a link-building technique.
Webmasters analyze the top-performing content for a specific keyword and reach out to those websites to try to get a backlink to their own quality content so that their rank improves.
Snippet bait
Snippet bait is the featured snippet of content under a search result that answers the query in about two sentences and is shown at the top of the SERPs.
Social media
Social media are interactive technologies that enable the creation and sharing of information, ideas, and other media through communities and networks online.
Social media marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing is a promotional strategy where social media platforms and websites are used to promote your product or service.
Social signal
A social signal is the collective likes, shares, and social media engagement a webpage receives.
Social syndication
Social syndication is a way of reaching broader audiences by repurposing your site’s content to be distributed onto your social media platforms.
Splash page
A splash page is a page on your site or application that acts as a front page.
It is shown before even the homepage and consists of your logo and sometimes different location and language setting options to direct users to the right page.
Split testing
AKA: A/B testing
Split testing is a controlled experiment done to compare webpages and measure how their differences influence conversion rates.
SSL certificate
An SSL certificate is a digital authentication of a website’s identity.
SSL certificates enable an encrypted connection for a website to send information to a server.
Static URL
AKA: static link
Static URLs are web addresses that are never changed. The URL stays the same and so does the content on the page.
Stop words
Stop words are are words like prepositions that search engines may ignore when indexing to be more efficient.
Subdomain
A subdomain is a separate part of a website that exists within the main domain.
For example, https://es.usembassy.gov/ is the subdomain on the US embassy website for Spain.
Submission
A submission is when you alert search engines of a new page on your site by manually submitting its URL so that it is indexed faster.
T
Taxonomy
Taxonomy for SEO is the optimization of pages on a website according to your organizational structure. Examples of taxonomy for SEO can be done according to categories and tags.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is one of the three main pillars of SEO and covers the optimization of your website for crawlers.
Technical SEO also addresses site performance and how quickly and efficiently your website runs.
Term frequency x inverse document frequency
AKA: TF*IDF
TF*IDF is a statistic that search engines use to see how relevant your webpage is based on how many times a keyword is used. It then will cross-reference that number with other documents in the same collection.
Thin content
Thin content is on-page content that offers virtually no value to users. It is usually automatically generated, content on doorway pages, or content stolen from other websites.
Top-heavy
Top-heavy is a term to describe websites with too many ads above the fold. Google will oftentimes rank these websites low in the SERPs.
Top-level domain
AKA: domain extension
Top-level domain is a web address’ extension, like .com or .org. It can sometimes be specific to a particular region, like websites with .uk or .es.
Traffic
Traffic is the amount of data that visitors and bots send and receive from a website. Traffic can be direct, referral, paid, or organic.
Traffic potential
Traffic potential represents the highest possible organic visits your website can get in the top position on Google for your specific keyword.
Traffic potential is not the same for every keyword. It depends on how popular a particular search term is.
Trust
Trust is an expression of how reliable and trustworthy a search engine believes your site to be based on past behavior and content quality.
TrustRank
A TrustRank is a way of analyzing links to differentiate between reputable pages and spam.
U
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free browser plugin that can be used on search engines to find keyword search volume, CPC, and additional keyword insights.
Uniform resource locator (URL)
AKA: web address
A uniform resource locator is the unique string of text that a user types into a browser to reach your website.
It functions as the online address for your webpage and is composed of three main parts: the protocol, domain name, and permalink.
Unique visit
The term unique visit describes the first time a user visits and browses your website.
Universal search
AKA: blended search or enhanced search
A universal search is a search where results on the SERP are mixed forms of media with the traditional organic results, images, videos, and so on.
Google does this to provide dynamic results and blend different vertical search engines like YouTube and Google Images.
Unnatural link
An unnatural link is an outbound link that is deceptive or manipulative and usually the result of paying for spamming or low-quality SEO services.
Unnatural links can result in Google taking manual action against your website.
URL Parameter
AKA: link parameter
A URL parameter represents the dynamic values that are set into a page’s URL during a query.
User agent
A user agent is a web crawling software that uses HTTP protocols.
User engagement
User engagement is a metric that shows how well your website holds a visitor’s attention and keeps them browsing your site.
User experience (UX)
The user experience is an element that explains how pleasant or manageable your website is to users. One main factor of the user experience is a website’s user interface.
User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content is any content that a user posts or uploads onto a website. Some examples of UGC are reviews and media uploaded to social media sites like images and videos.
User interface (UI)
The user interface is the design of a website or other space where interactions between humans and machines occur.
V
Vertical search engine
A vertical search engine is a specialized search engine that focuses on a specific type of content or topic.
Examples of vertical search engines are Youtube, Kayak, and Amazon.
Video optimization
Video optimization is the process of improving your video content to increase your video or profile’s search visibility. Elements such as thumbnail design and descriptions will help with video optimization.
Viral content
Viral content is a term that describes a piece of media that has gotten popular in a short amount of time.
Usually viral content does not stay popular for long but while it is it will generate a lot of backlinks and shares on social media.
Virtual assistant
A virtual assistant is a bot that processes language to perform tasks for a user.
Visibility
The visibility of a website describes how easy it is to find in organic search results.
Voice search
Voice search is when users speak a question into a device to conduct an online search using voice-activated technology.
W
Webpage
A webpage is a hypertext document that can be found in a website and shown to users in a web browser.
Website
A website is made up of several web pages hosted together online.
Website Navigation
Website navigation is how a website will connect its webpages so that visitors can easily navigate the site.
Webmaster guidelines
Webmaster guidelines are the rules put in place by search engine providers for webmasters to follow. These guidelines also help webmasters understand how their websites may be optimized best for search engines.
White hat SEO
White hat SEO strategies take a quality-focused approach to SEO and do not go against a search engine’s guidelines.
Word count
The word count of your content describes how many words appear in the copy. Search engines may consider content with a word count that is too low to be low-quality.
WordPress
WordPress is a free open-source content management system and website builder. It can be used to easily make and customize websites however you want and features plugin and template options for additional personalization.
X
XML
An XML is the markup language search engines use to understand the data on your website.
XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is an XML file with all of your website URLs and metadata for each stored inside. Having an XML sitemap helps you control how spiders crawl and index your site.
Y
Yahoo
Yahoo is an email, news, and search engine powered by Bing with a global market share of 2.71%.
Yandex
Yandex is the leading Russian online search engine, with 85 million monthly users.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a free wordpress plugin that helps users optimize their content. It is a great tool for no-index and auto-generating meta tags for your content.
YouTube
YouTube is an online video sharing and social media platform with more than two million users. Youtube allows users to easily store and share videos online and quality videos will frequently appear in the SERPs for Google.
Z
Zero-click
A zero-click is a query in a search engine that answers the user’s question at the top of the SERP. Because of this, the search query is never followed up by a click into one of the search results.
Zero-click searches are usually very simple questions that require a simple response.
