SEO can be a confusing field. Therefore, it is essential to know all the relevant Search Engine Optimization terms used in on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and the content development process. This Ultimate SEO Glossary covers A to Z terms that will help you to know how they impact your website’s traffic and ranking on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Not only do you need to know what these terms mean, but also which of the words are acronyms by definition. Well-structured, precise explanations of SEO and PPC terms will help you refine your search engine optimization and pay-per-click strategies.
The SEO Glossary is a small resource book that gives you an overview of the critical aspects of doing business on the Internet. You will learn what the different acronyms stand for, the SEO life cycle, and how the world of SEO relates to companies.
This Ultimate Search Engine Optimization glossary is great for beginners and experts alike as it explains in plain English what the terms mean. The dictionary also offers information on developing good SEO habits, optimizing websites, and dealing with spam, among others. This SEO Glossary will help you get ahead in the SEO industry by providing a quick and easy reference for basic definitions.
A
Above The Fold
Content that appears on a website before the user scrolls are known as Above the fold in the SEO industry. The first two sentences before the user have scrolled for 10% of the way down a page. Google created the Mobile-Friendly update in 2015 to lower the rankings of websites featuring too many ads in this Above the Fold space.
Admin Area
The Admin area of the dashboard is the place of the website from where a user controls everything. In WordPress, mostly the path to access the admin area is something like www.xyz.com/wp-admin.
A user has full access to make any changes after login into a website admin panel.
AMP
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source framework for quickly creating a mobile-friendly web layout. The AMP Specification consists of several documents that make a fully functional AMP system using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open-source code.
Instead of struggling with complex CSS and JavaScript, most publishers use the AMP plugin because only it needs to add a few essential elements—such as amp-ad, amp-IMG, amp-video, and amp package—to their web pages. In addition, since it’s an open-source project, anyone can review the code or contribute to the project, whereas more than 160 organizations have already made contributions.
Agile Content Development
Agile content development is content management technology-independent approach to helping you cost-effectively developing’s targeted and optimized content at high speed. The key differentiator of agile content development is that it uses a predefined editorial calendar, Google Analytics, and other tools to track, analyze, and optimize content.
Agile content development is an approach to content marketing that includes a predefined editorial calendar, an understanding of how and where readers are engaging, and the ability to make improvements quickly.
It’s just as important to know what content doesn’t work as it is to know what does. In agile content development, you start by hyper-focusing on only one or two areas at a time until you “turn the corner” – and then you can move on to something else.
Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a programming language that allows web pages to update themselves without reloading. This makes web pages more dynamic since there is less need for the whole page to be replaced when there are updates.
Using AJAX, a webpage can request information from the server using XMLHttpRequest, a browser object that fetches data from a server. This allows us to display content and data without requiring the page to reload.
In addition, it will enable the Web user interface to be updated independently of the underlying data. This technology works by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes and presenting to the user a more fluid interaction standard.
Algorithm
The algorithm is used in a website ranking system that is a well-programmed strategy to read millions of website’s structures and content to provide the most relevant result to the user’s query.
Search engine algorithms play a significant role in marketing, e-commerce, and even search engine optimization (SEO). Many of the top search engine providers use complex algorithms to rank their results for your query.
Search engines are designed to locate and deliver web pages of interest to end-users. These search engine systems, or indexes, work by assigning a numerical value or rank to each webpage. The catalog is based on several factors related to how and where the page appears on the Web.
The best result for a query is one that has the highest score. Unfortunately, the algorithms used by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and others are proprietary, so there’s no telling precisely what ranking factors search engines use to produce the most relevant results for any given query.
Alt Attribute
Alt attributes, also known as alternative text attributes, can be added to an image to describe the image. It helps the user to understand the meaning of the image is not loaded or cannot be displayed at the moment. Alt attributes are written in a markup language that is similar to HTML.
In website design, alt attributes provide a textual replacement for images when they cannot be rendered, like links to external graphics or non-graphical pages. The code for an image element that is purely decorative and has no alternative text (for example, an image that looks the same in every browser) must use the null alt attribute.
Anchor Text
The anchor text is the most common SEO Terms, and a user can see it on the website when a link has been followed. A visitor often clicks on the text next to associations such as “here” or “next” because they could provide some additional information to land the users to a particular destination.
If you want visitors to click on your links, make sure you use a proper anchor text for each link that directs users to a page equivalent to their expectations. The anchor text has the most significant effect on where the visitor will click when there is more than one link to a single page or website. A specific keyword should be used in the anchor text to ensure that visitors get directly to the relevant page or site.
B
B2B
Business to Business, in short, B2B is a term used when a business or company wants to collaborate with other businesses for any professional requirements.
B2B companies have long understood the importance of using SEO to drive traffic to their websites, yet the majority struggle with getting it right. Building a successful B2B site is incredibly challenging–especially for companies that sell expensive, customized products or services.
For these firms, identifying and attracting qualified prospects takes time. Plus, the B2B buying cycle can be lengthy–often more than six months from lead generation through final close.
B2B firms are businesses, ranging from large multinational corporations to small, privately-held companies that engage in informational transactions with other companies. Business-to-business (B2B) describes transactions that involve a large volume of research and negotiating between the buyer and seller.
B2C
B2C stands for Business to the customer, where a seller wants to directly connect to the prospective buyer.
B2C SEO is concerned with the promotion and marketing of products and services from one business to another. At its core rests the distinct buying cycle of any consumer that goes through a commercial enterprise to procure a good or service. It’s done for profit and in large quantities.
B2C represents the widening of the search market because the products and services are typically cheaper and easier to find. On top of that, because these products are for personal use rather than business use, the consumer is more involved in this process than a B2B consumer is.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your part, essentially linking back from their domain to yours. Domain metrics such as the number of backlinks pointing at any given site represent the value and importance of that URL for a given topic. This is often referred to as a link’s “page rank.”
Most search engine algorithms consider backlinks to be a vote of confidence for a site. They’re symbols that other sites trust the information on your site. Therefore, search engines consider the number and quality of backlinks when assessing the importance of your content.
They illustrate the value and standing of your website and are indicators of credibility. Many search engines consider the quantity and quality of backlinks when assigning rankings to domains.
Bad Neighbourhood
Bad neighborhood websites are those where you have created the backlinks for your site, but they have already violated the search engine policy or manipulated them by using some unacceptable languages and SEO practices.
Traffic from the Internet is hard to target, but it is easy to attract. Websites in bad neighborhoods are hard to attract and will get almost no traffic. Traffic also represents money. If a website in a bad neighborhood can’t generate revenue, there’s no point in running it.
A website in a bad neighborhood would have to pay for traffic, but that would hardly be worthwhile. If a website in a good neighborhood couldn’t generate revenue, it wouldn’t be worth running. This is an essential factor, as it means the operating costs are much less for a website in a good neighborhood than for one in a bad neighborhood.”
Broken Link
A link becomes broken when a website goes offline or when two pages are moved in a website, and no redirect is implemented. When this happens, the URL at the previously hosting webpage still shows the link to the webpage.
A broken link is also known as a 404 Error, and it is bad news for SEO because it tells search engines that a particular webpage no longer exists—and that no one cares enough to fix it.
There are several free and paid tools available to check the broken links of your website.
Business Directories
A business directory is an online database of companies offering various products and services. It includes their website URL, address, phone number, profile, nature of business, and more. Business directories are generally in a hierarchical structure, often with categories, which you can filter to match your needs. Thus, it is the equivalent of a traditional phone book.
Business directory websites typically have the organization and structure of a phone book. The difference between online business directories and traditional phone books is that search engine optimization plays an equally important role in its popularity.
Branded Keyword
When a search query includes a company, brand, or niche name, it is known as the Branded Keyword in SEO. This is typically the first step in identifying a group of questions with extremely low competitiveness for given keywords. The reason is; that this normally catches a business name that represents branded searches. BRANDPARTS are rare and valuable.
Every business has competition. They show up in similar companies, alternative products and services, and unrelated things that a person might search for (a competitor).
When you find a group of queries with extreme competitiveness and extremely low difficulty, this is an indicator that brand terms almost completely dominate these particular searches. If you have enough volume in the group, then they are worthwhile to target for higher ranking.
C
Cache
A cache is a kind of temporary memory that transparently stores data in your browser. So when a user requests the same website or page in the future, the result can be served faster. It has a higher hit rate than other methods of accessing data at some cost to total bandwidth.
Caches typically have a short average access time, which reduces overall latency and reduces the need for slower storage, especially in a network system.
Additionally, a cache is a data-holding component that can improve performance, increase availability, cut down on costs, and even boost safety. Computers in all stages of use and technology use caches to enhance performance and functionality.
Canonical URL
When multiple URLs have the same or similar content, instead of making users hunt around, we use canonical tags in SEO to reference the preferred URL. This is an essential tool for creating great user experiences on the Web.
The HTML code element allows a URL to be specified in the content to indicate that the target page is available on the Web. This principle can be applied to many types of content, such as plain text, images, audio and video files, etc. However, it is most valuable when used with a URL pointing to web-based resources.
Content Gap Analysis
A content gap analysis is a search query-driven approach to analyzing website content and identifying keyword optimization opportunities. This involves reviewing the most popular search queries used on a site and then determining how well the search engine optimized pages rank for each question.
By performing SEO keyword research, Internet marketers can better understand both the keywords that online surfers use as search queries and what content the internet users are most interested in.
A content gap analysis can provide insight into meaningful topics that your website currently doesn’t cover. With this information, you can create additional content around new issues to engage with site visitors and increase leads.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a method to manipulate the users on a website to spend some time by showing different information than they are looking for.
For example, a search engine looks at two texts, X and Y, that come from the same site and evaluates how similar they are. When it seems that corresponding substrings in X and Y are much more numerous than expected (e.g., because of synonyms), then the search engine concludes that X and Y are semantically related, even though the client sees only one of the texts but not both.
Cloaking is primarily done by companies whose customers search for products that the company does not have, or even if they do have what the visitor is searching for. Thus, they are trying to make it seem like they have more than what they carry.
Content Marketing
Strategy is a must for each successful content campaign. Content Marketing Strategy is comprehensive, based on the established goals and objectives of the company online and offline, and includes both evaluation and measurement tools.
Content marketing is an innovative way to create interest in and loyalty for their products and forms one basis of customer loyalty management. The purpose of content marketing is to increase the credibility, interest, thought leadership, and overall visibility of your company and to generate leads.
Content marketing could mean publishing content on your website, blog, or Facebook page or using social network sites such as Google+, Twitter, and YouTube. However, the bottom line of any content marketing strategy is always the same: increasing traffic to your website or earning revenue by selling their products.
Content Relevance
Content relevance refers to the ability of the content of a web page to reflect or represent all or part of an important topic or concept. This type of richness is also referred to as topical relevancy and on-topic strength.
Content relevance is critical to search engine marketing because it refers to how relevant or significant the words on or in your website are compared to those being searched for on a search engine.
Content relevance aims to target a website with relevant information to the topic or search term. This may seem easier said than done, but it can be achieved by developing a good understanding of your target audience and what they are searching for about your competitors.
Cookies
Cookies can be used for various purposes, including storing information about the users’ computer, preferences, or login details, so they do not need to re-enter them each time a user is visiting the websites. Cookies used like this are called “persistent cookies” or “tracking cookies.”
Cookies cannot harm your computer. Cookies set by Yahoo!’s sites do not contain personal information, but you might want to check with the site’s privacy policy to learn how it treats other kinds of personal information.
Cookies cannot be used to extract data from your computer. Instead, the internet browser software use cookies to store session information and track information on the pages you view.
D
Defective Links
A defective link is a hyperlink that points to an unrelated server or destination. Several issues can cause this, but the most common source of this problem is that when the website is moved or changed, the webmaster misses updating the links to the new location of the website. A web admin or designer must fix this type of problem. This issue may also occur if the original connection was coded incorrectly in the first place.
Links on a website may become defective if a website is reorganized. If the link to a page no longer works, it is essential to find the reason and correct it or remove it from the index. Defective links are not helpful to search engine crawlers, and the robots.txt file on your site can be used to remove them from the index.
Links in the body of your pages can also be removed, though this may affect the quality of your website. Defective links are wrong for website owners because they make it hard to maintain websites. It is also problematic for search engine developers because it leads to wasted resources and more incomplete or inaccurate search results.
Domain Popularity
Domain Popularity is an essential factor in determining a domain’s search engine ranking and its ability to attract visitors from both search engines and direct traffic through links. To rank high in search results on major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google, a web page must have some links pointing to it.
Good domain popularity is essential for a decent website: the more domains, the better. For instance, if you have one site with 100 domains that link back to your site, it will be worth more than another site with two domains. It’s almost impossible to get relevant niche top 10 rankings without good domain popularity.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to a website’s written and visual content that’s repeated across different web pages or even on the same page of a website. In other words, duplicate content describes how much of the website is replicated across multiple pages or sites.
Another reason for duplicate content is when a website has been hacked. Websites can be attacked, and the hacker will often place the same or almost identical content on many different websites that belong to other owners. This is usually done with spam-related content such as adult dating, replica products, etc.
Understand that duplicate content is not always bad. Sometimes it occurs accidentally or for legitimate purposes. However, knowing why this content is being created and how to avoid it can help improve the quality of your website. For example, you can use the rel=”canonical” tag to indicate the preferred version of a duplicated page to search engines.
Dwell Time
Short dwell time is an essential part of high-quality SEO results. For example, suppose a user arrives at a page and leaves within less than 5 seconds and scrolls around the most complex pages for 10-15 seconds. In that case, the diagram will fall in the bottom left corner, showing that quick searches are necessary to appear in the top ten search results on Google.
The short dwell time metric provides a general indicator of the engagement your pages are getting. This can be used as a signal to search engines regarding the quality of your content.”
When considering websites, Google typically places a great deal of emphasis on factors associated with quality and user experience, including content length, page load speed, and time spent by visitors on the site. A relatively short dwell time is often viewed as an indicator of page quality (although it can also be a function of ad clutter).
E
Editorial Link
Editorial links have been identified as a ranking factor for some time now. In addition, the click-through rate of inbound links can be used as a ranking signal in Google’s algorithm. Quality is essential, though. Not all sites are created equal.
If you get a link from a great site and that site has many authoritative domains linked to it already, it will pass more value than other sites. As you can see here, the blue shirt guy is also linking out to other sites, which means he is driving traffic away from his website, allowing others to get a backlink from his website too!
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics provide a measurement of the relationship users have with content. These metrics can inform content producers on which types of content are more engaging on their sites, such as stories, apps, or games.
Clicks and views provide limited insight into engagement, which is why it’s essential also to track page visits, time on site, bounce rate, and other basic engagement metrics. When implemented correctly, these metrics enable you to identify who your active users are (and, therefore, who your most valuable audiences are).
F
Featured Snippets
If you find a search result to answer your question, Google will sometimes show a particular information block above the organic search results. This box contains a summary (which may be in the form of a paragraph, list, table, or video), the publication date, page title, link to the webpage from which the answer originated, and URL.
Frame
If you use frames to display different parts of your site, the search engines may only index one of these portions and not the entire site. The search engine results page will also be displayed differently for a user who has frames turned off.
Findability
The measure of how easily the content on a website can be found internally (by users) and externally (by search engines). Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to deliver search engine rankings that will make your website attractive to users and boost your organic traffic.
Websites are optimized for SEO by improving content structure (for example, proper use of headings and keywords), coding (for example, HTML and CSS validation), link structure, and making use of specific software.
G
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides you with detailed statistics about the visitors coming to your website or online store. Also, you can use it to track audience behavior; time spends on your website, traffic sources, best-performing articles, most active hours, and much more.
It allows you to collect information on your audience’s demographic and geographical location and the traffic source essential driving to your site. It also provides information about which pages are most popular and which products are most frequently purchased. The visual reporting features enable you to create primary lines, bars, and pie charts over various elements of your reports.
Goggle Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner is available for free and can be accessed using any computer or mobile device with an internet connection for getting basic keyword research ideas. There’s no need to purchase or create an account with Google for this purpose, as users can simply log in using their Google account credentials.
Note that ads do not have to be generated through a web page or any type of advertisement. All that’s needed is creating a list of keywords and their estimated monthly traffic potential. The Keyword Planner allows advertisers to understand how many people in a specific location search for a particular word or phrase.
The data is grouped according to the country, state, city, and search engine language. The planner doesn’t reveal the exact numbers of individual users but rather an average of different keywords and users’ locations.
Google Knowledge Graph
The Google Knowledge Graph will dramatically impact the way people use Google. It serves to organize and make readily available large amounts of data about the people, places, and things Google knows about.
The knowledge graph provides precise information about whatever is searched, including names, addresses, phone numbers, recipes, articles, locations, and much more.
Google Knowledge Graph is an extension of the Google database that presents information, either structured data or general knowledge (or both), on entities within specific domains. The Knowledge Graph allows complex queries to be answered directly from Google search results, although many questions can still be answered through simple searching.
Google My Bussiness
Google My Business is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you manage your business free of cost on Google. It lets you add helpful information about your company, get reviews, and share photos.
They manage all of their listings – like their Business Page, listings on their products and services, driving directions, and customer reviews – in one place. By using this service, Google can have more accurate information that serves as a foundation to improve their search results for customers. Also, it allows for more relevant advertisements based on the company’s information.
Mostly the Google My Business pages are used to create in case of marketing your local store when you are doing local SEO.
Google Panda Update
The Panda update is a major Google SEO algorithm that affects the search engine’s “PageRank” with the intent of reducing “low-quality sites” or “thin content.” Rather than using a set of manual instructions and rules, Panda uses an algorithm based on a statistical analysis of a website and attempts to identify and remove poor-quality sites from its search results.
Panda search engine algorithm is developed to filter out the websites or pages that have low-quality content. Google’s definition of ‘quality is unclear but is most commonly assumed to be about content, design, and technical performance, such as speed. The update affects up to 12% of queries in English depending on the language and 7% globally at any given time.
This increases the prominence of high-quality content. This change to the Google search results is pretty controversial and debated in the media.
Google Penguin Update
Another Google ranking algorithm is the Penguin update which was first rolled out in 2012. The rollout of the update had massive effects on many websites that were using shady SEO methods to get higher rankings (for example, keyword stuffing, link farming, and spun articles) in the search engine results. Google intended the update to fight webspam, and so released the Penguin update.
Penguins’ name comes from the word “penguin” because, like penguins, websites that are affected move slowly and tend to waddle when they walk. This next generation of Penguin will be integrated into our core website ranking system, and it will now be part of our normal day-to-day operations.
Google Phantom Update
The US American webmaster community named the “Phantom” phenomenon. Many sites have lost up to 50% of their organic positions in Google over the last few weeks, according to SERPS tracking studies. But there is no official statement from Google about any extraordinary measures.
Web admins and SEOs generally use the Google Phantom update and web developers to describe a series of changes affecting the Google search results. The changes are actually a combination of several minor updates that Google calls “stings” as they are not significant enough to require an announcement.
Google Sandbox
Google Sandbox is the never-ending battle for top rankings challenge faced by most professional SEOs. While there are no ways to guarantee a steady stream of new keywords, the process can be expedited when SEOs utilize current web properties (such as brand websites or newly acquired domains) that already have some level of authority.
By producing new content and property management aligned with their client’s company mission, SEOs can help ensure that the search engines more easily process updates to sites. In cases where they also direct link authority, those same efforts can further support existing sites.
Google Trends
The “Trends” section of Google Insights for Search contains data visualizations of the recent trends in search volume. These visualizations show how often a particular search term has been entered relative to a set period, ranging from one day to one year.
Accessing the Google Trends panels helps you understand more about regional or global search trends.
H
Header
The header is the topmost part of your website, where you mostly place the logo or Menu. Headers help you guide users’ eyes around your page to improve scanning. Guides prevent eye fatigue and ensure that visitors read content in order and don’t miss important elements. Text within headers should be easy to scan and look different from any text in the rest of the body, such as bolded, more significant, or different.
HTML
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the basic and standard programming language that almost every website is written in. Therefore, every webpage consists of HTML tags. HTML tags help search engines find and index the specific elements of a webpage, making it easier for people to search for you.
HTML knowledge is an essential skill for anyone wanting to make their mark on the Web. It’s at the core of almost every website, and knowing it gives you a weapon against everyone from small business owners to professional marketing departments.
Use the HTML tags to edit your content and fine-tune it for search engines. The tags can add styling, formatting, lists, images, links, and more to content. We have tabbed the left-hand side to show the different sets of tags available and describe each in greater detail.
I
Image SEO
From time to time, search engines are upgrading their technology to provide the best results to the user’s query. Image SEO is also the part of their search engine algorithm where they try to understand the meaning of the Images with the help of Artificial intelligence and then show the most relevant picture to the users.
The SEO benefit of using the alt texts in your product images is pretty apparent, even if you would be unlikely to use the images on your website directly. The message being sent is that someone who is in the market for one of these products just might be persuaded to purchase online with the picture close at hand.
To get maximum ranking visibility for product images in Google, businesses are increasingly converting their product photos from JPEGs to the more flexible and universally accepted PNG and WEP format.
Inbound Links
Inbound links are the cornerstone of off-page SEO. Imagine a building where the rooms are sites in your niche and the hallways are links to/from other sites. If you have an empty hallway in your building, it’s a lot harder to get from one room to another—you have to go outside and walk around.
Building new rooms (without keeping up maintenance on the rest of the building) is a waste of time. Linking pages together is much like renovating inside: Paying more attention to your internal links involves a lot more work than simply creating new ones from scratch but will increase your traffic.
Inbound links are part of Google and other search engines’ algorithms to determine position preference on a SERP (search engine result page). Linking to the URL of your website from another highly authoritative webpage is one way to get your site more authority or higher rankings in the search engines.
Indexability
Applying keywords to a site is essential for search engine optimization and the human reader who expects to find what he or she is looking for on each page. It’s also helpful to check which search engines currently index pages of your site.
A high indexability (above 80%) is a perfect thing. You don’t want your product to be listed in the search engine results alongside way too many duplicate pages. Relevancy on your site depends entirely upon how many different unique URLs are linked to each page.
Index
Search engines are the databases that retrieve and store information gathered during the crawling process. Those databases include both text indexes of words associated with web pages and data-model modeling.
From time to time, search engine crawlers come to your website, and they add the newly published article or pages to their database, which is also known as page Indexing. Based on that, when a user is searching for a piece of data, the engine searches through their existing database and newly created website’s source code to provide the asked result to the user.
J
JavaScript
JavaScript is a powerful programming language that makes it possible to dynamically insert content, links, metadata, or other elements, on websites. Due to heavy code, it makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to index the web pages faster.
To dynamically insert content, links, metadata, or other elements on a webpage, server-side technologies such as PHP, ASP.NET, and Java are commonly used by developers. However, JavaScript is a client-side technology where additional code is embedded within an HTML page.
JavaScript can be used to alter contents dynamically that were produced from these server-side technologies. However, static websites do not require dynamic features as the content does not change frequently. As a result, static websites are often more accessible to crawl and index by search engines.
K
Key Performance Indicator
A key performance indicator is a metric that you set yourself to measure productivity. Using KPIs helps you track progress and identify areas requiring corrective action along the way. The following KPI examples will help give you ideas on following and tracking. So it is for different goals.
Because KPIs are customizable and laser-focused, you can set up KPIs that address your own unique challenges. In addition, given their specificity, they’re easy to track and optimize. And because they add to the precision of your data-related processes, your organization can make smarter decisions faster, keeping your business on track toward meeting its goals.
Keyword Density
The number of times a target word appears on a webpage or inside an article is known as Keyword Density. The more times that words appear in a single webpage, the better the page ranks would be. But avoid overusing keywords and stuffing the content with them as a Keyword density from 1-3% is suggested for most web pages.
Some search engines discount the authority of websites containing a high keyword density, which they believe, and for a good reason, such pages are spammy. In addition, search engines ignore the importance of keywords repeated over and over within a given page’s content.
Using exact match keywords more than three times per 100 words on an average page is not advisable unless used for keyword phrase targeting.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an integral part of creating a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for any website. There are several free and paid tools and techniques that can be used to conduct keyword research effectively.
It is important to note that the keywords selected represent the most relevant words or phrases users would enter into a search engine to locate content similar in relevancy or subject matter to that of a webpage. Search engines use keywords to associate pages with specific topics. Likewise, visitors use keywords to ask specific questions and find relevant answers.
Use keyword phrases in your text to make it easy for search engines to determine which pages are most closely associated with the information that users are looking for. In addition, search engines often assign rankings based on the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a bad practice of overusing the targeted keywords in your web content. As said earlier, the ideal keyword density must be followed in between 1-3% of the total word count of your article.
Search engines sometimes try to improve results by adding words that aren’t as important to the search or repeating a word multiple times on a page. When this happens, we call it artificial or spammy expansion. We look at hundreds of signals to determine whether these unnatural phrases on a page are intended to manipulate search engine results.”
When Google releases its new algorithm for search results, web admins often try to manipulate the system by adjusting the number of keywords they use on their website. This changes the way Google calculates the page rank and therefore gives them better placement within their rankings.
L
Landing Page
Landing pages are created specifically for conversion and are connected to a marketing campaign. Therefore, they differ from regular webpage content because landing pages have a distinct purpose being funneled towards or a specific action a visitor should be taking.
For example, when you enter our website through one of the banner ads, you are directed to one of our sales page follow-ups where we attempt to sell the services you clicked on earlier in the ad. These landing pages are the most important pages for your marketing campaigns. They have been optimized to ensure that visitors find exactly what they are looking for when they arrive at your site.
LSI
LSI is a technique to use similar words related to your targeted or focused keywords while writing an article or web content.
Some SEO experts refer to Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) as a way for search engines to better understand word relationships – reflect their relationship to the concepts, ideas, and entities that are mentioned on a page in addition to the words themselves.
LSI allows the computer to learn by example. It requires thousands of examples of the data you want to analyze, but it can go beyond the keyword and provide thousands of possible answers to a question based on the context of what you are inputting into the system.
LSI is necessary when dealing with sentences, not just one word or short phrases. For example, today, Google uses LSI in their search algorithm.”
Link
Link is the way to add one page to another page over the Internet. In SEO, there are two types of link techniques available where the first one is known as Internal Linking & the other one is External Linking.
Links serve as the basis for the Internet. Links allow people to find the information they need and content providers to drive traffic and build awareness. Links are how search engines rank content and provide users with valuable, well-researched answers.
Links are critical for helping search engines find your website to drive targeted traffic from other sites. In addition, integrating valuable links can allow you to grow an audience of qualified leads, fans, and customers.
Link Building
Link building is a process that helps to enhance your search engine rank by improving your site’s visibility. There are free and paid tools and strategies available to help your business gain more visibility with unique content and achieve good search engine optimization (SEO) results.
Link building is essential to online businesses as search engines like Google use it as a ranking factor. By attracting more links from relevant, high-quality websites, you will boost your link profile in Google’s eyes, improving your organic visibility and search ranking.
Link Profile
Links are powerful. The Internet would not function as we know it without them. Neither would Search Engine Rankings (SERPs). Links are the bread and butter of SEO, but what’s even better is a great link profile.
Some search engines use links to establish your website’s authority – and that’s important when you want your website to be perceived as highly relevant for specific keywords. Building a great link profile is one strategy that helps you rank higher in search engines and appeal to your audience as an authoritative source for your information. In addition, a good link profile generally reflects well on your brand, so choose your links wisely.
A few names to create your link profiles are social media platforms, community, business directories, FAQ sites, and more.
Log File
This file gives us your web browsing history. We will review this information only if we believe it could help solve an unsolved problem, like a website error or a bug. This file is never used to identify you personally and is only used in the aggregate.
This file logs the user’s movement on a website, allowing the owner to learn whether the site is being used. Data from log files may be kept for as long as one year.
Local SEO
Local SEO is optimizing traffic and business from one’s city to another. Hence it optimizes traffic from neighboring towns. It is done for larger enterprises that have audiences in one location or throughout the Internet.
Local SEOs build localized content and optimize a website for the specific region they want to reach. As a result, they strengthen the business in the area and offer benefits across the Internet.
In the Local SEO strategy, mostly the site owner target to create backlinks on the keywords related to their local area.
M
Manual Action
The Google penalty is a manual action where a human reviewer from Google concludes that your website did not follow Google’s webmaster quality guidelines.
The penalty might either bring your rank down or remove you entirely from the organic search indexing. Penalties can be for various reasons, including quality, duplicate content, spam, etc. However, severe punishment can cause you to lose your search engine rankings permanently.
Meta Description
The meta description is a kind of summary that you see on the search engine result page while finding something. It is a 2-3 lines short paragraph that gives basic ideas of the page where you want to land to get more information in detail.
A good meta description acts as an advert for the page content. It can be used to encourage clicks through to your website and should entice Google users. The meta description should relate to the main content of your page so that it will attract someone who has just clicked on a search result to view your webpage over another one.
To do this, you should use a mixture of numbers, facts, quotes, and links to appear relevant and authoritative for a search term.
Meta Tags
Meta itself contains additional information about a site, and there are several types of Meta Tags that you can use in the header section of your web pages to provide some additional information related to your content.
A few most used SEO Meta Tags are;
- Meta title
- Meta Description
- Robots Meta Tag
- Header Tags
- Schema
- Canonical Tags
These tags help the search engine crawlers to understand the available contents briefly so that they can help to rank our website and give the most relevant result to the user.
N
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is the practice of using black hat search engine optimization techniques to obtain a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) in a manner that is considered fraudulent, deceptive, or manipulative.
Negative SEO does not focus on creating value for users but on manipulating a search engine’s natural ranking process. The two primary black hat techniques are link spamming and keyword stuffing. These techniques could either incorrectly present the web page’s content or give the wrong target page altogether.
No-Follow Attribute
A no-follow tag prevents search engines from passing authority to the resources linked in the tag. So, for example, if you don’t want Google to pass PageRank to a particular webpage, you add the no-follow tag.
This meta tag tells search engines not to follow one specific outbound link on your page. Website owners sometimes use this tag when they’re displaying a paid link and don’t want to pass link authority to the advertiser, or if they’re linking to a page they won’t gain anything from (like an error page).
O
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is a good practice to do all the activities inside your website to give the best user experience. It includes a clean and responsive website layout, mobile-friendly theme selection, proper article and keyword optimization, a better navigation panel, and more.
A nicely optimized On-Page website contributes to your website ranking factor in search engines and influences user experience. This leads to higher rankings in search engines for content-rich websites.
A more practical and helpful website design promotes visitors to engage with the website more and stay longer, leading to better traffic and an improved ranking as search engines determine the website’s relevance.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page optimization is an SEO technique where you go to the third-party websites relevant to your business niche to create backlinks. It is a kind of favor you ask other website owners to place your webpage URL on their properties.
A better Off-page optimization strategy helps you to generate leads and brand awareness with the quick and easy backlink creation practice.
You can design your Off-page website optimization strategy to generate buzz, promote a specific product, or highlight your company’s capabilities. By marketing using the full range of products and services on the CreativeLive Marketplace, you can attract various leads that will convert into customers.
Organic Search
The natural results of a search engine listing are the unpaid or raw listings that appear on a SERP (search engine results page). When referral traffic comes to your website directly from the search engine result page, it is counted as Organic Search or SEO traffic. In this practice, you do not need to pay for any tools or website owner to place your URL on their property.
The information spiders used by search engines crawl the web and index millions of web pages. Search engines use algorithms to analyze and rank the websites listed in their SERPs designed to deliver the most relevant result for a given query.
P
PageRank
The algorithm PageRank was named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
PageRank is the score that is calculated based on the number of incoming links from authentic websites. In simple terms, each backlink of a website decides the score of your PageRank. But, of course, not all links are equal.
In a nutshell, the Google PageRank is a numerical code of a website’s importance. The higher Google considers the PageRank; the more critical the site is to be.
Paid Search
Pay-Per-Click Advertising is a type of Internet marketing that involves paying to get traffic or leads. Unlike Organic Search, Paid search traffic comes to your website only if you are running an advertising campaign on Google Ads, Bing, Facebook, or other similar platforms.
Business advertisers use this method to reach the people directly who are interested in their products and services. Let you know that if you are focused on SEO for your website, the Paid search result won’t affect any of your page or keyword rankings.
Q
QDF (Query Deserves Freshness)
The general idea behind Query Deserve Freshness is to deliver the fresh content available rather than content that has been on a source server for a long time. This helps Google to meet your users’ expectations of new, up-to-date search results.
Freshness is especially useful for breaking news, such as power outages, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other time-sensitive events.
Quality Content
Quality content consists of details you are putting in an article or web page that adds value for the user and make it worth spending the time to read the article.
Quality Content is in demand for doing online marketing for your business and blogs. It consists of a well-structured article along with targeted keywords, impressive infographics, authentic data, and more.
It is a unique piece of the web page that does not match with other sources on the Internet.
Google or other search engines privilege the websites that are loaded with quality content over those that use spun articles or duplicate content. The quality content drives massive traffic to your website if it is well structured and follows the SEO guidelines.
Query
The query is also known as the search query in SEO. It is the combination of words a user enters into a search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to get some information in return. A search engine prepares a list of websites that match the words or phrases entered by a user and then shows the respective results.
There are mainly 3 types of Search Queries in SEO;
Informational Search Query
When users intend to get some knowledge about something by searching on the Internet, it is known as an informational search query.
Informational queries may contain what, why, how, where, tips, tricks, guides, tutorials, how-to, etc.
A few examples of Informational Queries are;
- What is SEO?
- How to write user-friendly content?
- Where can I see the free movies online?
- What is the history of Whitehouse, USA?
- How to create a WordPress website from scratch?
Navigational Search Query
When a user wants to get the road map, location, the ways to reach from point A to B, etc., then such queries are known as a navigational search query. A navigational query can also contain the location of a particular brand, business, or website.
Navigational Queries may contain a particular brand name, business name, location, website name, product name or model, and significantly more.
Some examples of Navigational Queries are;
- Distance between Dallas to Mexico
- Reebok showroom near me
- Official website of XYZ
- From where to get the best SEO knowledge?
- Best place to buy the best website hosting plans
Transactional Search Query
When a user is looking to buy something or wants to know the price, then it is known as a Transactional search query. It can also be used for digital services like downloading the latest version of WordPress, fast internet browser, etc.
Transactional Queries may contain the words like coupon, buy, purchase, sell, download, upgrade, subscribe, and significantly more.
Some examples of Transactional Queries are;
- Price of 5G smartphones
- Download Divi WP Theme
- Order a new laptop online
- Discount coupon for WP hosting plans
- Reserve a seat at Taj for dinner
R
Ranking Factor
Google’s search results are filled with practical, high-quality links to web pages and answers. Google considers over 200 unique signals and more than a billion (yes, billion) individual pieces of data when determining the ranking of a web page.
Relevance
Web content relevance presents search engine optimization as a three-legged stool, with the “context” of the page (the surrounding words and phrases), the page’s on-page elements of content (e.g., title tag, meta description, header tags), and off-page features of content (inbound links).
The closer the on-page tags match the query context, the more likely search engines will determine that the page is relevant to queries of that type.
Responsive Website
Adaptive Design is a responsive website design that delivers a consistently excellent experience to all users, regardless of what devices they use. With a responsive website, all the layout adjusts automatically on several devices like smartphones, tablets, computers, or big screens.
Rich Snippet
Richer snippets use structured data to add an enhanced listing to the search results page, including a title, description, product star ratings, and pricing. Richer results can increase click-through rates and user engagement on SERPs and are shown in a carousel on desktop and mobile search results pages.
SEO-rich snippets are structured data that a website can add to its pages. When Google sees those snippets, we may show content more prominently in search results, make it easier to interact with that content and make that website stick out in SERP.
ROI (Return On Investment)
The Organic SEO ROI score is a quick and straightforward way to evaluate the return on investment that resulted from your organic search activities. This is calculated by dividing how much revenue you earned via organic search by the total investment cost, then multiplying by 100.
S
Search Engine
An index is created when you search, using a crawler that collects links with new content (typically every few days). Next, associations are analyzed and ranked using a series of algorithms that extract concepts from the Web. These concepts are then organized and integrated into the search index.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is an umbrella term for both organic and paid search engine optimization activities. This includes on-page optimization, working with inbound links from trusted websites, off-page optimization, and a lot of the steps you’re familiar with (technical consulting and user experience planning).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique to make your website better to be visible over the Internet. SEO helps to get huge traffic to the websites following the organic ways.
Following and tracking include keyword research, content creation/editing, connecting with search engines and other groups so the site can be easily crawled, and performing technical tasks, including adding metadata (called “meta keywords,” descriptive tags, or keywords) to each page and images.
Search Engine Results Page
The page search engines display to users after searching. Typically, search engines show about ten organic search results at a time, sorted by relevance.
Organic search results in the Google SERPS are usually the highest-ranking clickable results on many search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, at least on sites with high-quality content.
T
Title Tag
A well-optimized title tag for a webpage is a critical component of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines crawl the title and description of a page to create indexed content in their search results. Therefore, your title tag should include keywords and phrases related to your targeted search terms.
The title tag is the most important on-page SEO element because it is one of the first things to be seen when a webpage is shared or linked to by search engine bots. Using your main keyword, try and create a title that includes two or three keywords, separated by a comma.
Traffic
This term is used by web analytics to refer to people (or bots) visiting your website. There are many types of visitors, including first-time visitors, passive visitors, returning visitors, and returning visitors who have converted.”
U
User-Generated Content (UGC)
A great example of UGC is the videos and slide shows that you can find on Amazon.com. These are created by customers and posted for other customers to watch. These are often used as tools to generate positive reviews about a product or service.
User-generated content is an excellent way to get your customers to market your product or service for you. This strategy should be used with a call to action so that customers can easily share.
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of a resource on the Web. A URL usually consists of four parts: the protocol that describes how to connect to the server, the name or domain part of a hierarchical namespace, the host’s IP number, and a path to a resource relative to the server.
Usability
As many people as possible, a website’s ability to be used is referred to as “usability.” It involves the site design, browser compatibility, disability enhancements, and other factors that allow visitors to use your website.
V
Vertical Search
Vertical search engines help consumers find a specific type of content on the Web. The idea of a search engine is to crawl the Web with an unbiased algorithm so that it can identify the most relevant sites to the search terms a user enters. With vertical search, this premise is flipped around: rather than taking a broad view of the Web, it uses more specific parameters to search for only certain types of information.
Visibility
SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website within “Organic” search results. This process is entirely free to the business owner and, unlike PPC, does not involve spending money. SEO accounts for most traffic on the Internet but is still overlooked by most companies, big and small.
Voice Search
A new voice-activated intelligent personal assistant that lets you speak naturally and even understand your own words to respond to questions. Just press the Home button and ask about the weather, movie times, tomorrow’s schedule, or a fact.
W
Web Scam
Search engine spam is created for various reasons: to make a website appear higher in search results, gain traffic through search results, or bring targeted users to content or websites. There are several ways that search engine spam can be created to manipulate search engines and users.
Methods of spam creation may include keyword stuffing, cloaking, link schemes, and doorway pages, among others. However, in line with Google’s existing Webmaster Guidelines, the specific criteria for identifying search spam have not yet been published.
White Hat SEO
People used to apply three tactics to increase the ranking of a website through SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is the best and 100% organic approach to optimizing a website for ranking on several keywords.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat is the negative kind of SEO where a person tries to trick the search engine indexer through unethical ways like cloaking, spamming, spun articles, and more.
Grey Hat SEO
Grey Hat SEO is a mix-up of White and Black Hat SEO techniques. Here, a user tries to optimize their site using white hat techniques with the support of some unethical SEO habits like thin articles, copied content, keyword stuffing, and more.
X
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language search engines use to understand website data. XML was first submitted to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) as a proposal for standardizing the way information is represented on web pages, web applications, and in other environments where machine processing of content is required.
Regular expressions were formally developed to be a precise language for defining pattern matching algorithms and are ubiquitous in modern software.
Y
Yandex
Yandex is a popular search engine in Russia, ranked as the most visited site in the country, with Alexa’s web traffic analysis pointing to a 53%, or 0.58% market share (a share of all internet users). It is currently forming partnerships with companies to deliver localized shopping and news results that match each user’s preferred language and interests.
Though it is still mainly a service used for personal search, it also has many features that make it an efficient business-oriented internet marketing tool.
Z
Zero-Click
When a user does some queries on the Internet and gets the answer from the answer box only, it calls zero-click. Most commonly, these are informational searches where the user looks for company or business information directly on the SERP and then exits the window without visiting any website.
These queries are usually hard to identify correctly because the spider can’t reliably determine whether or not the page returns actionable results.
301 – Permanent Redirect
301 permanent redirection is the technique to point all the coming requests to another domain name. For instance, suppose there is a site called www.example.com, and we wish to route all the coming traffic to www.xyz.com. In such a case, without losing any of the SEO backlinks and other relevant links, we can move domain A to domain B through 301 permanent redirects.
302 – Temporary Redirect
If you see a 302 “Found” or “Moved Temporarily” error code on a site, that means the pages have been temporarily moved to some other location. 302 temporary Redirection is mostly used for the time being at the time of updating the website.
404 Not Found Error
The error code 404 is defined as; if a user is looking for something on a particular website but it is not available there.
404 Error are the most common error a website can show if it can connect with the server, but currently, no such data is available on its website.
