The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process is all about optimizing a website so that it gets more traffic, generates more revenue online, and establishes a brand.
SEO focuses on increasing the quality and quantity of traffic of a site through better search engine results.
Marketers or online promoters of a website work on bringing organic results i.e. visitors for which you don’t have to pay for, for instance, ads. Here are some essential SEO terms every marketer should know in order to promote his website online:
SEO Glossary – Top 60 SEO Terms Explained:
1. 301 Redirect:
This is basically used as a solution in case of broken links. This refers to redirecting a webpage to another.
Usually, when the old page is broken or is no longer online, it’s called a broken link. And 301 Redirect is used to redirect that broken link to a new website.
2. 302 Redirect:
This is a temporary redirect where the old content is temporarily moved to a new site.
3. 404 Not Found Error:
This is an HTTP status code which shows up if the website isn’t online.
In other words, the website can’t be found on the web servers. This error is displayed to any user who is trying to open a website which is no longer available online.
ALT Text – Here, ALT refers to alternate. This is used mainly in image tags so that the ALT text gets displayed in case the image doesn’t get loaded.
Usually, the image loading is slow due to the user’s weak internet connection or the image is no longer available in the server.
4. Anchor Text:
This is a part of the anchor tag which is used to create hyperlinks on the webpage. This contains the address of a website.
6. Backlinks:
The links which directly point back to your website. More the number of backlinks more is the website popularity.
The best way to get more backlinks is by having good quality content on your site which is worth social media shares.
7. Bounce Rate:
This term refers to the number of website visitors who left your site instantly after viewing it.
A high bounce rate isn’t good for your site because it shows that users didn’t enjoy the site experience.
8. Breadcrumbs:
These provide navigational cues on your website. This helps to improve user experience since he can explore your website without confusing himself and the content.
The main types of breadcrumbs are – location-based breadcrumbs and path-based breadcrumbs.
9. Broken Links:
As mentioned above, these are the hyperlinks which are broken or no longer working. They don’t serve their purpose which is to point the user to the provided address.
This might occur if the website is no longer available on the server or the website might have moved to a new location on the server.
10. Canonical URL:
This is the best website address for the user in situations where there can be the same content available in different locations. This URL also helps search engines the best address to be linked for a type of content.
11. Click-Through Rate (CTR):
This is the number of clicks by users on a particular link. This results in better rankings for the website.
12. Cloaking:
It is a method of displaying different contents while the user is on the same web page. This results in better ranking and high traffic. However, it is considered to be spamming.
13. Conversion Form:
This is a form used to collect details from your website visitors. These forms serve the purpose of converting the traffic into leads.
14. Conversion rate:
It means the percentage of website visitors which converted into clients. The conversion could have come through contact forms or subscribed newsletters and so on.
15. Cost Per Click:
CPC refers to the price paid for every ad clicked. A lower CPC is always helpful in attracting quality traffic. This is also called PPC (Pay Per Click).
16. Domain:
This the main address of your website.
For instance, www.yoursite.com. Search engines prefer websites which have longer registrations because they reflect your commitment to the web.
17. Duplicate Content:
This is the type of content which exactly matches or quite similar to the content of another site. Having duplicate content is called plagiarism.
18. The Fold:
This is the part of the web page which gets cut off by the browser window and the user has to scroll down to further read or see your page.
Thus, you should avoid keeping any ads on the upper part of your page because that part will be visible in the search engine results.
19. Headings:
This is the text that is placed inside the heading tags (H1, H2, H3).
Headings have a stronger and larger font since they are usually titles for an article or the subsections.
20. Inbound Link:
This is a link from one site to another site which helps improve the page ranking.
21. Internal Link:
This is a link from one webpage to another within the same site. This is like navigating across the website.
22. Indexed Pages:
These are the web pages of your site which are stored by search engines.
23. Keyword:
Any word or phrase that a user enters online to search for is a keyword. SEO aims at including keywords in a web page so that it attracts more traffic.
24. Keyword Density:
This is the result of dividing the number of times a keyword has been used on a page with the total number of words in that webpage.
25. Keyword Stuffing:
Unnaturally increasing the keyword density is called keyword stuffing.
Both these are no longer used and you can be penalized if you use.
26. Linkbait:
This is a small content published in order to get more backlinks. It can be a paragraph or a video or an image.
27. Link Building:
This is the process of getting more inbound links in order to improve your SERPs.
28. Link farm:
This is a farm where every website on it is interlinked in order to unnaturally improve their page ranks.
This is also a spamming technique for which you can be penalized.
29. Link Popularity:
It is the number of backlinks your website has. The popularity of the website is defined by the high link popularity which is earned genuinely through quality content.
30. Link Sculpting:
This is a method of using the nofollow link attribute to improve the page rankings.
31. Long Tail Keyword:
This is a search keyword phrase longer than 3 words. Users use these keywords in order to search for a specific piece of information.
32. LSI keywords:
Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are somehow related to the primary keyword of a page.
33. Metadata:
This gives an idea of the website content to search engines.
34. Meta Description:
This is the description of the webpage content within 320 characters.
35. Meta Keywords:
They help to know what a webpage is about. These keywords aren’t used anymore by search engines.
36. mozRank:
This rank is measured on the basis of link popularity by Moz’s version of Google Page Ranking algorithm. 10.0 is the best rank and 0 is the least.
37. Citation / NAP:
It stands for Name, Address, Phone number. This is one of the important factors for local rankings.
38. Nofollow links:
These links ask search engines not to use the hyperlink to influence SERPs.
39. Page Title:
This is the name of the webpage you provide. This is displayed at the top of your browser window.
They usually contain the name of the business or anything related to the business because this is more weighted.
40. PageRank:
This is the position of your site based on its importance across the internet by Google.
It ranges from 0 to 10. The number of quality links influences your PageRank.
41. Panda:
Google Panda is a series of updates released for the search engine ranking algorithm by Google.
This update lowers the ranks of thin websites (website with low-quality content and less number of webpages)
42. Ranking Factor:
This is an element that determines the PageRank on the basis of the number of inbound links to a webpage or the contents of the title tag on that webpage, etc.
43. Referrer String:
This is a piece of information sent from the user’s browser while he is visiting a particular website.
44. Robots.txt:
This is a file used to inform search bots about the website structure. This text file is placed in the root of the domain.
45. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feed:
It’s like a newsletter which you subscribe to from a website in order to receive new updates (similar to following a person or page on Facebook)
46. Sandbox:
This is a separate index used by Google to keep all the newly discovered websites.
Google keeps these websites in the Sandbox until they are verified after which they are moved to regular index.
47. Search Algorithm:
This is a mathematical formula to display the set of pages in order when the user searches for a keyword.
Search engines tend to change their search algorithm to avoid misuse.
48. Search Result:
These are the results displayed when a user enters the keywords in a search engine.
49. Search Term:
This is a phrase or set of keywords which users type into the search engines in order to search for some data.
50. SEM (Search Engine Marketing):
It involves promoting your products or services through search engines. SEM is divided into two parts: SEO and PPC.
51. Structured Data / Schema:
This code is used to highlight a particular data so that its easier for search engines to find the website.
For examples, you may create markups on your business logo or the physical location of the business.
52. SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page):
This is the end page which gets displayed once the user hits the search terms into the search engine. By default, Google displays 10 results per page.
53. Sitemap:
This is a document which contains the map of the entire website. It’s usually created by the webmaster or particular software. This document makes it easy for search engines to index the website.
54. Spider:
This is a program used to collect information on websites across the internet.
55. Traffic:
This term refers to the number of users visiting your website.
56. Title Tag:
This tag contains the title of your webpage or website and is displayed at the top of the browser window.
The Head tag may also contain the title of the page. These tags are also called HTML title elements. These tags describe the title of the page and its relevancy.
You can view the title tag by simply right-clicking on the webpage and clicking on the “view page source” option.
57. Topical relevance:
This is used to evaluate the quality of backlinks of a certain website.
58. Traffic Rank:
This ranking defines the number of visitors on your site compared to that of the other websites across the net. You may know your website traffic rank on Alexa.
59. URL:
This acronym stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the address of a webpage.
For instance, www.yoursite.com/contact is the URL for the contact page of “yoursite” website.
60. Web Crawler:
This computer program is also called a spider or a search bot.
This has the same purpose as a spider to search for new webpages and help the search engine index them. I hope that now you’ve got a better knowledge of SEO terms, the bad practices involved in SEO, tips which might help your page ranking and other ways to improve your digital marketing techniques.
Conclusion:
For any SEO specialist or a person who wishes to have his website optimized, it’s strongly recommended that you as a marketer should avoid using the black hat tactics like spamming, link farming, keyword stuffing, and cloaking.
These black hat tactics improve your SERPs unethically which might lead you to penalization or banning.