SEO Glossary Of Terms.

What do all of these SEO words mean? Like most technical industries, SEO has its own language. In my opinion, this is just so that it sounds more difficult than it actually is, and therefore allows SEO agencies to charge more for doing less, I guess we can thank Google for that! However, I’m going to let you in on a little secret, it’s not that hard, and you can do it too! Below are some of the key terms you need to know to start learning about SEO and more importantly start talking like an SEO expert.

Bookmark this page so you can refer to it later.

2xx status codes: A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page has succeeded.

4xx status codes: A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page resulted in an error.

5xx status codes: A class of status codes that indicate the server’s inability to perform the request.

Alt Tags - Short snippets of code that allow you to tag each photo on your site with a short text blurb. This is super important for your images to help rank in the images section of Google search results.

Anchor Text – Text in your webpage content that is linked to another website or webpage. Often you will use the keyword that is relevant to the page you’re linking to. 

Black Hat SEO – A back-handed approach to SEO that involves shortcuts and manipulation of a website. Don’t do it, as search engines will end up blacklisting your site.

White hat SEO: Search engine optimization practices that comply with Google’s quality guidelines. 

Keyword Density – How often a keyword is mentioned on a page. 

Headline Tags – HTML code tags denoted by “. The most common mistake I see is that clients don’t have H1 “headline tags” on their sub-pages because that formatting is too large. You need to make sure all your websites pages main headlines are H1 headings.

Head Terms – phrases more generic in nature (usually 1-2 keywords long) that garner a significant amount of search engine traffic, but provide little return. 

HTML – Stands for Hypertext Markup Language is a standardized code for tagging text files to formate font, colour, graphic, and hyperlinks to create webpages. 

Backlinks – Links to your website from external websites that are not on your domain. Also referred to as Inbound Links, and are super important for increasing your website authority. 

Indexing – The process used by the search engines to crawl the web, scanning webpages and storing information about them. 

Link Building – The process of generating backlinks from other websites. We will cover this in detail in the Offsite SEO part of the SEO Guide.

Link Juice – The boost given to a website‟s authority via inbound links from other authoritative websites. 

Long-tail Keyword – The theory used to explain that while a majority of search traffic results from a small percentage of keywords (the head) there are millions of unique keywords that make up a significant volume of search traffic in aggregate (the tail).

The Search Engine Algorithm - The calculation the search engines use to find the most relevant information in relation to a search query. 

SERP - Search engine results page. SEO “professionals” love dropping this one.

Crawling: The process by which search engines discover your web pages.

De-indexed: Refers to a page or group of pages being removed from Google’s index.

Search Intent: This refers to what users really want from the words they’ve typed into the search bar.

Google Search Console: A free program provided by Google that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing in search.

Seed keywords: The term we use to describe the primary words that describe the product or service you provide.

Keyword stuffing: A spammy tactic involving the overuse of important keywords and their variants in your content and links.

SSL certificate: A “Secure Sockets Layer” is used to encrypt data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher.

Thin content: Content that adds little-to-no value to the visitor.

Thumbnails: Image thumbnails are a smaller version of a larger image.

CSS: A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is the code that makes a website look a certain way (ex: fonts and colors).

DNS: A Domain Name Server (DNS) allows domain names (ex: “moz.com”) to be linked to IP addresses (ex: “127.0.0.1”). DNS essentially translates domain names into IP addresses so that browsers can load the page’s resources.

Local business schema: Structured data markup placed on a web page that helps search engines understand information about a business.

Meta descriptions: HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. Google sometimes uses these as the description line in search result snippets.

Redirection: When a URL is moved from one location to another. Most often, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).

Rel=canonical: A tag that allows site owners to tell Google which version of a web page is the original and which are the duplicates.

Hreflang: A tag that indicates to Google which language the content is in. This helps Google serve the appropriate language version of your page to people searching in that language.

JSON-LD: JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring your data. For example, schema.org can be implemented in a number of different formats, JSON-LD is just one of them, but it is the format preferred by Google.

Lazy loading: A way of deferring the loading of an object until it’s needed. This method is often used to improve page speed.

Pagination: A website owner can opt to split a page into multiple parts in a sequence, similar to pages in the book. This can be especially helpful on very large pages. The hallmarks of a paginated page are the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, indicating where each page falls in the greater sequence. These tags help Google understand that the pages should have consolidated link properties and that searchers should be sent to the first page in the sequence.

Webmaster guidelines: Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results.

Search traffic: Visits sent to your websites from search engines like Google.

Time on page: The amount of time someone spent on your page before clicking to the next page. Because Google Analytics tracks time on page by when someone clicks your next page, bounced sessions will clock a time on page of 0.

UTM code: An urchin tracking module (UTM) is a simple code that you can append to the end of your URL to track additional details about the click, such as its source, medium, and campaign name.

Pages per session: Also referred to as “page depth,” pages per session describes the average number of pages people view of your website in a single session.

Page speed: Page speed is made up of a number of equally important qualities, such as first contentful/meaningful paint and time to interactive.

Click-through rate: The ratio of impressions to clicks on your URLs.

Conversion rate: The ratio of visits to conversions. Conversion rate answers how many of my website visitors are filling out my forms, calling, signing up for my newsletter, etc.?

Bounce rate: The percentage of total visits that did not result in a secondary action on your site. For example, if someone visited your home page and then left before viewing any other pages, that would be a bounced session.