These are the SEO Terms you need to know in order to understand the concept of SEO. This is the complete and Full List of The Most Used Key Terms in SEO. These Key Terms will help you to appreciate the technical aspects of SEO that have been confusing you because of SEO Terms you did not understand.
For the easy location, these SEO Terms are alphabetical. This is a definition of the major SEO Terms you will encounter during SEO research.
0-9
10 Blue Links: Also simply Blue Links. 10 Blue Links attributes to the format search engines uses to display search results on SERPs. It refers to the ten organic results on SERPs all displayed in the same format.
301 Redirect – This is a form of URL redirection that allows you to direct traffic from one URL to another. It’s a way to make one web page point visitors to another. This type of redirection is specifically useful when you change the web address of a page so that traffic to the old address is not lost but pointed to the new URL. By applying a 301 Redirect, search engines will be able to update their index.
A
Algorithms: A process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways based on the relevance of the content to the query.
ALT Text – Its a Tag or Attribute that describes an image in your website’s HTML. The Alt Text helps search engines to understand images on your website and know what it’s all about. In your SEO efforts, you should add ALT text to images whenever possible.
Ambiguous intent: Unclear intention of a searcher’s query. Often ambiguous intent will require further specifications.
Anchor Text – These are the words used to link to another web page. It’s very important that the Anchor Text is made up of words that describe what the destination page is about. Anchor text helps search engines understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.
B
Backlinks: These are “inbound links.” They are links that originate from other websites and blogs to your website.
Black hat: These are unethical practices that aim at manipulating and unfairly gaining search engine raking. Black hat SEO generally refers to any method against search engine terms of service, used to gain an unfair site ranking in SERPs.
Blog – A website or a part of your website where you publish content regularly. In most cares, each individual blog is published as a new page. An increase in pages potentially increases the possibility of being discovered by search Engines.
Bots: These “crawlers” or “spiders.” They are special scripts that go around the internet sniffing for new content and links for possible indexing.
Bookmark – A link to a website saved for later reference in your web browser or computer.
Bounce rate: The percentage of total visits that did not result in any further action like visiting another page on your website.
C
Caching: The saving of a copy of web page to serve it in future when its queried. It’s usually done to save bandwidth usage and speed up future queries. The cache will normally be updated after a particular set period of time normally referred to as TTL – Time to live.
Caffeine – also called Google Caffeine is the new web indexing infrastructure that was designed to deliver faster and fresher results and enable Google to crawl and index more web pages.
Canonical URL – Where the same content can be addressed through several links, canonical URL help search engines to decide the best way to access a certain piece of content.
Click-through rate: Impression Vs Clicks. The ratio of impressions to clicks on your Links.
Cloaking: Tricking search engines by showing different content to search engines while serving a totally different content to visitors. It’s intended to manipulate the search engine to give a higher ranking than one deserves.
Conversion Form – Like a contact form or an email subscription form. These forms help the web owners generate leads through which they can then follow up to either create more value or to follow up leads for possible purchase.
Crawling: The process by which bots move the entire internet to discover content.
Crawler directives: Instructions to the crawler regarding what you want it to crawl and index on your site.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – This is the outlook designing code of your website. The CSS is the part of your code that defines how different elements of your site look or display on your website.
D
De-indexed: Removal of a page or a group of pages from Google’s search database.
Directory – Web directories are organized Web site listings often organised bu categories to help human users locate websites of similar industries. Unlike search engines, directories are put together by human beings. Submitting your website to a directory potentially gives you more traffic and also improves your SEO ranking.
Domain – The main web address of your site (for example www.kweshan.com). One tip to enhance your SEO rating is to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favour websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment. If you would like to register a domain, Feel free to benefit from a 30% discount on all domains bought by Kweshan users when you buy from www.techsysug.com. Use the coupon code KWESHAN.
Duplicate content: Content that is shared between websites or between multiple pages of a single website. Avoided duplicate content as much as possible to improve SEO.
F
Featured snippets: Organic snippets that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries to directly answer the query without opening the content source links.
The Fold – The “fold” is the point on your website where the page gets cut off by the bottom of a user’s monitor or browser window. Anything below the fold can be scrolled to, but isn’t seen right away. Search engines place some priority on content above the fold, since it will be seen right away by new visitors.
G
Google My Business listing: Its a google product that features a free listing available to local businesses.
Google Search Console: A free program provided by Google that allows webmasters to monitor how their site is doing in search.
H
Headings – Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H2, H3, H4 or H5. This text is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.
Header tags: An HTML element used to mark heading section of a webpage.
HTML – The code part of your website that search engines read. Keep your HTML as clean as possible so that search engines read your site easily and often. Put as much layout-related code as possible in your CSS instead of your HTML.
I
Image carousels: A special Image results in some SERPs presented as scrollable images often scrollable from left to right.
Image compression: A technique of image SEO that tries to speed up web page load time by making image file sizes smaller without compromising the image’s display quality.
Inbound Link – A link from one site into another. A link from another site will improve your SEO, especially if that site has a high PageRank.
Index: All the content search engine crawlers have discovered and added to their database to serve to searchers.
Indexing: Adding to the database and organizing of content found during the crawling process.
Indexed Pages – The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.
Intent: In the context of SEO, intent refers to the aim of a search engine user’s query. Its the perceived objective of the words a user types into the search bar.
Internal Link – A link from one page on your website to another on the same website, for example, this SEO For Beginners.
J
Javascript – A scripting language that allows website administrators to apply various effects or changes to the content of their website as users browse it. Search engines often have difficulty reading content that is inside of Javascript, but they are getting better at it over time.
K
Keyword – A word that a user enters in search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.
Keyword stuffing: A black hat SEO spammy tactic of irrelevantly overusing keywords and their synonyms in one’s content and links.
L
Link Building – The activity and process of getting more inbound links to your website for improved search engine rankings.
Link equity: This refers to the link value of a referring URL. It is basically the measure of the value or authority a link can pass to its destination.
Long Tail Keyword – An uncommon or infrequently searched keyword, typically with two or more words in the phrase. Small businesses should consider targeting long tail keywords, as they are lower difficulty and often have more qualified searchers. Common keywords such as ‘software’ are more competitive, and very hard to rank high for them in search.
M
Manual penalty: It’s a user violation of Google’s terms of use and quality guidelines. Its also called a Google “Manual Action” because it is normally raised by a Google human reviewer after they detect TOS – Terms Od Service Policy violations on your website.
Metadata – Data that tells search engines what your website is about.
Meta Description – A brief description of fewer than 160 characters of the contents of a page and why someone would want to visit it.
Meta robots tag: Or plainly robots tag refer to a code that provides crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content on a website.
N
Navigation: A list of links that help visitors Identify and move to other pages on your site also called Website Menu.
Nofollow – Or Nofollow link is a link with special instructions to the search engine crawlers not to follow or go beyond this page. It is not wise to use nofollow Links when linking to internal pages on your website. nofollow is often used on external links when one does not want to give SEO credit to the destination link.
NoIndex tag: A special meta tag instruction to search engines not to index the page on which the code is placed.
O
Organic SEO: Free and quality Earned placement in SERPs, as opposed to paid advertisements.
P
Page Title – The name of your web page. Page titles should contain keywords related to your business. Words at the beginning of your page title are more highly weighted than words at the end.
PageRank – A component of Google’s core algorithm. A number from 0-10, assigned by Google, indicating how good your overall SEO is. It estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of content and links on a particular page.
PageRank: A component of Google’s core algorithm. It is a link analysis program that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it.
Panda – Refers to a series of updates released by Google to its search engine ranking algorithm that are intended to discourage people who create large amounts of mediocre content in an attempt to claim many keyword rankings without generating much value for users.
People Also Ask boxes: This is more like related queries. People also ask features a box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) – Advertising method in which an advertiser puts an ad in an online advertising venue and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords is a classic example of this.
Q
Query: What the search engine user is searching for. The words entered into the search bar.
R
Ranking: The Ordering of search engine results by relevance to the query in SERPs.
Ranking Factor – One element of how a search engine determines where to rank a certain page, such as the number of inbound links to a page or the contents of the title tag on that page.
Referrer String – A piece of information sent by a user’s browser when they navigate from page to page on the web. It includes information on where they came from previously, which helps webmasters understand how users are finding their website.
Robots.txt: Files that contains instructions to search engine robots – bots. It instructs bots which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl.
RSS Feed – RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication.’ It is a subscription-based way to get updates on new content from a web source. Set up an RSS feed for your website or blog to help your followers stay updated when you release new content.
S
Search engine: A content retrieval program that crawls, indexes and ranks content to serve to users upon a query. Examples: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Search volume: An estimate of the number of times a keyword is searched.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) – A page showing results of a search query in a search engine. It typically has 10 results on it, but this may vary depending on the query and search engine in question.
Sitemap – One of the SEO Terms you will get quite often. A sitemap is a document that provides a “map” of all the pages on a website for easy navigation by a search engine bots.
Social Media – Online media created by and shared among individuals. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter are popular social media websites. Links from many social media sites now appear in searches. It’s important to have links to your site spread throughout social media.
Spider – A computer program that browses the internet and collects information about websites.
SSL certificate: A “Secure Sockets Layer.” An encryption solution to help securely pass personal data from browser to server without a data hijack.
T
Thin content: Refers to web content that contributes very little or no value to the web visitor. This could be “quality thin or quantity thin”. “Quality thin” often comes in the form of duplication while “quantity thin” is normally very short content.
Title – The title of a page on your website, which is enclosed in a <title> HTML tag, inside of the head section of the page. It appears in search engine results and at the top of a user’s web browser when they are on that page.
Traffic – The visitors to your site.
Traffic Rank – How much traffic a website is getting compared to other sites on the internet.
U
URL – The web address of a page on your site (example: www.yoursite.com/contact).
These are some of the SEO Terms that you should be aware of in your study or implementation of SEO strategies. If there are some other SEO Terms that we have left out, we would be glad to hear from you by leaving us a comment in the comment section below.
