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Age
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.
Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.
B2B AND B2C
These terms are similar and mean Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C).
Backlinks
Backlink is simply a link placed on someone else’s website that points back to your site. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO. Getting a lot of backlinks with relevant anchor texts is the shortest way of improving your search engine rankings.
Deep Link / Deep Linking
Let me quote Wikipedia here:
On the World Wide Web, deep linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.
Deep links are particularly valuable for SEO. Linking to specific pages within your site with a good anchor text improves the rankings of these pages. Essentially, building deep links is where SEO game is won or lost.
Duplicate content
If you have two separate pages within your website that have the same content on them (or very similar content) then you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is believed to be a bad thing for SEO. Google doesn’t like sites that use the same piece of content over and over again, and they often penalize them for it.
If you think that you are safe then think again. Let me give you an example. If your site runs on WordPress, and if you’re using similar categories and tags (like for example a tag “business” and a category “business”) then the listing pages for your tags and categories will probably be very similar if not exactly the same. That is a prime example of duplicate content.
Keywords
There are many definitions of keywords. Let me share the one that matters for SEO.
Keywords are single words or whole phrases of a particular SEO importance for a given page or website.
For example, if I’m writing an article about choosing the best gardening equipment, my main keyword could be “gardening equipment“. It is the keyword I want to rank for because I want people to find this article when they input “gardening equipment” into Google.
Another example is this very list. The main keyword here is SEO glossary. I want people to find this post by putting “SEO glossary” into Google.
Keyword density
Keyword density is a number describing how often does a specific phrase appear in a piece of text. To calculate it you just have to divide the number of times your keyword appears in a piece of text by the total number of words this piece of text has, and then multiply the result by 100. The final result will be expressed as a percentage score.
Keyword density is believed to have an effect on SEO. The reasoning behind it is that if a given phrase has a high density score then it means that the text is clearly about that phrase, so it probably should get good rankings for it. Unfortunately this practice doesn’t work so well like it used to in the past.
Keyword stuffing / Keyword spam
If you take a random piece of text in English some words will occur more frequently than the other. For example, words like: and, or, it occur very frequently, while words like: powerhouse, mushrooming occur very rarely. Keyword stuffing is a practice of taking a word or a phrase and repeating it very often in a piece of text. Usually to the point where the text no longer looks natural, all for the purpose of increasing keyword density of your desired phrase.
While working on keyword density is no longer believed to work, keyword stuffing does work, but it works against you. Stuffing your text with keywords is sure to backfire.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
The standard definition of LSI is truly impossible to understand so I’m not going to bring it up here. Instead here’s a more digestible one.
LSI is considered to be an important factor for search engines when ranking your page. It’s said that search engines analyze the content on your page and search for LSI keywords supporting your main keyword. If they find such keywords your page gets a boost in rankings for your main keyword.
LSI keywords are keywords that are similar to your main one – keywords that are usually found along your main keyword in the natural language.
For example, if your main keyword is “gardening equipment” and you’re using it a lot in your article it would be great to use some LSI keywords as well, such as: “plants“, “garden“, “vegetables“, “planting“, etc. These are the keywords that would be mentioned naturally in a genuine conversation.
In other words, LSI is a way of checking whether the text is genuine or just stuffed with random keywords purely for improving rankings.
Linkbait
It’s like fishing bite only for links. Basically, it’s a piece of highly viral content. Content that is most likely to attract a lot of links, hence – linkbait.
Creating linkbait content is usually very hard even though the principles are simple. There are a couple of ways you can choose: (1) create something really funny, (2) create something of exceptional quality, (3) create something that brings a lot of value for free.
Linkbait content is not only text. Videos, pictures, graphics, and audio work equally well.
Link farm
It’s a network of websites that link to each other for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings and Page Ranks. Let me give you an example. If you were to create a link farm (don’t!) you could launch 4 different websites, for example. Each on a different server. Then you would link page #1 to pages #2, #3, #4. Page #2 to pages #1, #3, #4, and so on. Basically, every page links to every other page. Such a network isn’t very powerful when it contains only 4 sites, but when they’re hundreds or thousands of them (which isn’t uncommon) then it’s a completely different story. BUT!
This is considered as a “black hat” SEO technique. Don’t take part in it unless you want your site to get penalized.
Link sculpting
By using the “nofollow” attribute of a link you can make some of the links on your site unimportant from an SEO point of view. Therefore, by using this attribute skillfully you can “sculpt” the PageRanks of certain pages within your website. You can increase the visibility of some pages by granting them with follow links and decrease the visibility of others by using nofollow links.
This whole technique requires a lot of practice and knowledge to do it properly. What’s more, many people believe that it’s no longer that effective due to Google’s new approach for handling nofollow links.
Meta description
It’s a short description of a blog/page/post used mostly by search engines. This description is not displayed anywhere on the blog.
Here’s how Google uses it. Whenever someone googles a specific keyphrase Google makes a decision which websites should be displayed and in what order. For each website Google displays a title and a short description. Google has two ways of putting this description together:
If the meta description of the website contains the keyphrase used by the user then Google displays the meta description.
If the meta description doesn’t contain the keyphrase then Google displays a fragment of the website’s content that does contain it.
If you’re using WordPress then meta description for each page or post can be set using the All In One SEO Pack plugin.
Meta keywords
It’s a list of keywords and keyphrases for each blog/page/post used mostly by search engines.
Nowadays, many people think that the major search engines don’t pay any attention to this element while ranking websites. And it’s probably the case. Nevertheless, setting proper keywords won’t do you any harm.
Therefore including your main keyword on the meta keywords list might be a good idea. For this post, I’d include SEO glossary and SEO terms.
If you’re using WordPress then meta keywords for each page or post can be set using the All In One SEO Pack plugin.
Meta tags
Meta tags consist of two main elements: meta description, and meta keywords. Meta tags are placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure of your page. The information contained in those tags is usually not meant for the users but for the search engines. It helps them determine what the page is about. Therefore it might be worth to set them manually for each page or post within your blog.
If you’re using WordPress then all meta tags for each page or post can be set using the All In One SEO Pack plugin.
Natural links
All links your page has acquired naturally without you actively building them.
For example, if you’ve written a great post that gets viral on twitter and a lot of people end up linking to it because they like it so much, all those links are natural links.
Nofollow
“Nofollow” is a very popular term in today’s SEO. When in fact it’s just an optional attribute of a link. However, its “optionalism” doesn’t make it unimportant. In fact, it’s the most important attribute from a SEO standpoint.
By default every link is a follow link. This means that whenever a search engine encounters a link, it follows it. Checks where it leads to, and basically takes it as a vote. A vote by the linking website to the website that is being linked to. The nofollow attribute notifies the search engines that they shouldn’t even pay attention to such a link – no vote, no link juice.
From a user’s perspective nofollow links look exactly the same as their follow brothers and sisters.
In order to create a nofollow link just add one extra attribute to an HTML link:
rel=”nofollow”
An example nofollow link:
<a href=”http://wikipedia.org/” rel=”nofollow”>Wikipedia</a>
Off-page SEO
The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. Off-page practices are everything you do outside your page to improve its rankings.
Basically, the main element of off-page SEO is link building.
On-page SEO
The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. On-page practices are everything you do on your page to improve its rankings.
This includes things like: tuning the HTML structure, improving title tags and descriptions, making your site load faster, checking the keyword usage and density, improving the internal linking structure (the way your pages are linked to each other), etc.
Organic search
You’re doing organic search when you visit Google, input a phrase and push the search button.
Organic search results (natural search results)
When you do a search on Google the results will most often come in two columns. The column on the right presents the paid results (AdWords ads that someone has bought). The column on the left presents the organic search results.
Getting high rankings in organic search results is what the SEO game is all about.
PageRank
PageRank or PR is an algorithm first created by Larry Page (one of two founding fathers of Google) to calculate (although “estimate” might be a better word here) the importance of a given website. No one is 100% certain about how it actually works or what all the factors are because Google is not very open in that matter. However, one of commonly believed opinions are that one of the deciding factors is the number of backlinks a site has and the PageRanks of the sites linking to it. So basically, the more links you have, and the better PageRank these linking sites have the better your PageRank will be.
It’s not surprising but pages with highest PageRanks are usually ones that are highly recognizable and popular around the internet. For example, Google.com itself has a PR of 10. Facebook is PR9 website. Yahoo – PR9.
Robots.txt
This is a file. One that’s particularly important for SEO. It notifies the search engines which areas of your blog are restricted for them. Restricting search engines from accessing some of your pages might not sound that tempting at first but in fact it’s a valuable thing. First of all, you can exclude all your admin pages from indexing (for example, pages in the wp-admin section of your WordPress blog). You can also use it to prevent search engines from seeing duplicate content on your site. What you do, for example, is prevent them from accessing the category listings on your blog, so only the tag listings are indexed, or the other way around. Very useful file. You can (and should) learn more about it here:
Sandbox, supplemental index
Google is believed to have a second index called the sandbox (or the supplemental index). Not every new page appears in the main index straight away. Some of them are put into the sandbox until Google decides that they are worthy of appearing in the main index – the one you see whenever you do a standard search on Google. Websites that are placed in the sandbox don’t appear for normal searches. This means that being in the sandbox is the worst that can happen to your site.
LONG TAIL Keywords
These types of searches include a longer, more specific set of search queries and are more narrow in nature. When someone is entering in a long tail search they are looking for highly specific information and are often considered more qualified. A great majority of searches are long tail in form.
Search engine
What you see at google.com is a search engine. Essentially, search engines are software applications. Their main task is to search the internet for a given phrase. Search engines have specific algorithms for doing this. These algorithms have a way of deciding which sites should appear first in the search results (which sites are the most relevant).
The exact algorithms search engines use are not shared to the public. That’s why everybody involved with SEO can only guess what needs to be done to improve site rankings.
No surprise here, the biggest and most respected search engine is Google.
SEM
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. In other words it means “marketing via search engines”. Marketing or promoting your products or services via search engines can be done in two main ways. You either optimize your site so it appears at a high spot in organic search results, or pay for the clicks directly, in which case your site is listed under the “sponsored listings” section.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a practice of improving site’s rankings in the search engines for given keywords. When doing SEO you need to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO. The actual tasks that need to be done are changing almost every day. What was working perfectly yesterday may not be working at all tomorrow. That’s just the reality of SEO. It’s why SEO is never a one-time task but an ongoing work.
SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page (SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages). This is a page that gets displayed when you search for a keyword on Google or other search engine.
Spider (crawler, bot, robot)
Search engine spider is a special piece of software that browses the web, looks for new sites, checks what’s going on on them and sends the data back to Google (or other search engine) so they can index and rank these sites.
Supplemental result
Let me quote Wikipedia on this one.
Supplemental Result is a URL residing in Google’s supplemental index [i.e. sandbox], a secondary database containing pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’s PageRank algorithm. […] A supplemental page will still rank in search results, but only if there are not enough pages in the main index that are returned within the search.
Title tag
Every page has a title tag. From a user’s standpoint the title tag is visible only in one place – your browser’s title bar.
For example, the title tag of the page you’re reading right now is: “SEO Glossary – 41 SEO Terms Explained“. It’s a very important SEO factor. There’s no better way for search engines to find out what the page is about than by looking at the title tag, that’s why you need to spend a moment on coming up with a good title tag.
How to set up a title tag.
If you’re using WordPress then the whole thing is rather simple. First of all, every new post receives a title tag that’s the same as the title of the post. However, if you want to change the title tag you need a plugin – All In One SEO Pack, for example. This plugin provides a really simple way of changing the title tag of any page or post on your blog.
URL
Not getting into boring technical details it’s simply the address of a specific web page.
For example, the URL of the post you’re currently reading is:
White hat SEO
As opposed to the black hat SEO, white hat SEO is a set of all SEO practices that search engines encourage you to use. Of course, there’s no official reference place or ranking for SEO practices, so in order to be up to date with what’s recommended and what isn’t, you have to constantly read the most popular SEO blogs, and some in-house Google blogs like these two: Official Google Blog, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.
XML sitemap
It’s a file (usually sitemap.xml). Its main function is to give search engines a map of all the different URLs that your blog contains (all pages, posts, archives, etc). With such a thing they can index your blog a lot quicker.
If you’re using WordPress you don’t have to create this file on your own. There’s a plugin for that: Google XML Sitemaps. I you aren’t you can visit a site like XML-Sitemaps.com and get one built there.
CLICK FRAUD
Click fraud refers to improper clicks on pay-per-click advertisements that are normally done by the publisher for the purposes of undeserved profit. Telling people to merely click on the advertisement just to accumulate clicks and profit lowers the advertiser confidence that they will be getting a return on the investment they have made in their advertisement space purchase.
CRAWLER
Crawler is a type of program that “crawls” or moves through the Internet or a specific web site by way of the link structure to gather data.
DOORWAY Pages
A doorway or gateway is a web page that is created to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page is used to redirect users to a different site or page and is also known as implement cloaking.
GATEWAY PAGE
A gateway page is the same thing as a doorway page, which is a page that is designed solely to attract traffic from a search engine and redirect it to another site or page.
GOOGLE DANCE
When SERPs were changed, this caused a major disruption in the Google algorithm. The Google dance described the huge shift that came because of this change or the period when a Google index is updated when various data centers have different data.
HIT
A hit occurs when a server sends an object, graphics, files or documents. It used to be the sole measurement of web traffic, but it is no longer as relevant.
IMPRESSION
An impression is also known as a page view or an event where a user visits a web page one time.
IN-BOUND LINK
These types of links are the source of trust and pagerank. An inbound link to your site from another trusted site will boost your SEO and ranking.
INDEX
As a noun, an index is a database of websites and their content used by search engines. As a verb, to index means to add a web page to a search engine index.
MOZRANK
MozRank is a logarithmic ranking established by SEOmoz. The ranking goes from 0 to 10.0 depending on the quality and number of inbound links pointing to that page or site with 10.0 being the best ranking.
ROI
ROI stands for “Return on Investment,” which is a use of analytics software to determine return on investment, weighing the cost and benefits of different SEO schemes.
Hashtag –
Is a single word or phrase preceded by the # symbol to define messages relating to a paricular topic. Hashtags are most commonly used on Twitter.
Borken Link
A broken link is a link which no longer works, due to a variety of causes, often resulting in an error page. A broken is caused by several reasons. The most common result of a dead (broken) link is a 404 error, which indicates that even though the web server where the request was sent to responded, the specific page requested could not be found. A broken link which results in a DNS error is caused when the server which hosts the target page no longer works or has been moved to a different domain name.
Cache
Cache or "web cache" is the temporarily stored copy of a web document such as an HTML file, PDF document, image, etc (or a combination thereof). Search engines use such copies of web pages to facilitate their search functionality. The cached files in the search engine indices allow users to search for web pages and documents a copy of which has been cached (saved) by the search engines for this purpose.
Cookie
A cookie is a small text file which stores data about the user on his local machine. The cookie can be used to store a variety of information including the contents of a user's shopping cart, the login status, and website preferences.
Cookies are often cited as a privacy concern, but are an essential part of utilizing the web and the many services offered by websites.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is the depth to which a website is crawled by a search engine. Depth is the degrees of separation as measured by the number of clicks (through links) it takes to get to a particular page from the homepage of a website. Since search engine spiders follow links to discover pages, the deeper a search engine spider is willing to go into a site the more content it is able to find. Search engines determine the crawl depth of each website based on the authority assigned to it by the search algorithm--higher quality sites are rewarded by a deeper crawl which in turn makes more of their content available to searchers through a search engine's index.
Crawl Frequency
Crawl frequency is the frequency by which a website is crawled. Generally, most sites/pages are on a 30-day crawl cycle, which means that the site will get crawled every thirty days. This does not necessarily mean that the entire site will be crawled in one day, but that each page of the website will get recrawled about thirty days after the last crawl.
Like crawl depth, crawl frequency is determined by the search engine algorithm and the value which it assigns to a particular page or website. For example, if a website is updated often, and is given 'enough' value by the algorithm, the crawl frequency of the site may be as high as hourly or it may even be measured in minutes.
Flash
Flash is a vector graphic-based software which facilitates the creation of highly interactive and rich-looking websites. Flash is owned by Adobe and is widely supported by browsers and platforms; however, currently Apple's mobile devices do not support Flash.
Websites which are developed entirely in Flash have a tough time gaining high rankings in search engines as search engine algorithms have very little on which to base ranking decisions. So it is recommended that if you will be utilizing Flash to ensure that your website is not made in its entirety with Flash software, and only uses Flash elements.
Fuzzy
Search Fuzzy search is the technology which helps retrieve relevant results even if the search terms are misspelled (or fuzzy).
FTP
FTP (or File Transfer Protocol) is a protocol for transferring data between two or more computers. FTP capabilities are built into many pieces of software such as Dreamweaver (a web development software). FTP software is also available as a standalone tools which allows for transfer of files between computers, and is mostly used by web developers to transfer files from local machines to web servers.
Hidden Text
Text Using hidden text on web pages is a risky SEO technique which is basically the process of hiding optimized, and often voluminous text stuffed with keywords from regular website visitors while still accessible to search engine spiders.
This approach goes against search engine guidelines and will (once discovered) get a website banned from search engines.
Meta Refresh
Is a meta tag which is used to make a browser refresh (this is not a redirect) to another URL.
Example of meta tag refresh:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.example.com/destination.html" />
Note: The number in the 'content' portion of the meta tag indicates the number of seconds the browser should stay on the page before refreshing. Using a '0' would refresh to the destination page immediately.
Domain -
The main web address of your site (example: www.yoursite.com). It's good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment.
301 redirect
A redirect is where you arrive at a page and are immediately taken to a different page [ normally before the original page even loads ]. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirection. It is telling search engines that the page they’re trying to access has changed its address permanently. Therefore any ranking the page already has should be passed to the new address. Whereas a 302 redirect is a temporary redirection and search engines do not pass on any ranking if this is found.
404 error
The error message when a page or resource cannot be found on a website as the result of a broken link. Your website should have a specifically created and styled 404 page that offers navigation and other help to anyone who lands there.
Above The Fold
The section of the webpage that can be viewed within the browser window without the user scrolling down. Important for SEO purposes as the Google’s Page Layout algorithm focusses on first content on a page. Often home to a hero header or section.
Alexa
A website ranking tool that’s been around for a long time. Now owned by Amazon who have confusingly also given the name to the intelligent personal assistant used by their Echo smart speaker. For most sites, the ranking tool isn’t of any real relevance.
Algorithm
Normally refers to the Google Search Algorithm. The programs used by the search engines to rank web pages in reference to any given search query.
alt Text / alt Tag / alt Attribute
All essentially refer to the same thing. Text that provides alternative, descriptive information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it. For example, if the user uses a screen reader. SEO important as Google has no other way of telling what an image actually is. Historically have been used in SEO terms to reinforce a page’s keyphrase.
Eg:
To give you an example, here’s what a standard IMG tag could look like:
<img src=”clock.jpg” alt=”picture of a clock” />
Analytics
Refers to Google’s program for gathering and analysing website usage data. A key tool, just don’t expect to get your life back once you start peering into the blackness of its depths.
Anchor text / Link text
The visible text that a user clicks on to follow a link. Important for SEO in link building as search engines use anchor text to indicate the content relevancy of both the referring site and the referred landing page.
HTML Tag: <a href=”Link”>Anchor Text</a>
Authority
The level of trust[ and thus ranking ] that a site is credited with for a particular search query by the search engines. Derived from a large series of factors including visitor traffic, backlinks, social media shares, bounce rate.
Authority Site
A website that has established enough authority to be considered a ‘centre of excellence’ for a particular search phrase or subject.
Backlink / Back Link / Incoming Link
Any link to a site from another website, social media platform etc.
Bait and Switch / Code Swapping
Dubious practice of establishing a good web page ranking using legitimate, relevant content then replacing the content with marketing or advertising material. Considered to be…
Black hat SEO
Any SEO practices which are considered unethical and try to cheat the search engine guidelines. Likely to be met with harsh ranking penalties from the search engines if found out. Of course, marginal SEO techniques might be deemed OK today but punishable at the next algorithm update.
When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.
See also:
- Black Hat SEO.com - parody site about black hat SEO
- White Hat SEO.com - parody site about white hat SEO
- Honest SEO - site offering tips on hiring an SEO
- SEO Black Hat - blog about black hat SEO techniques
Bounce rate
The percentage of website visitors that do not proceed beyond the page they initially land on. Instead they ‘bounce’ away to a different site [ often the web page they were on previously via the back button ].
Breadcrumbs
Small horizontal navigation bar above the main content. Useful on sites which have a deep structure in letting viewers know where they are in the site hierarchy. For instance, Homepage > Category > Sub-category > Current Page. They can have some SEO value on such sites.
Broken Link / Dead Link
A web link that now points to a non-existent page or resource . Covers outgoing links to other sites, backlinks from other sites or internal website links. Are detrimental to your site’s search engine ranking so fix or remove wherever possible.
Canonical tag / Canonical url / rel=canonical
Often website page content gets fully or partially duplicated on other pages, or the page can be accessed via different URLs. Search Engines don’t naturally comprehend which page is the ‘original’ and can end up ranking the wrong page or even diluting it across several.
Here’s what it looks like: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/” />
A canonical tag indicates which URL is the original, the one you want ranked. Also useful in circumstances where you publish an article through external channels like Facebook and Medium as well as on your own site.
Cloaking
Displaying different content to search engines as opposed to human visitors. Normally considered a Black hat technique designed to fool the search engines into giving an inflated ranking. Definitely not recommended as your site will be severely penalised and even banned from the search indexes.
Click through rate ( CTR )
If 100 people see your listing in a search index for a particular keyphrase [ impressions ] and 25 of those click on it, that’s a CTR of 25%. There is an ongoing debate on whether CTR influences organic search rankings. Basically, will increasing your click through rate have a positive influence on rankings. What is obvious is if you are getting high impressions but a very low CTR then think about amending your Title and Description meta tags for that page.
Content Delivery Network [ CDN ]
Hosting that provides geographically diverse copies of your website resources so that visitors can access them quickly regardless of their relative location to your main hosting. Helps with site speed.
Content spinning / Article spinning
Taking an original piece of content and re-writing it to create numerous ‘unique’ versions so they can be published on other sites. Normally considered Black hat SEO because most spun content is produced through automated methods and is considered poor for human readability.
Co-citation and Co-Occurrence
Nope, I’m not even going to try and explain these here. Best you head over to this article on their SEO value.
Crawler / bot / spider
The program search engines [ and others ] use to gather the information on your website.
Disavow
Normally refers to the Google tool which allows you to specify incoming links that you don’t wish to be taken into consideration when ranking your site. For instance, links from sites that Google might consider to be spammy and thus those links may actually be detrimental to your ranking.
External Link
An outgoing link to another website. Although the recipient is normally considered the primary beneficiary there can be SEO benefits for the giver if the link is a ‘good’ quality editorial link to a page with related content.
Favicon
Favicons are 16×16 pixels small icons that usually contain the logo or a simple graphic and appear in the tab of web browsers as well as bookmarks. Now easier to produce via free web resources and can help reinforce brand. No direct SEO value so perhaps out of place in an SEO glossary but your website really should have one.
Fresh Content
Adding new quality content to websites helps with ranking. The key word here is quality…
Google Mobile First Indexing
2017 will see Google experiment with preferring mobile versions of websites when it comes to indexing and ranking. Thus a poorly configured mobile site might negatively impact your search engine standing.
Google shaming
The search giant’s practice of highlighting unencrypted websites if you use the latest version of their Chrome browser. Other browsers may quickly follow suit.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
These are the SEO guides and articles designed to help you build a successful search engine presence.
Google Webmaster Tools
The resources Google provides to help you.
Headings tags
Commonly are the page title [ H1 ], paragraph titles [ H2 ] and sub-paragraph titles [ H3 ]. Previously had some SEO significance and still often included in SEO page checking programs. Actual current SEO value a source of discussion. Still best to use no more than one H1 tag on each page and go easy with the others.
Hero Section
An area at the top of a webpage often consisting of strong visuals with simple typography and user interface elements. Most of the elements rest on top of a background image and can be often animated. All designed to provide a vibrant and stimulating introduction to the page.
Hidden Text
Hidden text is text on a page which is visible to search engine spiders but not visible to the human visitors. Dubious SEO technique used to try and gain you extra ranking credit with search engines. Likely to get you a penalty or even a ban if discovered.
HTTPS
a protocol for secure communication over a computer network. Now seen as the default configuration for websites of all types. See this Wikipedia entry for an in depth explanation. See also Google shaming.
Index
Commonly used to refer to the search engines’ complete databases of web pages. Your initial SEO activities are aimed at getting into the index.
Indexed Pages
The number of pages from your site that are in the index. You might not even want all your pages indexed, Your terms and conditions or privacy policy pages have no need to be on the index.
Information Architecture
The general term covering how you design, categorise, organise and structure your content in a useful and meaningful way. Good Information architecture should show consideration to how both humans and search spiders read your website.
Landing page / Entry page
The page a visitor arrives on. Although the front / home page is most popular, well ranked inner pages may also have decent numbers. Make sure they are well configured to keep visitors on your site and don’t bounce.
Link Bait
Creating content with the specific aim of attracting a lot of backlinks, often via Social Media channels. Basically content which you hope will go viral.
Link Building
The process of actively increasing the number of backlinks to your site.
Link exchange / Link swapping / Link partner / Reciprocal linking
Where two sites link to each other. Often of low quality in terms of related content and rarely now of any great SEO significance.
Link Juice
The quantity of trust and authority that a link will pass to the landing page at the other end. The quantity is dependant on the quality and ranking of the originating page or website. Concisely, the SEO value of any particular backlink.
Link popularity / Link equity
A measure of a website’s value based on the quantity and quality of backlinks to it.
Link Pyramid
The description of a backlink structure taking the form of a pyramid with your website at the top. For example, your website has 10 links pointing to it from other sites. Then each of those 10 sites may have 20 further links pointing at them. And so on and so on…
Link rot
A measure of he quantity of broken links on a site combined with the length of time they have remained broken. Can become an SEO indicator of a stale or abandoned website.
Long tail keywords
A search query phrase which is longer, more precise and specific. As they’re more specific there is often less competition in search indexes than for shorter, generic keyword terms. The vast majority of searches are now long tail.
Meta tags
The general term for several code snippets that are often incorporated in the head section of a web page. These include the Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords & Meta Robots.
Meta robots tag
Used to tell search engine crawlers/ spiders whether to index that specific page.
Natural search / Organic search
The search positions and web traffic which originate naturally based on SEO and not through paid advertising.
Nofollow / rel=”nofollow’
The tag or attribute which informs the search engines that the associated link should not be given any value or trust when calculating rankings. Essentially no link juice is passed on to the site at the other end.
Offsite SEO / Offpage SEO
Those activities that are carried out away from your site [ or the actual content pages ]. Normally now refers to items such as link building and Social Media signal development.
Onsite SEO / Onpage SEO
Cover term for all SEO activity carried out on the actual site itself.
Pagerank
The judged value of any specific page by the search engines. Not to be confused with the old Pagerank Toolbar which used to show a Google measure of a site’s value [ long since disused ].
Repeat Visits
If your website is frequently visited by returning users then this can positively enhance your search engine position as this is seen as a mark of authority. If people come back for more then it likely means the site contains good quality content.
Rich Cards
I will go with Google’s own definition for these: “Rich cards are a new Search result format building on the success of rich snippets. Just like rich snippets, rich cards use schema.org structured markup to display content in an even more engaging and visual format, with a focus on providing a better mobile user experience.”
Rich Snippets
The term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML. This allows search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page. For more detail read this beginners guide.
Robots.txt
The file that sits in your root folder and provides instruction to web crawlers about which pages or sections of your website you want them to index.
Search engine friendly (SEF) URL
A page url which descriptively reflects the page content or at least the main keyword or phrase. Should have stop words stripped out and not be overly long. To create one after the page has been published is to do a URL Rewrite.
SEO
Stands for search engine optimization, the processes used to increase website visitor numbers by achieving high rank in the search results indexes. But you knew that, surely?
SERP / SERPS
Stands for Search Engine Results Page or Pages.
Sitemap
A page on your site with active links to all other pages. Used as an alternative navigation system. An HTML sitemap is designed for human use, an XML sitemap in Site Speed
How quickly your website loads for visitors. Can be affected by a variety of factors including server issues, rendering large image files and running too many onpage scripts. Has been an SEO influencing signal for some time and not likely to change.
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Using social media channels for website promotion. Either by using it to increase user visits or for link building.
Social Signals
The overall ranking attributes garnered by social media shares and discussions.
Splash Page
An initial page on a website that provided plenty of visual stimulation to human visitors but actually contained little content of SEO value. A bit like having a hero section but without anything else on the page.
Stop Words
Usually refer to the most common words in a language and are normally filtered out in queries by search engines. Can be similarly filtered out from web pages when being ranked or indexed.
Text link
A plain HTML link.
Time on page
The amount of time that a user spends on one page before moving on. Used as an indicator of page quality and relevance.
URL Rewrite
Making URLs more descriptive and content related to boost search engine ranking. Commonly the rewritten URL will include the primary keyword or phrase for that page and can be classified as a search engine friendly (SEF) URL. Ideally, the URL should be usefully descriptive from the outset. If rewriting remember to add a 301 redirect from the old URL.
User generated content (UGC)
The content generated when interacting with a website. Comments left after articles, Facebook conversations, discussions etc.
White Hat SEO
Ethical SEO activities. Obviously the opposite of Black Hat SEO.
Reference:
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