SEO Glossary List

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. It can also be defined as the process of optimizing one’s website to get organic and free traffic from the search engines results. SEO is completely free, and your website can be of great value to Google because it adds value to the users of Google. This can be achieved if the content of the site is accessible and useful to the users. SEO can be considered as a long-term investment since it takes 6 – 12 months to succeed because the website must be done well and should be useful to Google search engines.

Ways to make the most out of SEO

1. Determine the keywords you want to rank for on Google. That is choosing keywords carefully based on relevance, volume, competitiveness as well as buyers’ instincts. Ensuring that the keywords you are using on your website are what users are searching for.
2. Help Google understand your website which is also known as on-page SEO. This is done by telling Google you have the answers to the keywords people are searching for. It can be achieved by adding those keywords to the website’s title, description, contents, image tags, and google tags. In other words, one needs to optimize the meta tags, header tags, anchor tags
3. Help Google trust the website. This can be done by having a higher domain authority and can be done by ensuring the site is useful. To achieve the usefulness of the site, one must create a great user experience by ensuring the website is easy to navigate, moves quickly, and above all valuable to the user. Backlinks (letter of recommendation) can also be used to increase domain authority.

GLOSSARY

A

• Algorithm: An algorithm is a set of guidelines for the calculation of multivariate that learn and adjust over time. To personalize this answer for digital marketing, an algorithm is a calculation that could easily meet customers’ goals by providing value in the most cost-effective and transparent ways imaginable.

Example

• Algorithmic Penalty: An algorithm penalty, which is also known as penalty is the term given to the effect on some sites based on changes to search engine algorithms. It can also be said to be a set of instructions that search engines use when they determine the ranking of your site as to its benefit or lack of benefit.

This happens when the site in question has things on the site that violates Google’s principles.

Example

An example of a company that faced an Algorithmic penalty was eBay based on the panda 4.0 updates and that is because the update did not meet their qualities parameters.

• Alt Attributes: The alt attribute is mainly the HTML attribute used in HTML and XHTML documents to indicate alternative text (alt-text) that is to be made when the component to which it is used cannot be performed.

The alt attribute is used by « screen reader » software so that a person who is browsing contents of a webpage to enable increased consumer satisfaction during use.

Example

Some examples of an Alt attribute are as follows

<img src= »book.gif » height=« 200 » width=« 100 » />

<img src= »book.gif » height= »200″ width= »100″ alt= »opened leather journal with writing in it » />

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): The accelerated Mobile Pages, commonly known as AMP is an unrestricted-source program from Google meant at making an “efficient and effective mobile internet”. In several approaches, this project is Google’s reaction to Facebook’s instant articles, which gave media organizations a platform to have their articles read very quickly without the user leaving Facebook.

Example

• Anchor Tag: An anchor tag is said to be an HTML component that creates a link to a target URL. When applied properly, the link can wrap-around text, images, or buttons, so that site visitors can relate to it and visit the link’s target.

It is the best method to provide context about the link’s destination, either in the manner of clear anchor text or with a descriptive image. This helps website users to know what to expect, and Search Engine crawlers can understand the correlation across both URLs.

Example

• Anchor text: The anchor text also known as the link label or link text is the obvious, clickable content in an HTML hyperlink. The term « anchor » was used in older versions of the HTML specification for what is currently referred to as an element, or <a>. The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as « text that an element wraps around ». In XML terms (since HTML is XML), the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.

Example

• Artificial Intelligence (AI): Artificial intelligence means the replication of human intelligence in machines and technologies. The goals of artificial intelligence include learning, reasoning, and perception.

Artificial intelligence gives companies effective and efficient ways of doing things to achieve better results. It also helps the business find ways of increasing consumer satisfaction as well as ways to attract new customers.

Example

• Authority: This is when a company’s website is determined to attract a lot of people to visit their site. And the information found on the site should be reliable and trustworthy. When this happens, that company’s website is said to be an Authority.

Example

• Author Rank: Author Rank would be a query-independent criterion like PageRank. Google would want to see content with high Author Rank and high PageRank. That combination would be a strong signal, showing that the authority of that author was accurately reflected in the link graph.

Example

B

• Backlinks: Backlinks normally contain external sites generally known as a referring domain or (letters of recommendation) that contribute to the overall strength, relevance, and diversity of your domain’s backlink profile.

Backlinks normally link two sites in an article which helps throw more light to a particular text by suggesting other useful texts to read relating to what one is looking for.

 Example

• Blockers: An ad blocker is a program that will remove different kinds of advertising from a Web user’s experience during the use of a website. These programs aim at a specific form of ads, such as pop-ups, banner ads, and other popular forms of online advertisement, allowing a user to surf the Web without annoying distractions or interruptions.

Example

• Black Hat SEO: This is mostly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page’s ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine’s terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites.

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• Blog: A blog is used to reach the home business’ target market. It is used hand in hand with the company’s website and that helps the company to manage their activities as well as easier to use by visitors.

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• Bots: A bot is a piece of software that impersonates a user. The precise definition is any software that automates recurring tasks over the internet, but that is so broad it includes all kinds of applications that won’t concern marketers.

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• Bounce Rate: This is a term in internet marketing used for web traffic analysis and it represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (« bounce ») rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.

Example

If a company has written an informative article on LGBT+ answering specific questions, then the principal source of the traffic to that site will be organic search which will increase a company’s bounce rate.

• Breadcrumb: A breadcrumb is a small text path, often located at the top of a page indicating where the user is on the site.

Example

• Broken link: A broken link is a webpage that can’t be found or accessed by a user, for various reasons. Web servers will often return an error message when a user tries to access a broken link.

Example

• Business to Business (B2B): This is a term used in business to determine the target of a business. That is who a business is dealing with. This means a company targeting or supplying to another company.

Example

A company that is solely into the production of cotton to be supplied to a cloth-making company. The cotton company being a business has a target being the cloth-making company which is also a company as his customer. For this instance, a business is supplying to another business. LaFactory is a typical example of a B2B business where services are provided to other businesses.

• Business to Consumers (B2C): Just as B2B, B2C has to do with a company producing goods and services meant to be consumed by the final consumer without going through factory processing.

Example

An example of a B2C company is the eCommerce Lafactory, where its main target group of consumers is the final customers to consume the product.

C

• Cache: Cache can be a useful SEO tool to catch a glimpse of what Google wants you to do. In this guide, we’ll go through some of the best ways to use Google cache to track competitors and help you potentially rise in the SERPs.

• Citations: In very simple words, a local mention is a brief mention of your business. It includes the name, address, phone number, zip or postal code, website address, etc., and the place where the business is located.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): It is the percentage of clicks you will get per 100 ad impressions. In other words, Click-through rate is an advertising metric that is used to measure how many users clicked an advertisement, link, or call to action and went on to the landing page or website that was liked to that ad, or link.

Example

• Content Management Systems: Thisis a turnkey solution allowing the creation of a dynamic site from A to Z and updating it easily. The advantage of using this type of software is that they often do not require technical knowledge and allow significant time savings.

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• Competition: The competitiveness between companies selling similar products and services to achieve revenue, profit, and market-share growth.

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• Content is King: It means that content is vital to any digital marketing strategy. By having a clear approach to all aspects of your content creation, your business will be in a much stronger position when it comes to engaging and converting leads to customers.

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• Conversion: A conversion is an event that is tracked and recorded when a campaign goal or interaction is complete. In a lot of cases, this will mean a sale.

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• Crawling: Crawling is tracking and gathering URLs to prepare for indexing. By giving them a webpage as a starting point, they will trace all the valid links on those pages. As they go from link to link, they bring back data about those web pages back to Google’s servers.

Example

• Cascading style sheet: Itis a time-saving document for web designers, as they can style batched sections of HTML code, rather than styling individual lines of code one at a time. They can be used to define text styles, table sizes, and other aspects of Web pages that previously could only be defined in a page’s HTML.

Example

D

• Deep-link: A is an important tool for marketers and developers looking to enhance user engagement, determine which campaigns drive users to an app, and improve the onboarding process. The future value of deep links lies in how we use them and the new consumer experiences they are going to enable.

• Domain name: A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control within the Internet. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes.

• Domain name registration: This is the process of registering a domain name into a register for it to be recognized as the subject of the domain name license to benefit the registrar.

Example

• Domain Marketing: This is the process of using various internet addresses to increase the potential number of visitors to a company’s site. Domain marketing allows the use of domains to improve the site’s uniqueness and visibility.

Example

E

• Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T): This is done by Google, it comes from Google’s search quality rater guidelines and it helps to indicate the quality of a page and this helps influence ranking.

Example

• Editorial link: Editorial link is a type of backlink, and it is the best a company can have on its website. They are the referential link that provides more information to the user about the subject in question.

• Email outreach: An email outreach is a process of getting in touch with people such as influencers, sponsors, and customers through emails.

Example

• Entry Page: An entry page is the first page users arrive at during query search. An entry page is not necessarily a company’s home page.

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• Error 404: This happens when a search page is not found or it is a code HTTP communication protocol on the internet to report an incidence.

Example

• Exact Match Anchor Text: This happens when the search results in the perfect match to the search of a user.

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F

• Favicon: This is the visual representation of the company’s website and business that will help users identify the business and its website.

Example

• Featured Snippets: These are the cards that appear with a self-contained excerpt from a page that will, ideally, answer your search query. One of the first things you’ll notice is that the snippet rarely comes from the number one search result.

Example

• Filter word: A filter word represents words that make search engines appear as low quality and degrades the quality of the search engine.

Example

• Free for all: This is also known as a link farm and can be defined as a group of websites operated by an automated service or program that are all connected to a particular website paying for it. Such a site is normally penalized by Google and should be avoided.  

G

• Google Ads: This is the advertising platform of Google, where ads are served to users when they perform a search. The instant benefit of Google Ads is that it improves the visibility of the brand & brings in faster results.

Example

• Google Analytics: It is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. It can also be used to track website performance and collect visitor insights.

Example

An example of google analytics is when it gives you the number of women or men who visited your site. It can also give information such as ethnicity, age, and preferences of the people that visited your site within a particular period.

• Google my business: This is a free service provided by Google to small businesses to assess tools and services that will aid them in having a digital presence across engines and the ever-increasing range of the various Google services.

Example

• Google Search Console: Google Search Console initially known as the google webmaster, is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize the visibility of their websites.

Example

H

• H1 – H6: These are tags within the content of a page that defines the header of the page and organizes sections of content. It can also be explained as a section of a website or blog that is larger than the rest of the content to signify importance.

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• Holistic SEO: This has to do with long-term, effective, and efficient SEO practices which will position the company’s website for success in the present and future.

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• Homepage: A homepage can be said to be typically the first page encountered on a website that usually contains links to the other pages of the site.

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• HootSuite: Itis a social media management tool that allows users to schedule and post updates to Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, WordPress, and other platforms from a dashboard with tabs organizing all the social profiles you connect.

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I

• Image compression: This is the process of decreasing the size of an image file without reducing or losing image quality. This is often used to increase the speed of a web page, for a better customer experience.

Example

• Image Tag: An image tag is used to contain an image on an HTML page. Images are not technically inserted into a web page; images are linked to web pages. The image tag creates a holding space for the referenced image.

Example

• Index: An index is another name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes contain the information on all the websites that Google (or any other search engine) was able to find. If a website is not in a search engine’s index, users will not be able to find it.

Example

• Internal link: Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to another page on the same domain. They are most often used for navigation but are also valuable to help establish a hierarchy on a website and to help spread link equity, or ranking power, around a website.

Example

J

• JavaScript Rendering: Often known as JS is a programming language run on a client’s machine that conforms to the ECMAScript specification. This normally contains no content until JavaScript creates the document object model that is rendered content.

Example

K

• Keyword Research: Keyword research is the process of researching and analyzing popular search terms, words, and phrases that people type into search engines like Google and including them strategically in your content with the ultimate goal of making that particular piece of content appear higher on the search engine results pages.

Example

• Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the practice of inserting many keywords into Web content and meta tags to artificially increase a page’s ranking in search results and drive more traffic to the site. A keyword is a significant term that is relevant to the content in question.

Example

• Keywords:  keyword is a term used in digital marketing to describe a word or a group of words an Internet user uses to perform a search in a search engine or search bar. In an SEO strategy, keywords are very important and should be the core of any copy written for the web.

Example

• KPI: Key Performance Indicator is an indicator that helps us measure the progress of an objective set in advance, which enables us to quantify the degree of success of our actions. In digital marketing, KPI’s maybe visits, clicks, completed forms, sales, etc.

Example

L

• Landing page: The landing page can also be known as « lead capture page”, “single property page », « static page », « squeeze page » or a « destination page », is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement.

Example

• Local Pack: A local pack, also known as the local SEO 3-pack is the listing of three businesses you see first in the search results when searching for terms using keywords like “near me” or “near [Location].” When you search for a local business, Google generates a list of potential businesses that fit your search query.

Example

• Local Search: Local search marketing is anything you do on the web to promote a physical business that makes face-to-face contact with its customers. It applies to both single-location small and medium businesses (SMBs), national enterprise brands, and chains.

Example

• Long-tall Keywords:  Long-tail keywords aresearch queries usually consisting of two or more words that narrow down the focus of the search results and bring up more specific results. Long-tail keywords are also often lower difficulty and lower volume. To understand this better, let’s also define head keywords.

Example

M

• Meta Description: The meta description is a searcher-focused piece of text that we recommend should be no longer than 155 characters in length (with spaces). It should describe what a page has to offer. Although these pieces of text are not used for rankings, a good description can generate great traffic to your website.

Example

• Meta Directives: Robots’ meta directives (sometimes called « meta tags ») or just meta directives. are pieces of code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content. Whereas robots.txt file directives give bots suggestions for how to crawl a website’s pages, robots meta directives provide more firm instructions on how to crawl and index a page’s content.

Example

• Mobile-First Indexing: Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.” – Webmaster Central Blog That’s about the best, a short description of mobile-first indexing we’ve seen over the past few years.

Example

O

• Organic Search: Organic search is a term for search engine results that are naturally generated and not influenced by commercial relationships between an organization and a search provider, ISP, or other party hosting search results.

Example

P

• Page Speed: In the simplest sense of the term, page speed refers to how fast the content on any given website page loads. Page speed can be described in one of two ways: “page load time” or “time to the first byte.”

Example

• Page titles: A page title, also known as a title tag, is a short description of a webpage and appears at the top of a browser window and in SERPs. A page title is an important element when optimizing an SEO page and it should include a page’s keyword in the title tag.

Example

• Pay-Per-Click: Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. Advertisers pay a fee anytime a user clicks on the ad.

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• People Also Ask: This is a block displayed on some search engines to customize the results seen based on factors such as one’s location, or past search history. Each answer comes from a web page, and Google provides a clickable link to the source below each one.

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• Personalization: personalization is “a process that creates a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties designed to enhance the experience of the recipient.” More simply put, one might say: Personalization is the act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual.

Example

Q

• Query: A query can be said to be what the user enters in a search engine. It can be a word or series of words to gather a variety of answers.

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R

• Rankbrain: RankBrain is a machine learning system that uses artificial intelligence to improve search results and interpret new queries. Bloomberg released the first statement about RankBrain from a senior research scientist at Google named Greg Corrado.

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• Ranking: Ranking on Alexa Rank is an important base when doing Digital Marketing, helping businesses and partners have a clearer view of the website. But remember that rankings are only a relative measure. The “reach” of your website depends not only on the traffic but also on the changes in traffic of other websites.

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• Rel=Canonical: It is a tag in the code of a web page that tells the search engines which version of the page is the original and which is a duplicate.

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• Relevancy: Relevance is exactly what you might imagine–it’s a score that serves as a barometer of whether the messaging truly appeals to the audience you are targeting. It is measured using a combination of variables as a person moves from search query to add to a website.

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• Responsive Design: Responsive web design plays an important role in digital marketing, including advertising. Paid advertising campaigns direct visitors to your website, but they don’t necessarily keep them there. Good responsive web design makes use of the landing page by capturing the attention of visitors and quickly adapting to their needs.

Example

• Robots.txt: The robots.txt, also known as exclusion standard or robots exclusion protocol, is a standard used by websites to communicate with these web crawlers and web robots.

Example

S

• Schema: Schema markup is one of the biggest digital marketing solutions in SEO. It is the code associated with a website that helps users get more informative results from the search engines.

Example

• Search Volume: a search volume is a handy tool used by digitalmarketers to determine the number of searches that a particular keyword gets over a timeframe. It is also recommended to identify the intent of the keyword, which are the queries that your target consumers are interested in.

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• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): This is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

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• Search Engine Results Page (SERPs): A search engine result page usually answers google displays after a query is submitted.

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• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate: It is the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems, preventing criminals from reading and modifying any information transferred, including potential personal details.

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• Short-Tail Keywords: Short tail keywords are general search queries consisting of one or two words. Sometimes called « head terms, » they describe highly broad searches for information

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• Site Speed: Site speed is a ranking factor and an even larger ranking factor for mobile pages, due to Google’s above-mentioned mobile-first index. With that being said, we have already seen the direct impact that site speed has on client website SEO rankings and organic traffic.

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• Site Structure: This refers to the way a website is set up i.e., how the homepage, category and tags pages, and other important pages are interconnected. The ideal site structure of any site should resemble a pyramid with a homepage at the top and categories with subcategories beneath it.

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• Structured Data: Structured data is a consistent format for providing information about a page and organizing the page content. This is done using the Schema Markup and it allows search engines to readily arrange web pages in search results.

Example

An example can be details given concerning the recipe, precisely what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on, or at what time is a movie premiering.

T

• Tags: A tag is an element included on each webpage to be measured. In other words, it is a small piece of code that is inserted into the page’s source code. It allows the third-party analytics tool to log connections on its server.

Example

• Traffic: The number of visitors that a web page receives. For a website to be successful it needs traffic to be driven to it from various sources. This traffic, however, needs to come from people who will be interested in buying your product or service, and for this to take place you need to target people within your niche.

Example

U

• Uniform Resource Locator (URL): URL is one of the key concepts of the Web. It is the mechanism used by browsers to retrieve any published resource on the web

Example

• Unique visit: A visit can be termed unique when a user browses the company’s site for the first time and returns to that site using the same IP address.
• Universal search: A universal search, also known as a blended search or enhanced search can be defined as the results obtained from google SERP that are included among the traditional organic search results but include additional media such as videos, links, images, and many more.

Example

W

• White Hat SEO: This is a term that covers all the techniques that operate in good faith with the rules and expectations of search engines and their users. If you’re not trying to trick, undermine or outsmart the search engine ranking algorithm, then the company is probably practicing white hat SEO.

Example

• XLM Sitemap: An XML Sitemap is meant for search engines, and thus they are formatted in a language that’s easy to understand for computers that are the XML. The XML, fortunately, can be understood by humans also.

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Y

• Yandex: Yandex can be said to be the most popular search engine in Russia with about 60% of the market share. This search engine specializes in inter-related services and products.

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• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages: These are pages that in google search guidelines and contain information that can directly or indirectly lead to a reader’s safety, happiness, health, or financial stability when such information is inaccurate, false, deceptive, and untruthful.

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• Yoast SEO:  This is a tool that helps companies optimize their WordPress page in a user-friendly manner to increase user satisfaction and increase click-through rates.

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Z

• Zero clicks: This happens when a search query does not receive any clicks from users. This can occur when users are looking for a specific word not found in the search query. Another reason is that users get the exact information needed from their search at the top of the results and do not need to open or click the link to get what they want.

Example