Are you looking for an SEO dictionary that explains some SEO terms? SEO in simple terms?

SEO is a complex subject. You will be overwhelmed with a lot of terms, especially if you are new to this. SEO.

That’s why we published this article, which contains a ton of terms, from basic concepts to advanced techniques.

In this article, you will find the following:

• Definitions of most SEO terms
• Their advantages or disadvantages (for some SEO definitions)
• Frequently asked questions and more

SEO Glossary: ​​100 Terms and Definitions Explained

 

Are you ready? Let’s dive into the details.

 

A

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):  It is an open-source HTML framework launched by Google. These are incredibly lightweight pages designed to provide a super-fast experience for mobile phone users. AMP is not a ranking factor in Google search.

Above the fold: This is simply the top part of the web page. It is also the part of a web page that is visible to website users without scrolling. Any content you must scroll to read is considered “below the fold.”

Algorithm: Google’s algorithms are the “multiple factors” that Google uses to rank web pages in search results. These factors include user experience, content quality, expertise, backlinks, etc.

Call to Action (CTA): A CTA is a prompt on a web page that encourages your site visitors to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter, following your Facebook page, or making a purchase.

Alt Text: It is also known as ALTERNATE text, a short description of the image. ALT text gives the “meaning of the images” you use in your blog posts or web pages.

Link Bait: This type of content is specifically designed to attract backlinks from other sites. This content includes comprehensive guides, monster list articles, tutorials, and more.

Site Architecture: This is also the structure of a website, which refers to how the pages of a website are organized. This has a huge impact on SEO because it can affect how search engines crawl and index a website.

B

Title Tag: The title tag is an HTML element that defines the title of a web page. This tag will appear in search results and is a vital factor in determining your organic click-through rate.

Backlink: A backlink is a link from another website to your website. Backlinks are extremely useful for increasing your website’s authority and improving search traffic.

Black Hat SEO: Black Hat SEO refers to techniques used to manipulate search engine rankings (primarily by breaking search engine rules). These techniques include landing pages, keyword stuffing, obfuscation, etc.

Meta Tags: These tags provide search engines with important information about your web pages, including titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, etc.

H1 Tag: This is probably the most important title tag on a web page. It is often used to indicate the main topic of a page.

H2 Tag: This is a secondary heading tag used to identify subtopics on the page.

H3 to H6 Tags: These tags are used to identify even smaller subtopics on the page. H3 is the highest section level and H6 is the lowest.

Keyword Stuffing: Using too many of the SAME keywords on a page to rank higher in search results is a bad SEO practice. This practice can result in a penalty for the website, as search engines consider it a spamming technique.

Open Graph Meta Tags: These snippets (or previews) control how URLs are displayed when posted to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. These tags display important information such as page title, image, and description.

X-Robots Tag: This is part of the HTTP response header of a URL that can be used to control how search engines crawl and index a web page.

C

Duplicate Content: This is content that appears in multiple places on the Internet. Duplicate content can negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings, as Google prefers unique and useful content. You can use tools like Copyscape to detect duplicate content.

Masking: is the practice of showing different content to search engines and users. This is a bad practice used to manipulate search engines and can result in penalties for websites.

Crawler: A crawler is an online bot (or program) that search engines use to crawl and index websites.

Keyword cannibalization: This SEO problem occurs when two or more pages on your site target the same keyword. This problem is caused by the fact that search engines no longer know which of these pages should rank. This is similar to cannibalizing your website’s results, such as clicks, content, optimization, etc.

AI Content: L AI content can be considered “automated content” created using AI tools. mental intelligence such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, Jasper AI, etc. It is best NOT to rely 100% on this type of content to build authority or improve search engine rankings.

Viral Content: This type of content quickly goes viral online, often through social media. This type of content is also great for blogging to create swiftly buzz. Often, this is trending, interesting, or shocking content.

Local Citation: This is any mention of your business online, such as name, phone number, address, etc.

Link building is the process of creating links to your site from other sites. This increases the overall reliability and authority of your site.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): CSS is a coding language used to format HTML documents. It adds style (fonts, colors, spacing, etc.) to web documents.

Persistent Content: This type of content remains relevant even after several years. This helps you maintain the same level of traffic and attract new visitors if your content is great.

D

Top-level domain (TLD): This is the last part of a domain name, such as.com,.org, or.net. It is part of the Domain Name System and is usually assigned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Disavow: In SEO, disavow means that search engines have to take manual action against your site due to the presence of unnatural links. This tells Google that certain links on your site should be ignored or discarded. If you have unwanted links, you can use this feature.

Session Duration: This is the average time a user spends on the site per visit.

Keyword Difficulty (KD): This is a metric that measures how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword or search term. Keyword difficulty scores range from 0 to 100, with 0 being the easiest to rank and 100 being the hardest.

Keyword Density: This is the percentage of impressions for a keyword on the same page. If keyword density is high, search engines consider it a “spamming technique” and may penalize your pages from ranking higher.

Exact Match Domain (EMD): A domain name whose keyword or search term is EXACTLY matched. These domains are used to rank higher for a specific keyword.

E

User Experience (UX): This is the overall user experience when viewing a website or application. The better the user experience, the lower the bounce rate and the higher the conversion.

IS: This is experience, authority, and reliability. Recently, Google also introduced another E which became EEAT, and the extra ‘E’ refers to experience. These factors are taken into account by Google to evaluate the quality, authority, and reliability of a website.

Link Exchange: This is a type of mutual agreement between two (or more) websites to create links between them.

F

Ariadne’s Son: Breadcrumbs are navigation elements that tell users their current position on a website, which helps improve indexing and the user experience.

Ranking Factors:  These are signals given by search engines when evaluating a page to determine its ranking. These factors include backlink quality, link quality, search intent, etc.

Featured Snippets: Featured Snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google search results.  They were introduced by Google to help people quickly find information for several popular search queries. These searches are also known as “Position Zero”.

Freshness: “Freshness” is an important ranking factor in search algorithms because it prioritizes newer, fresher, and recently updated content for most queries or keywords.

First Content Paint (FCP): This is a performance metric that measures the time it takes for the first piece of content to appear on a page.

 

G

Quick Wins: These are small, simple changes you can make to a website to improve its search engine rankings. Quick wins include updating old pages, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, removing untrustworthy links, and more.

Google Analytics: This is a FREE web analytics tool provided by Google to track website traffic and user behavior.

Google My Business (GMB): This is another free tool provided by Google that helps businesses create and manage their online presence. Businesses can display their information, such as website URL, email address, phone number, and more.

Google Search Console: A free tool introduced by Google that helps website owners track their site’s presence in Google search results. You can check your site’s indexing status, search queries, and crawl errors.

Google Panda: A Google algorithm update was introduced in 2011 to penalize low-quality websites with sparse content.

Google Penguin: Google’s algorithm update released in 2012 is designed to penalize websites that use spammy SEO techniques to build links.

Google Dove: An algorithm update from Google launched in 2014 to improve the ranking of local businesses in search results. This update helps provide more relevant and accurate results to users searching for local businesses that rank highly in organic searches.

The Brain of Google Ranking: It is a machine learning-based search engine algorithm launched by Google in 2005 to provide users with more relevant search results.

Guest Blogging: Guest blogging (or guest posting) is a link-building strategy that involves creating free content for other websites in exchange for receiving backlinks to your site.

Google Trends: This is a free tool from Google that analyzes the popularity of popular search queries in different countries.

H

Hreflang : Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographic targeting of a web page. This tag allows search engines to serve an appropriate version of this page based on the user’s country (or language settings).

hub: A hub (or content center) is a collection of content organized around one specific topic. They are also called “item groups”.

.htaccess: .htaccess (hypertext access) is a hidden file that allows you to customize the details of your website without changing the Apache server. You can configure various things like redirects, IP address management, etc.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): It is the primary markup language used to create web pages and web applications.

HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is mandatory for all websites and online stores, as it encrypts all information sent between the client’s website and the web service.

I

Vanity Indicators: These are data points or metrics that are NOT directly related to the website’s goals. Examples include impressions, likes, shares, comments, followers, etc.

Indexing: Indexing is the process by which search engines like Google organize information before searching to answer queries faster. It can also be thought of as a “database” in which search engines store and retrieve information when crawling websites.

Query Purpose: The purpose of the query or search phrase. The intent can be informational, navigational, or transactional.

Engagement Metrics: C Metrics measure how users interact with content on your site. May be

• Time spent on the page/site
• New and regular visitors
• Bounce Rate
• CTR

J

JavaScript (JS) is a just-in-time compiled programming language used to create dynamic and interactive web content.

Link juice: Link juice (or link authority) is the value of a link passed from one page to another. The more links pointing to a web page, the greater the link juice, which helps improve the ranking of the pages that receive it.

K

KPI (Key Performance Indicators): These are indicators used to measure the performance of a website. These metrics can include average customer value, dwell time, search visibility, organic click-through rate, and more.

L

Dofollow link: This is a link that transfers link juice (or link authority and SEO value) from one page to another.

Incoming link: This is a link from another website to your website. If Google were to link to our BlogPasCher website, it would be an inbound link to BlogPasCher. Incoming links can be very useful because they tell search engines that your site is authoritative.

Outgoing links: These are links that lead from one website to another.

Internal linking: These are hypertext links between a page on your site and another page on your site.

External link: a hypertext link that points from one website to another external website.

quality link: This is a backlink from an authoritative or trustworthy website. These links are extremely useful if you want to improve your site’s ranking.

Jump Link: This is a type of link that helps your site visitors navigate through your content faster. They allow you to link to specific sections of your web page or article. These links allow you to access a specific part of the web page.

Footer Links: These links appear at the bottom of a website (often called the “footer”).

Unnatural links: These are irrelevant (or spammy) links created for the sole purpose of boosting search engine rankings. These types of links may be penalized by Google.

Nofollow links: These links tell search engines NOT to use them to calculate page rank. Search engines do not take into account the juice or authority of these links.

Local Business Blueprint: This is structured data markup code that can be added to your business website to optimize local SEO.

M

Long-tail keyword: A keyword phrase that typically consists of three or more words. These keywords are less competitive than short-tail keywords and are often easier to rank for.

Meta Description: This is a short description of the web page that appears in search results (under the title). Compelling meta descriptions can help improve your click-through rate (CTR).

Target Keyword: This can be thought of as the primary keyword or search phrase that a web page is optimized for to improve its organic ranking.

Negative keywords: These are words or phrases for which you ask Google not to show your ad. For example, if you sell e-books, you can add the negative keyword “free” to prevent your ad from appearing in searches such as “free e-books.”

Keyword: A word or phrase that a person enters into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to find information about a topic or product.

N

Navigation: It can be thought of as a “menu” that allows users to navigate around a website. Good website navigation improves the user experience and reduces bounce rates.

O

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing a website’s ranking in search results. It uses many techniques, such as keyword research, content optimization, link building, blogger outreach, and more.

Video Optimization: This is the process of optimizing videos (whether YouTube videos or other videos) to improve their organic visibility in search results and on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube.

P

Custom 404 Page: A custom 404 page (also called an error page) is displayed when a user tries to access a non-existent page on a website. You can create custom 404 pages to display articles or high-traffic pages on your website.

First Link Priority: If you link to the same web page twice (or more), Google will always give priority to the first link.

Pingback: A notification (or ping) sent to search engines when a new web page is published. This can help get new website pages (or blog posts) quickly indexed in search results.

PPC (pay per click): Pay per click is an advertising model in which publishers pay for each click. These ads often appear above organic search engine results.

PBN: PBNs (private blog networks) are platforms created only for linking to other websites to increase their search engine rankings. Google frequently penalizes these networks.

Pogo sticking: Pogo sticking occurs when a user is unable to quickly find what they are looking for because they are looking through several different search results to find the right information (or product).

Entry Pages: These pages are designed specifically to rank highly for search engines, but they provide no value to users. This is a bad practice and can lead to lower site rankings.

Orphan Page: This is a web page without internal links pointing to it. This means that the user cannot access the page without knowing the exact URL. These pages are harmful to the structure of your site.

Web Page: This is a single page of a website, usually created using HTML. They can contain text, images, videos, etc.

Keyword Prominence: This is a good SEO practice that refers to the position of your keywords in your “prominent places” on the page, such as the meta description, title tags, image ALT tags, subtitles, etc. The closer the keyword is to the top headings and other important places, the more noticeable it is.

Knowledge Panel: This is the information box that appears in Google (top right on the desktop-only page) when you search for specific people, places, organizations, etc.

Home Page: This is the main page of a website that visitors typically see when they first come to your site.

Relevance: is one of the main ranking factors that tells search engines how relevant a web page is to a user’s query. Using relevant headings or body text plays a key role in relevancy.

Q

QDF (Query Deserves Fresh): This is a Google reranking feature that allows Google to show NEW web pages in search results (rather than old pages). QDF results mainly appear when a certain search query is trending or suddenly becomes popular.

R

Keyword research is the process of finding relevant keywords for your website. This is often done to increase search traffic to your site.

Keyword Grouping: It is recommended to group related keywords into clusters. This can help you do better keyword research and create HIGHLY relevant content that is optimized for multiple keywords.

On-page SEO: This is the process of optimizing the content, code, and structure of a website to improve its ranking in search results. On-page SEO factors include things like keyword usage, title tags, meta descriptions, and page speed.

Redirection: This is the process of sending a user from one web page to another. It has several benefits such as moving the web page to a new URL, fixing broken links, etc. The three most commonly used redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh.

Negative Link: It is a bad SEO practice to try to destroy another website’s ranking. These include creating spammy backlinks, negative reviews, bad user ratings, etc. for the target website.

Robots.txt: This is a file that tells search engines what URLs they can crawl on your website. It is mainly used to prevent search engines from crawling pages that have not yet been published. This is simply a way to protect a web page from Google.

Voice Link: This is about optimizing your website or products to appear in search results for voice search. These voice commands or queries are usually performed on search engines or voice devices such as Alexa or Siri.

Image SEO: Image SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s images for search engines. It’s about using relevant keywords in the image, including alt text, file name, and caption.

Query: is a word, phrase, or search query that is entered into search engines to find information.

Local SEO: This is the process of optimizing a website or business so that it can be found in local search results. Any business with a physical location can benefit from local SEO.

Organic Search: These are search results where you get FREE listings. You can use organic search to find websites through free search results.

Link Recovery: This is a link-building strategy that attempts to recover lost links. You can use tools like Semrush to easily find lost backlinks.

Whitelink: These are ALL SEO techniques that follow Google’s guidelines. These techniques are good to implement and include things like creating relevant content, updating existing articles, creating relevant links, and more.

Off-page SEO: These are all actions taken outside of your website to improve its ranking in search results. These include building links, getting reviews, mentions, etc.

Non-click searches: These are words, phrases, or search queries that result in a direct response from search engines such as Google. Searchers do not need to click on the results, as these searches provide quick answers.

S

Mobile Site: A website that can be easily viewed on mobile devices.

Directory Submission: This is a link building strategy that involves submitting a website’s URL to online directories. This is an off-page SEO tactic that builds links to a website.

Over-optimization: Over-optimizing your pages for search engines is a bad SEO practice. This is usually done by choosing one or two keywords and placing them throughout the page.

Quality Score: Measuring the quality of a backlink. These scores are used by Google to quickly determine the value of a backlink.

T

Dwell Time: The average time a person spends on a website page before returning to search results. If a page has a shorter dwell time, the search engine is NOT happy with the result.

Exit Rate:  The percentage of visitors who leave a website from a particular page is often used to analyze the effectiveness of landing pages or user flow.

Page Title: The text that appears in the web browser’s title bar when the page loads.

Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable text of a hyperlink. Using descriptive anchor text when linking to other pages is an SEO best practice. This helps search engines like Google understand the context of the link.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing or reading one web page. A high bounce rate often leads to poor conversions.

Traffic: This is the number of visitors to a website, app, or landing page. It can be measured in terms of unique visitors, total page views, or sessions.

TrustRank : This is an algorithm used by search engines like Google to combat spam on the Internet. TrustRank is calculated based on several factors, including the number of links, quality of links to a website, age of the website, etc.

Click-through rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of people who click on a specific link out of the total number of impressions (people who see the link). CTR = clicks ÷ impressions. For example, if you received 10 clicks and 100 impressions, your CTR would be 10%.

U

Canonical URL: The canonical URL is the URL of the MAIN version of a page when there are duplicate versions of the same page. This can be considered the preferred URL for the web page. These URLs help avoid duplicate content issues.

URL : A uniform resource locator (URL) is the address of a web page. In simple terms, a URL can be thought of as the home address of a website.

V

Page Load Speed: The overall time it takes to load a web page. Page loading speed used to be a ranking factor. This is always an important metric, as it can impact the user experience and bounce rate of a website.

Unique Visitors: These visitors are people visiting the website for the first time. Finding unique visitors for your SEO campaigns is very important because it can show you how effective your campaigns are.

Volatility: This is the fluctuation or change in search engine results (SERP) positions over time. It can be used to find out the ranking of keywords, their position in time, etc.

W

Web scraping: This is a method of collecting data (or content) from websites without the permission of the site owner. It is commonly used by search engine crawlers to collect and display data in search results for various queries.

Webspam: It is a bad SEO practice to create content with the sole purpose of “spamming Google search results.”

X

XML : This is a markup language (like HTML) that search engines use to understand data from a website.

XML Sitemap: This is a file that lists all the pages of a website with their URLs. They can help search engines crawl and index a website easily.

Y

YOY (Year by Year) of a Website: It measures the growth rate of a website from year to year by comparing the statistics over a certain period. It can be used to compare traffic levels, average session duration, bounce rate, etc.

Z

Frequently Asked Questions: SEO Terms and SEO Dictionary

Here are some frequently asked questions about SEO terminology:.

What is UGC in SEO?

UGC stands for User Generated Content, which is any form of content (text or video) posted by a user on the platform. Examples of user-generated content platforms include YouTube, Facebook, Quora, etc.

What is an additional link?

Sitelinks are links to other pages on your website that appear in certain Google search results.

What are orphan pages?

These are pages on a website that do not have internal links pointing to them from the website.

What is a 301 redirect?

This is the process of CONSTANTLY redirecting from one URL (or web page) to another URL.

What is a 302 redirect?

This is a TEMPORARY redirect from a URL (or web page) to another URL or page.

Final Thoughts on Search Engine Optimization Terms and Definitions

SEO glossary terms are essential to know and understand, especially if you intend to use SEO.

We highly recommend that you bookmark this page so that you can refer to it whenever you come across a difficult SEO term.

What do you think about the SEO vocabulary mentioned here? Do you have questions? Please let us know in the comments.