SEO Glossary

In my previous blog, I discussed what is SEO and Why it is important.

But before jumping in deep into the SEO process. For newbies, It is important for you to understand its various SEO terms.

You will come across with all these terms while SEO process. And you may learn it through Google.

But When I jumped to SEO process I also come across different SEO terms.

And I end up finding the meaning of the same word again and again because some terms are so confusing that they refused to enter your head in the first place.

This is the reason I am writing this article about SEO Glossary.

This article contains the complete list of all those SEO terms under one roof

So, let’s jump straight away to the full A-Z list of SEO terms!

400: Bad Request: When your screen pop with 400 error it means that the server is not able to process the request sent by the user. The server is not following the HTTP protocol properly.

Redirection: There are two type of redirect temporary and Permanent. But according to User, there is no difference between them. But for search engine they both are different.

301: A 301 is a permanent redirect its a instruction to web server that current links or records using the URL has been updated. The new URL should be provided in the Location field included with the response.

The 301 redirect is considered a best practice for upgrading users from HTTP to HTTPS

404: Not Found: It means a web page that you are trying to visit. is removed from the server.

This error pop up due to various reasons Web page that you are trying to visit is permanently removed from the server.

The website is updated with new URL but Admin forgets to change it on the server accordingly.

So the website is not able to redirect to the updated link automatically.

A

Alt text: Alt tag is also referred as title attributes of an images. The alt tags describe what on the image and the function of the image on the page.

Search engine cannot interpret images. Alt tags is a solution for this by providing text which is read by the search engines.

When Googlebot or other search engine crawlers inspect a page, images with properly formatted alt text contribute to how the page is indexed and where it ranks.

Analytics: It is a set of a programme which makes it easy for you to analyze your website under one roof.

This Programme is designed to track different activity performed by visitors on your website.

Like your website traffic, Bounce rate and many more.

Anchor text: Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.

The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through html code.

B

Backlink: It means an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website.

The higher, the trustworthy and relevant backlinks, the more are your chances to rank well in the SERPs.

Blackhat: It stands for the unethical practice of SEO guidelines.

In this method, Admin of the website doesn’t follow the guideline of a search engine to get rank in the SERPs.

If Google or any other search engine find such website they ban site permanently.

Blog: A set of the article is called a blog.

Bot: A device or piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, as online searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention

Bounce rate: A bounce is a single-page session on your site. Such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. or you can say that Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website, and do completely nothing on the page they entered.

So they don’t click on a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page and get exist.

Bread crumbs: Bread Crumbs help user to trace their steps from your website homepage to the page they are currently viewing.

For example:

I you are on Yoast.com for instance the path to their yoast SEO plugin page is Home > Software > WordPress Plugins > Yoast SEO for WordPress.

This breadcrumb immediately shows you where you are. Every part of that path is clickable, all the way to the homepage.

Bookmark: Bookmarking is an activity which is performed to increase your own website traffic and gain an ongoing stream of news readers and customers by posting link on bookmarking sites.

C

Canonical Issues: The canonical issue often called the “canonical link”, is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues.

It does this by specifying the “canonical URL”, the “preferred” version of a web page. Using it well improves a site’s SEO.

For example:

if you have several similar versions of the same content, you pick one “canonical” version and point the search engines at that. This solves the duplicate content problem because the search engine will understand which version canonical. it can count all the links towards all the different versions, as links to that single version. Setting a canonical is similar to doing a 301 redirect, but without actually redirecting.

Cloaking: It is the process of showing content to the search engine which is different that what human sees on the same website.

Cloaking is mainly the part of Black Hat SEO.

CMS: It stands for Content Management System. It is peace of software which allows you to build a website without any background knowledge of coding. Using drag and drop option you can easily build a website. Example WordPress.

Code Swapping: Process of changing the content of the website after achieving the higher rank on SERPs

Comment Spam: Irrelevant comments posted on your website for the sole purpose of dropping a link to the spammer’s website is called comment spam

Conversion: Process of making money from visitors to your website is known as conversion.

Conversion Rate: Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

Crawler: It is set of the programme also known as bot or spider. Who visit world wide web to collect information of the different website.

D

Doorway: A web page which is specially designed to catch traffic from a search engine. It redirects users to another or page is implementing cloaking.

Deep Linking: Process of giving back link to the internal page is known as Deep Linking.

Do-follow Link: While search engine bots crawling your website they look for the external links placed in your website. If these links are mention as do follow then the search engine bots will follow the link and so link juice will get pass.

How to give do follow link on your website?

 SEO 

Editorial Links: Link which is earned due to having quality content on the website or due to the content marketing of the content on the site.

F

Feed: This is a set of the programme through which users get a content on their device notification such as news, blogs etc.

FFA: It stands for Free for all. A website or page which contains many outgoing links to unrelated websites. Through Title or any unique content.

Frames: A web page which having to different document which appears on a single screen with its own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them.

G

Gizmo: It is a gadget or small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. Gizmos can make good link bait.

Google Bomb: when Google webmaster changes the search result for humorous effect is know as Google Bomb. The “miserable failure” – George Bush, and “greatest living American” – Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.

Google Bowling: Process of trying to lower the rank of a website by giving an outbound link from low Authority website.

Google Dance: Change in Google algorithm which causes fluctuation in SERPs.

Googlebot: Google’s spider program

GYM: Stand for Google – Yahoo – Microsoft, the big three of search

H

Hub: a Trusted page which having quality content and provides link to related pages.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language is a coded language for Search Engines. They cannot read standard texts so keep your HTML codes to the point and relevant to your domain so that your website can rank better.

I

Inbound link: It is an incoming link to your site from another website.

Index Noun: Database of a search engine. From where search Engine feeds result on your screen.

Index Verb: Webpage added to the index by the crawler.

Indexed Pages: Pages in the database which has been indexed by crawler

K

Keyword – key phrase: For search the words or phrase entered by the user in the search box of the search engine. keyword Cannibalization: Excess use of the same keyword on a different page of the same website. is known as keyword cannibalization. This practice makes it difficult for search engine to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.

Keyword Density: It is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page

Keyword Research: Searching for a keyword which is important for your niche.

Keyword Spam: It is also known as Keyword Stuffing. Inappropriately high keyword density.

L

Latent Semantic Indexing: It is a mathematical method used by search engine to determine the relationship between terms and concept in the content search by the users.

Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords: Are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. Contrary to popular belief, they are NOT just synonym or keywords that are similar in meaning.

Link: It is an element on the web page Which can be clicked by users to jump on another page.

Link Bait: Attractive or quality content which is shared to target the larger audience to increase the traffic to the website.

Link building: It is the process of obtaining a quality link for your own website from the authorized website is known as link building.

Link Condom: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link

Linkerati: This process includes social taggers, resource maintainers, forum posters and other content creators through which you generate traffic to your website.

Link Farm: A group or site which gives links to each other is known as link farming.

Link Juice: Link juice is a non-technical SEO term used to reference the SEO value of a hyperlink to a particular website or webpage.

Link Love: An outgoing link, which passes trust, unencumbered by any kind of link condom.

Link partner: Two websites who give a link to each other is known as Link Partner.

Link Popularity: Process of measuring the number of backlinks and incoming links to your site is known as link popularity.

Link Spam: Unwanted link those link which is posted by the users on your website.

Long Tail: Longer specific queries is known as the long tail.

M

Meta Description: It is text maximum of 160 character which appears below the title on the search engine results. When a user’s search a results search engine reads meta description and shows the results to the user accordingly.

Mashup: A web page which consists primarily of single-purpose software and other small programs (gizmos and gadgets) or possibly links to such programs

META Tags: It is consist of Meta Description and Meta Keywords. It is written is a head section of HTML. It is used by search engine to understand information is better manner.

Metric: A programme used by analytics for the standard measurement

MFA: It stands for Made for Advertisement. There is N number of website which is made for the commercial purpose.

Mirror site: the Same site with a different address is known as Mirror site.

Monetize: Website made to earn income.

N

Natural Links: When other webmasters, bloggers or website owners link to your content (blogs, images, products, videos etc) because they think is useful for their readers and adds value to their websites or pages.

Nofollow: If a search engine finds any nofollow backlinks then it will ignore the link and will not go deeper into crawling and no juice is passed.

How to mention No follow link on Site?

 SEO 

Non Reciprocal Link: If site A gives a link to site B but site B don’t link back to site A is known as Non Reciprocal link.

O

Off-page SEO: The SEO techniques which is performed out side of your own website to impact your ranking on SERPs.

On-page SEO: On-page SEO is a technique where the website owner optimizes his website and web pages all by himself.

Organic search: When your business pops up in a search result without paying any money is called organic search.

Organic link: An organic link is a link which is not paid or authorized for and is displayed to the users only because the search engine bots trusts them to be natural.

P

Panda: It is peace of algorithm design by Google using which web page with low-quality content and poor sites goes down in Google search result.

Penalties: Search engine penalizes the website which doesn’t follow the SEO factors and intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques. As a penalty search engine low rank these website in the search results.

Page Authority: It is a score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Page Authority is based on data which includes link counts, rank, Trust and dozens of other factors.

Penguin: Google Penguin is there another update which helps them to catch the sites that are spamming the search results by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google’s search ranking

Private Blog Network (PBN): It is a network of authoritative websites used to build links to your money website(s) for the purpose of ranking higher in the Google search engine. A money website is the website you intend on ranking

R

Reciprocal link: Two websites which mutually decides to interlink each other to gain rank in search results is known as a Reciprocal link.

Regional long tail (RLT): A multi-word keyword term which contains a city or region name

RLT: Stands for Regional Long Tail

Robots.txt: Robots.txt is a text file created by webmaster to instruct web bots. How to crawl web pages on their websites.

ROI: (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100.

S

Sandbox: It a filter which is placed by Google on new website. A new site which don’t receive good ranking on its important keywords and keywords phrases. Even the site having the good content. The site is affected by sandbox effect.

SEM: It is a process of promoting your website on search engine by paying some money to get your business on the 1st page of the search.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization ( For more visit – https://seoshouts.com/what-is-seo/)

SERP: This is a page which shows the result when the user inserts query in the search bar.

Site Map: A Sitemap is a structured page or document which helps the search engine or webmasters to know about the proper flow and structure of the website to help them to index and rank better in the SERPs.

Sock Puppet: Creating an online identity for hiding person’s real identity.

Social Bookmark: It is a form of social media where admin bookmarks their site for public access.

Social Media Marketing: Marketing your business using different social media platform is known as social media marketing (SMM).

Spamdexing: It is a practice using which admin try to boost their business page ranking in the search result.

Spammer: Spammers are people who keep spamming the web.

Spider trap: an Endless loop of the link which traps the spider programme. It is mainly used for spamming.

Splash Page: Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content.

Static page: Page whose content is static is know as a static page.

T

Time on the page: Amount of time visitors spend on any particular page of the website.

U

URL: stand for Uniform Resource Locator

User-Generated Content: Content which is generated for users. Like blogs, Press Release and much more.

W

Walled Garden: A web page which is linked to each other but doesn’t link to any other page know as a walled garden.

Web 2.0: Are the profiles built on free subdomains with a bunch of quality blog posts.

White hat SEO: SEO done for any website following the right guideline and technique for SEO is known as White Hat SEO.

Widget: Small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display.

Conclusion:

I hope the above SEO Glossary is helpful for you. If still, you have any doubt in any specific term.