SEO is a lot of work! This glossary of SEO terms is designed to make your SEO life a little easier.
SEO is hard enough as it is. There’s tons of work to do, SEO terms to learn, errors to fix, images to resize, and inevitably you’ll have to do the same job twice, maybe even three times until it is correct.
Memorizing these key SEO terms won’t make you an SEO superstar overnight, but it will make your SEO life a lot easier.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Abbreviated as AMP, this SEO term is a feature that allows your site to be loaded much quicker on mobile devices by reducing unused html.
Alternative (Alt) Text
Search engines are unable to determine what an image is by “seeing” it, so alternative text is text that tells the search engines what an image is. This is different from file name.
Anchor Text
The clickable text of a link.
Backlink
A link coming in to your website from another site.
Black hat technique
Black hat techniques in SEO are methods that the search engines don’t want you to use and can penalize you for.
Blog
Short for web log, a blog is an area of a website (or sometimes the entire site) where you place articles related to your product or service.
Bounce Rate
The rate of users that leave your site immediately after arrival.
Click Through Rate
CTR is the rate at which users click on your site on a search engine result page (serp). The ratio is impression-clicks.
Cloaking
When a website displays different content to users and search engines. A black hat technique.
Content
The information on your webpage. Content can be text, images, video, blogs, etc.
Conversion
This SEO term is the process of a website visitor doing a specific thing. Examples are a user filling out a form, or buying a product, or calling your business. These are all conversions.
CPC
Cost per click. The dollar amount that an advertiser will charge for a click to your website.
Crawling
This is what search engines do to index your page in their search results. The spider/Google bot searches webpages for SEO terms and keywords. If a page is not indexed it will not appear in the search results.
Directory
Directories are websites where you can place your information, such as Yelp or Foursquare.
Domain
This SEO term is the name of your website before the suffix. E.g. on google.com, google is the domain name. The URL is the whole thing beginning with https.
Domain Authority
A metric invented by Moz.com to rank a website’s score dependent on a number of factors.
Duplicate Content
Information that appears in more than one place on the internet.
External Link
A link form a website that directs the user to a different site. Different than directing a user from page to page, which is an internal link. Here’s an external link to Google.
Google Adwords
Adwords is Google Pay-Per-Click advertising service where users bid on specific keywords relevant to their product or service.
Google Analytics
Created by Google, this software enables a webmaster to see site analytics, such as where the traffic is coming from, what the bounce rate is, how many pages users navigate to, etc.
Google Bot / Google Spider
This SEO term is the robot that scans/crawls the internet for Google.
Google Search Console
GSC allows webmasters to make sure their pages are on indexed on Google. It also provides error reports if a page is not functioning properly or isn’t mobile-friendly.
Heading tags
Tags on your website text identifying important information for search engines. Use only one of each for each webpage.
HTML
Hypertext transfer protocol. The language used to build and show webpages.
Hyperlink
A link.
Image SEO
Adding alt text, reducing file size, and adding titles and captions are all instances of image SEO.
Inbound link
A link form an outside website to yours. Also called a backlink.
Index
Verb- When search engines file your website on their platform.
Internal links
Links between pages inside of a website. Here’s an internal link to our homepage, Pasadena SEO Company.
Impressions
When a user sees an item. Different from a conversion where a user takes action.
Keywords
Phrases, 2 to 5 words long, that are used to tell users and search engines what information is on your webpage. These are then placed in important real estate on your webpage, e.g. URL, title, headings, etc.
Keyword Density
The ratio of your keyword to the entire text of a site. A good density is 1%.
Keyword Stuffing
The practice of over-placing your keyword on a webpage. Not advised.
Link building
Getting other websites to place links on their pages to your website.
Local SEO
Process of utilizing these SEO terms while optimizing your site to populate on search engine result pages when someone does a search in your area relevant to your product or service. Mostly used for businesses.
Long tail keyword
Keywords that have many words in them, making them easier to rank for.
Meta description
A description of your webpage that appears in search engine results but is not visible on your page.
Meta Title
A tag telling search engines the name of your page. The blue part of the google result.
Noindex
A tag telling a search engine not to index this page. See Indexing.
Off-page SEO
Optimization outside on your website. E.g. backlinks, citations, etc.
On-page SEO
What you do on your webpage to optimize it. E.g. Keywords, content, meta titles, alt image attributes, etc.
Organic Traffic
Users who go to your website from a Google result page, not a paid ad.
Optimization
The practice of using all these SEO terms while making a website search friendly, includes decreasing page load times, removing multiple headers, having fresh content, avoiding duplicate content, creating backlinks, meta titles and descriptions, etc.
Outbound links
See external link.
Outreach marketing
Trying to get influencers or other parties to market your product or service.
PPC
Abbreviation of Pay Per Click, an advertising method wherein you pay per each user enacted visit to your website from the advertising platform.
Pageviews
A metric that counts how many users view your page.
Position
See ranking.
Query
What a person types in a search.
Ranking
Where you rank on a search engine result page.
Robots.txt
A file that tells search engines which pages on your site to crawl.
Searcher intent
In search, what a user in intending to do. Search engines try to identify this metric rather than spit out results that are verbatim to what a user entered.
SEO
Search engine optimization. See optimization.
SEM
Abbreviation for search engine marketing, the practice of paying to appear in search engine results.
SERP
This SEO term means Search Engine Results Page. What Google returns after a search is entered.
Sitemap
A document that tells Google how your pages are interconnected.
Time on page
The amount of time a user spends scrolling, reading, or interacting with a webpage.
URL
Standing for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the address of a webpage on the internet. The URL we are at now is https://pasadenaseo.co/blog/glossary-of-seo-terms/
Usability
Metric indicating how easy to use a website is.
Website speed
How long it takes a webpage to load.
White hat SEO
Strategies that optimize a webpage’s SEO that search engines are okay with.
XML sitemap
This SEO term is refers to a document (commonly sitemap.xml) that maps of all your different webpages in your site for a search engine to see.
Well, there it is! We hope you found this useful! If you feel we left something out, feel free to leave a comment below and we'll add it to our glossary of SEO terms.
The only way to become a better SEO is spending hours in front of the keyboard, but knowing these SEO terms by heart is going to make your workflow faster and enable you to get more done. Also it helps you not need to go back over something because you messed it up by not understanding it the first time.
Thanks, for reading our blog! Feel free to browse our site and learn more about us, or to employ our SEO services.
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