SEO Glossary

Discovery Mosti

There are so many different terms out there used in the digital marketing world, some of them are vital in your understanding of SEO and others are just some jargon that people might use to trip you up. Either way, it's best you get to grips with it all.

1. Algorithm – This is what the search engines carry out so they can determine which results are best for the user's search terms.
2. Alt text – Alt text or Alternative text is what you would add to an image as an attribute to the HTML. When Search engines crawl your site, they can't actually see the images so this text will help them understand what your image is. The user would only be able to see this text if the images on the site do not load correctly.
3. Analytics – This is a collection of data that displays a website's performance with its users such as click-through rate and bounce rate etc. It can also display customers behaviour when interacting with a site.
4. Anchor text – The clickable text that appears within a hyperlink is called Anchor text, it is one of the factors that search engines take into consideration when ranking a site.
5. Backlink – This is a link that is received from one site to another. For example, if within this page I created a link to Coca-Cola's website, then I have just given their site 1 backlink.
6. Branding – Branding is when you take an idea, create an image and market it to an audience. There are multiple forms of branding that take place on and offline
7. Broken link – This is a link that no longer works or has never worked. This means that the page it's directing the user to does not exist. This can be caused by either the page being moved to a different URL or the page being deleted.
8. Browser - A browser is what a user would use to view web pages on the internet, there are multiple browsers out there such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox.
9. Cache – This is where the data is stored from web pages that the user has visited which create faster loaded times.
10. Canonical tag – These tags are used to help search engines with duplicate content. A canonical tag would be used to tell the search engine that the page is duplicate so that the other can rank in the search engine.
11. Content – This is the text and images that appear on any web page on the internet, it is one of the biggest factors in ranking a website. It can be on anything from, blogs, pages, and videos.
12. Conversion – This is the action that you want the user to take once they reach your website. This can be buying a product of signing up for a newsletter etc.
13. Crawler – This is what search engines use to grab sites content to index.
14. CSS - Cascading style sheets are part of the code on the website that contains the styles, fonts and colours.
15. Click-through Rate(CTR) - The click-through rate is a metric that appears on analytics. It is used to determine how successful your campaign is. It is calculated by dividing the overall number of clicks by the number of impressions.
16. Digital Marketing - Digital marketing is a term used to describe any kind of marketing that involves the internet. This can be anything from emails to SEO to Social Media.
17. Directories - A directory is businesses and sites that contain a whole list of companies from different sectors such as Yell, Thomson Local, Scoot etc.
18. Domain Authority - The domain authority metric is one factor that Google takes into consideration when ranking a website. This is determined by your site's age, size and popularity.
19. E-commerce - E-commerce is an online store that allows a site to take orders and payments.
20. Follower - Followers are a term used to describe people that are subscribed to any content you post. This term is mainly used in social media circles.
21. Gif - A gif is a lower resolution image than the likes of jpeg, but it supports short animation features.
22. Google Adwords - This is a marketing option that is Google offers also known as pay per click(PPC). It allows you to create sponsored ads on Google's search results which will cost you a fee per click.
23. Homepage - The homepage of a website, also known as the main page or index page is the first page that the user will see if they type the domain name into the search bar.
24. HTML - Hypertext markup language is coding tags that are used to represent the formatting of text, images, tables, lists etc.
25. Hyperlink - A hyperlink is clickable for the user to be able to access another site or document.
26. Inbound Link - This is also known as a backlink, it is a link coming from another site pointing to your site
27. Index - An index is a collection of data that search engines have crawled which is then stored in the search results.
28. Interact - This word in the context of marketing is the process of you interacting with your user base. This can be done through multiple avenues such as social media and forums.
29. Internet Marketing - This is just another word for online and digital marketing.
30. Java - This is a computing language that is used to run certain programs on browsers.
31. JavaScript - JavaScript is a scripting language that works within the HTML of a website
32. JPG - JPG or Joint Photographic Group is a file type used for images, it allows you to store high-quality images in a smaller file size. This is what is called lossy compression so it will have an effect on the overall image quality.
33. Keyword - Keywords are used to best describe the content of a web page. In terms of SEO, pages must be optimised to allow for search engines to crawl your site and easily understand what your page is about.
34. Keyword Density - Keyword Density is how often the keyword has been mentioned throughout the web page.
35. Keyword Phrase - This is just 2 or more words together to make a keyword phrase.
36. Landing Page - A landing page is the page that the user ends up on once they click on a link in a search engine, email, google ad etc.
37. Link - A link is a what is used to direct someone from one place to another. It is usually in the form of text or an image for the user to click on.
38. Linking Structure - A linking structure is what you search engines look for when crawling your site, a clear and well mapped out linking structure is important for SEO as this indicates to search engines that users can easily navigate your site
39. Meta Data - This type of data is used to help search engines understand what a web page is about. Metadata is in the form of tags and plain text.
40. Meta Description - The meta description is a short description of what a web page is about and should consist of anywhere between 70 and 160 characters.
41. Meta Tag - This is a tag used to help search engines understand web pages, tags have different levels of importance such as <h1>, <h2>, <p> etc. which again search engines will take into account.
42. Meta Title - The Meta Title is the title that will show for the pages result on a search engine. This should clearly state what the page is about and should contain no more than 60 characters.
43. Metric - A metric is a piece of data that is used to determine how a website is performing. SEO involves looking at a lot of metrics to understand where a site needs improvement.
44. Mobile Friendly - Mobile Friendly is what a user will call a website that has the functionality to work correctly with a mobile device. The first point of call is the newest line of site
45. Negative Keyword - These are keywords that have been deemed unnecessary for an advertising campaign. Adding negative keywords to a campaign will prevent the site from showing in the results for that keyword to avoid any waste in the budget.
46. Off-page - This is the term best used to describe any actions that affect your sites ranks that occur off of the website itself. This includes things like backlinks, directories etc.
47. On-page - This is the areas of SEO that involve the actual website itself. This can be factors such as meta tags, internal linking structures etc.
48. Optimising - This is carrying out the action of modifying a site's on-page and off-site elements to boost its rankings within search engines.
49. Organic Traffic - Organic traffic is people that have come through a website from the natural search results that don't involve paid advertising.
50. Page Authority - This is another metric that determines how likely a page is to show on a search engines results. It has a point scale of 1 to 100
51. Page Rank - The page Rank or PR is a metric ranging from 1 to 10 that used to be an important factor in how high a site would rank on Googles search engine. Since changes have occurred in the algorithm, this metric isn't as relevant anymore.
52. Paid Traffic - This is the traffic that has come through a website via paid advertising such as Google Adwords
53. Plugin - This is an extension that can be attached to websites to allow for extra features and functionality. Popular plugin types include contact forms, e-commerce etc.
54. PNG - PNG or Portable Network Graphics is an image file type that supports lossless Compression. This means that the original image quality isn't affected.
55. PPC - PPC or Pay-per-click is a form of internet marketing that involves bidding for certain keywords that allow for your website to be advertised on search engines.
56. Ranking - The ranking of a website is the position that it's sitting in a search engine. The top three ranks in search results gain the most traffic which is why SEO is all about boosting a website's position on a search engine.
57. Redirect - A redirect is when a URL has been forwarded on to another URL. I would suggest that you try to improve your work through this. This is used to allow for multiple domains to land on the same website. For example, a site may be on a .co.uk domain but you want to those who type in .com to land on your site also.
58. Referral - A page that links to another site is called referral page for the site that has been linked to.
59. Responsive Website - A responsive site is one that is very easy for the user to interact with on both desktop and mobile devices
60. Results Page - A results page is what a search engine will throw up any time you type in a keyword and search.
61. RSS - The RSS or Rich Site Summary is where you can leave information about updates to your site, users can subscribe to this so they can receive notifications.
62. Search Engine Saturation - This is the term used to describe lots of pages showing up from the same site on 1 results page.
63. Search Volume - Search volume is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase has been searched on a bi-monthly basis.
64. SEM - Search Engine Marketing is a term used to describe the overall marketing in search engines which involves paid (PPC) and unpaid (SEO) search.
65. SEO - Search Engine Optimisation is a marketing method that improves a websites organic rankings on a search engine.
66. SERP - The SERP or search engines results page is the page that shows after a user has typed information into a search engine and committed the search.
67. Sitemap - A sitemap is a list of pages that are on a website, mapped out for crawlers to easily scan the pages. This makes sitemaps very important for SEO reasons.
68. Social Media Marketing - This is a form of marketing that uses social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic and business to a website,
69. Spam - Spam usually comes in the form of an email that is irrelevant content that can even cause harm to a website or computer.
70. Sponsored Results - The sponsored results are what you can also call advertising results. These are usually in the form of bids for certain keywords that allow for you to gain more traffic. There are tools such as Google Adwords which enable you to create sponsored results.
71. Traffic - Traffic in marketing is what is used to describe users on websites. The traffic metric is one of the main factors to determine how successful a marketing campaign is.
72. TXT - This is a text file that has very basic editing options.
73. URL - Where any file is located on the internet they have a unique web address which is known as a URL. Users can type this into a browser to view the file.
74. User Experience - The user experience is a marketing term that users will send to the newest version of WordPress. This is determined how satisfied a user is with their experience of navigating your website, buying a product etc.
75. Visibility - Visibility is determined by how often your web pages show up in googles search engines. The purpose of SEO is to improve this factor so that your site is showing for a lot more keywords and phrases.
76. XML - This is a markup language that you will see used for sitemaps etc.