SEO

SEO Glossary

13/07/2022

Sometimes, we forget that not everyone comes from a digital background. To aid newcomers, we’ve compiled a comprehensive SEO glossary detailing all of the most frequently used digital marketing and SEO terminology.

SEO Glossary 2022: Touch up on your SEO knowledge

We’re frequently updating this list with new terms. Don’t forget to bookmark or save this page for future reference. For easy navigation, click on one of the letters below for the page to relocate you to the desired section instantly.

Last updated: 13th July 2022.

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X

#

 

.htaccess: The .htaccess file is a configuration file that allows webmasters to control cache settings, URL redirections, and many more advanced website commands.

404 Not Found: A 404 code is a response code that indicates that a page is unavailable or not found. The page may have been deleted, moved or is just temporarily unavailable.

301 Redirect: A 301 redirect diverts a user from an existing URL to a new URL. A 301 redirect tells a search engine that the URL has been permanently moved. 301 redirects are the most commonly used type of redirect as they can transfer existing link juice to the new web page.

302 Redirect: A 302 redirect acts as an additional redirection command. However, unlike a 301 redirect the 302 does not pass link juice to the new web page.

 

A

 

Above The Fold: Above the fold is a term used to describe the top portion of a web page viewable without scrolling.

AC Rank: AC Rank stands for A Citation Rank. This ranking score is calculated based on the number of root-linking domains a website possesses. The score is scaled from 0-15, 15 being the highest. AC Rank had initially originated from Majestic SEO.

Alt Attribute: An Alt attribute is text that provides information about a particular image. Search engines aren’t capable of adequately understanding what an image is about without using an ALT image tag.

Eg. The HTML code of an image of a Black Porsche 911 Turbo would look like so: <img src=”http://www.example.com.au/black-porsche-911-turbo.png” alt=”Black Porsche 911 Turbo” />

Anchor Text: An anchor text can also be called a link label, link text, or link title.

An anchor text is the visible, clickable text that appears as a hyperlink. Best practice states that the anchor text should be used to describe best the content of the page it is linking to.

Eg. Say, we can link to a page about an Apple iPhone 15. The anchor text would appear like so: Apple iPhone 15. Using a clear and descriptive anchor text provides the end-user with a general idea of what the linked-to page is about.

Arbitrage: Arbitrating exploits market inefficiencies by taking advantage of the price difference between two or more markets.

Some webmasters use spun articles to build bulk amounts of new backlinks. This practice is a direct manipulation of search engine quality guidelines and may result in a Penguin penalisation by Google.

Authority: Authority (or Domain Authority) typically refers to a website or web page’s ranking potential on the SERPs. Five key factors contribute to a site or page’s authority. They include link equity (quality and quantity), website age, traffic trends, and web content.

Authority Site: An authority site refers to a website that is an established figure within its respective industry. An authoritative website will most likely have excellent online visibility, high SEO rankings and many quality pages.

 

B

 

Backlinks: The term backlink or links is one of the most used terms in the SEO industry. A backlink is an inbound or incoming link from an external site.

A healthy amount of high-quality backlinks indicates that a website is an authority within its field. This may also signify that the website contains quality content that people in the industry are actively looking for and would link to.

Bad Neighbourhoods: Bad neighbourhoods refer to a website or a group of websites that engage in unethical or black hat practices. Being associated with linking activities with bad neighbourhoods can put your website on high alert when detected by search engines.

Black Hat SEO: Black Hat SEO refers to specific SEO practices and techniques that directly violate search engine guidelines – Google, Bing, Yahoo. Such techniques are a direct attempt at manipulating search engines to achieve higher rankings. Black Hat SEO techniques include but are not limited to the cloaking of text, excessive keyword stuffing, automated link schemes, article spinning and more.

Blog: A blog, short for weblog, is the discussion section of a website that consists of informational posts. Blogs are a good way to engage with readers actively. Blogs are also considered powerful communication tools to distribute content (also for blogging SEO purposes) and attract large viewership.

Blogroll: A list of links on a blog typically links to related blogs within the same industry or field.

Branded Keywords: Branded keywords are associated with the brand name. For example, “Apple phones” is a branded keyword because the brand name is part of the overall word.

On the other hand, “New phones” would be deemed an unbranded keyword as the keyword contains no mentions of a brand name. The process of SEO typically aims to attract organic traffic via unbranded keywords.

Broken Links: Broken links no longer direct the user to the designated page requested. Websites should be regularly checked for broken link occurrences and fixed ASAP. Having a healthy site with minimal broken links ensures a high level of user experience and may even result in improved conversion rates.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rates refer to the percentage of users who enter a web page and leave without any additional action.

 

C

 

Cache: A cache is a component that stores data so future requests for page content can be served even faster than the first request. Numerous cache plugins for WordPress do an excellent job of serving page content faster. The following two plugins have been known to work exceptionally well: W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache.

Call to Action: A call-to-action is a marketing term to encourage or persuade users to complete a particular task. Call-to-action keywords are highly motivated when selling or marketing a particular service or product. Such keywords may include: call, contact, purchase, buy or get in touch. At least one call-to-action keyword should be used in the meta description. This increases the chances of higher click-through rates from the search engine result pages.

Cannibalisation: Cannibalisation is a term that describes two or more web pages on the same website trying to rank for the same keyword. Two or more pages unintentionally optimised for the same keyword could see themselves ranking and being de-ranked for the same search query.

Canonical Tags: A canonical tag uses rel=”canonical”. The canonical tag hints to Google that there is a preferred version of a set of pages with very similar content. Many websites have several pages with very similar products and content. For search engines to best crawl and index the correct page, the most preferred page should be tagged with the canonical parameter.

CDN: CDN is an acronym for content delivery or distribution networks. CDNs are large systems of servers deployed across multiple data centers of the internet to serve content to users fastest and most efficiently.

There are both paid and free CDNs offering different levels of service. Pricing structures may vary considerably depending on the bandwidth and features required.

Citations: A citation (commonly referred to as a local citation) is any reference you can provide about your local business. Citation metrics include business name, address, contact number, fax and any other relevant information you can provide about your business.

Citations contribute to a website’s credibility and local search engine rankings. Local businesses should take advantage of citations by submitting them to local websites such as Hot Frog, Yellow Pages, Local and Yelp.

Click Fraud: Click fraud is the term used to describe intentionally clicking on an ad to waste an advertiser’s budget. This occurrence is most frequent on Google AdWords, as the platform uses a Pay-Per-Click system.

Click Through: Click through describes the actions of a user clicking on a link and being taken to the destination page.

Cloaking: Cloaking is a form of Black Hat SEO technique that involves presenting content to a search engine spider that is, in fact, different from the content presented to a user.

CMS: CMS is an acronym for ‘content management system.’ CMS are programs created to provide webmasters with an easy navigational back-end system – without the need to learn complex coding languages.

Examples of content management systems include WordPress, Magento and Joomla.

Content: Content is the term used to describe all relevant information and materials on a website. Content can be made up of text, images, buttons and more.

Content Marketing: Content marketing is utilising content to distribute rapidly across multiple online channels such as social media, forums and news websites.

Content marketing aims to attract users with content and convert them into purchasing customers by leading them to the website.

Conversion: A conversion refers to a user who has taken action on what the website is built to achieve. This may involve purchasing an item, signing up for a program, or subscribing to a newsletter.

Conversion Rate: A conversion rate is the percentage measurement of converted users.

Eg. If a website receives 100 visitors, and 10 visitors end up making a purchase, this would equate to a 10% conversion rate.

CPA: CPA is an acronym for cost per acquisition. This is a term used to describe the business-related expense used in trying to convert a new customer.

CPC: CPC is an acronym for cost per click, which describes the cost incurred when a user clicks on an advertisement link or image.

Crawl/Crawling: The term crawling refers to search engine spiders analysing and gathering information about a web page and sending the data back to the source (search engines). After a web page has been crawled, the search engines gather all relevant data to index the page into its search result pages. The web page then gets ranked according to its relevancy with the search query being searched.

CRO: CRO is an acronym for conversion rate optimisation. Much like search engine optimisation, CRO is focused on improving a website’s conversion rate by optimising and changing different components of the site to have it drive more sales or leads ultimately.

CSS: CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheet. CSS is used to control the styling and appearance of a website.

CTR: CTR is an acronym for click-through rate. A click-through rate defines the percentage of exactly how many times an ad has been clicked in relation to the amounts of impressions (views) the ad has received. Eg. An ad receives 1000 views and there have been 100 clicks which equal a CTR of 10%.

 

D

 

Deep Links: A deep link is a web page within a website’s hierarchy. Eg. You’ve got your root domain www.bluemonkey.com.au, an example of a deep link within the Blue Monkey website would appear like this: www.bluemonkey.com.au/south-africa/blue-monkey.

De-Index: De-indexation is when a site or web page has been excluded and removed from the search engine result page. De-indexation is most likely due to implementing Black Hat SEO or unethical optimisation techniques.

Directory: A directory, or web directory, specialises in linking to relevant websites by having webmasters submit their websites to be categorised within its database. Many paid and free web directories offer opportunities for backlink building.

Dofollow Links: A dofollow link is a link that passes along link equity to the target URL. Dofollow links directly increase a website’s authority and page rankings on the SERPs.

Domain Age: A website’s domain age refers to when a website has been registered. Search engines typically prioritise older sites in comparison with newly registered websites.

Domain Trust (DT): Domain trust is a term used to identify how trusty-worthy search engines deem your website. Various factors are taken into consideration when determining a website’s DT. They include domain age, a website’s incoming link diversity, the percentage of high-quality links compared to low quality, and internal linking structure. Moz’s famous MozTrust is a great metric for determining domain trust.

Duplicate Content: Duplicate content refers to content that has been copied or matches content from another website. Search engines view duplicate content as untrustworthy and, in return, will most likely contribute to the page ranking poorly within the search engine result pages.

 

E

 

EMD: EMD stands for exact match domain and refers to the domain name being the exact match with a website’s primary keyword. Eg. An EMD for the keyword ‘dog harness’ would be dogharness.com.au. EMDs have long been known to play a huge part in increased ranking positions for the matching keyword. Over time, Google has implemented updates to devalue the priority of EMDs.

Educational Links: Educational links are .edu domain names. Educational links are highly regarded as links that transfer one of the highest amounts of link equity when linked to an external web page. Because of the complicated nature of acquiring a .edu backlink, search engines typically deem these domains to be of higher ranking value.

Evergreen Content: Evergreen content refers to naturally timeless and ever-useful content. The idea behind the word comes from being forever green – forever fresh. Eg. The informative content of abdominal workouts will forever stay relevant compared to a news report that would only stay fresh for a few days. Search engines have incorporated updated algorithms to consider the effects of evergreen web pages and how they should be appropriately ranked on the search engine result pages. Case studies have also shown the effects of evergreen content and how they contribute to branding, user engagement and conversions.

 

F

 

Feeds: A feed is a web document that is a shortened version of a web page used for syndication purposes.

Footer: The footer is the bottom section of a website. It usually contains navigational links to relevant web pages and business contact information.

 

G

 

GoogleBot: GoogleBot is Google’s very own search engine spider responsible for the data collection of all the websites across the web.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is Google’s free website data tracking service. The platform tracks and monitors all relevant statistics, including website traffic, traffic sources, organic search queries, conversion rates and integrated Adwords data.

Google Bowling: Negative SEO is the process of decreasing a competitor’s website on the search engine result pages by linking very high volumes of low-quality links to their website.

Google Dance: Google Dance refers to the constant change in SERP rankings. This is mostly caused by indexation updates of Google’s database or algorithm.

Geo-Targeting: Geo-Targeting describes targeting specific users based on their location. The location could be a country, state, city or postcode.

Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools is a free website analysis service. The tool allows webmasters to check their websites’ health and indexation status. The tool has received many updates from 2012-2014, such as the Link Disavow and Rich Snippets implementation, allowing webmasters to understand their websites better.

Grey Hat SEO: Grey hat SEO refers to practises and techniques that aren’t completely ethical; however, at the same time are also not considered to be black-hat practices.

Guest Posting: Guest posting is writing for a related blog within the same niche or industry. Guest posting is a foundation for brand awareness, self-promotion, PR and link building.

 

H

 

Header: The header is the top section of a website. It usually comprises the website’s logo and navigational bar and acts as the primary navigation source when browsing a website.

Heading Tags (H1, H2, and H3): Heading tags are marked-up page headings that describe the web page’s content. Search engines use heading tags as a means of deeming the relevancy of a web page.

Home Page: A home page refers to the page on the website’s main page on the root domain.

HTML: HTML stands for hypertext markup language. It is a computing programming language used to create web pages and all other relevant materials that can be displayed on a web browser.

Hyperlink: A hyperlink is the HTML term for a basic link, primarily directing you to the new page after clicking.

 

I

 

IM: IM is the acronym for Internet Marketing and may also be called online or web marketing. Internet marketing includes marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, content marketing, lead generation, email marketing and Facebook advertising.

Impression: An impression is equivalent to one view or display of a webpage or ad. Typically, SEO data tracking tools will provide the total impressions achieved on a website in specific time frames.

Inbound Marketing: is the process of advertising your business through SEO, social media marketing, videos, blogs and all relevant forms of content marketing. Inbound marketing is considered to earn customers’ trust and attention rather than convincing them of your company’s worth (Outbound marketing – cold-calling, radio, television, PPC). Inbound marketing creates numerous foundations for the company to be found on and draws the customer in by providing or offering something they find of interest.

Indexed/Indexation: Indexation is having a webpage registered within the SERPs. To check the number of pages indexed, type in the following command within Google’s Universal Search: site:yourwebsitehere.com

Infographic: Infographics are visual representations of data, graphs, and text that are fused to be presented quickly, clearly, and highly efficiently.

Internal Linking: Internal linking is linking to another inner page. Internal linking helps increase search engine crawling efficiency and improves user navigational abilities.

Inbound Link: An inbound link is an incoming link, coming from a 3rd party website to yours.

 

K

 

Keywords: Keywords are search queries used to find a relevant web page. Different keywords serve different purposes. Long and highly descriptive keywords have higher chances at conversions in comparison with shorter keywords, which have high amounts of volume but may contain very poor conversion ratios.

Keyword Density: Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword has been used in the body of a web page. While Google has stated in the past that no more than 2% of the body content should contain the target keyword, any more would be considered spam. However, Yahoo and Bing, on the other hand, have stated that they’ll allow up to a 5% keyword density. For best practice, we recommend optimising for anywhere from 2-4%.

Keyword Research: Keyword research involves analyzing and carefully selecting specific keywords that would best accomplish website objectives. Generally, keyword research selects the best keywords to increase a website’s online visibility.

Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the unethical optimisation technique of overusing keywords in the body section of a web page. It usually occurs when the keyword density is above 5%.

 

L

 

Landing Page: A landing page is a page strategically set up to capture leads and generate sales. It is typically the destination page when users click on an online ad or SERP result.

Latent Semantic Indexing: LSI for short, is used by search engines to identify key phrases related to a web page, and to understand better what the page is about.

Link Bait: Most commonly created by search engine marketers and content marketers, link bait is content designed to gain attention and attract users to link to the website. Forms of linkbait may include online hoaxes, eBooks, guides, memes and infographics.

Link Building: Link building is building backlinks to a website. The number of backlinks a site possesses indicates its popularity and value in the eyes of search engines. This directly contributes to its ranking position on the SERPs.

Link Disavow: Google’s Link Disavow submits links to Google that you want to be ignored. By having a link/s submitted, Google will no longer transfer link equity from the submitted external link to the host website. The Link Disavow tool allows for single link submissions to disavowing links from an entire website. Google recommends that link disavows be completed only by experts, as freely submitting links could harm your website’s rankings.

Link Equity: Link equity, also known as link weight, link value or link juice, is the amount of value a link passes through to another web page. Google has deemed that every link holds a unique value based on the website’s authority linking out. An incoming link from a highly authoritative website would hold more link equity than a website with minimal online credibility and authority.

Link Exchange: Link exchange is the negotiation process between two webmasters to establish an incoming link on either side.

Link Farm: Link farms are groups of websites that contain an excessive amount of external links. Link farms typically have no real content of their own and exist for the sole purpose of linking out to as many websites as they choose. Automated programs create many link farms. Many are set up to increase the number of backlinks to the target website.

Link Hoarding: Link hoarding is the method of the unwillingness to link out to other websites. This is often done to keep all link equity circulating within one’s website.

Link Profile: A link profile refers to the different types of sources of incoming links to a website. A variety of different metrics can be incorporated into building a link profile. The most common link profile metrics include the number of backlinks, quality of backlinks, the number of linking root domains, PageRank and the different types of linking websites, whether from blogs, blog comments or forums.

Linking Root Domain: Linking root domains refers to the number of links to your website. For example, a link linking from www.examplesite.com.au to www.examplesite2.com.au would be classified as a linking root domain. On the other hand, if www.examplesite.com.au/about links to www.examplesite2.com.au, this would not be classified as a linking root domain.

Link Velocity: Link velocity is commonly described as the speed at which a website attains incoming backlinks. A high spike in link velocity may call for an alert of unnatural or very spammy links and may lead to penalisation from search engines.

Long-Tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords are key phrases typically over three words long. Eg. How to build a treehouse, the best dentist in eastern Sydney.

 

M

 

Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are short paragraphs that appear on the search result pages, giving the searcher an idea of what to expect before entering a page. For best performance, meta descriptions should be no more than 155 characters in length, contain the page’s primary keyword and should have a call to action.

Meta Keywords: Meta keywords were originally HTML tags used on websites to hint to search engines about what keywords they would want to be ranking for. Due to the advanced growth of most search engines, the meta keywords tag is no longer considered when deeming the relevance of a web page.

Meta Tags: Meta tags refer to the three different types of HTML tags. They are the title tag, meta description and meta keywords.

Monetize: Monetizing is the process of building, maintaining or optimising a website to earn money. Methods of monetization include incorporating CPM ads, CPC ads or affiliate marketing.

 

N

 

Niche: A niche is a market that specialises in a particular product, subject, or topic. Eg. A website about weight loss is a weight loss niche.

Nofollow Links: Nofollow links are opposite to dofollow links. Nofollow links are embedded with a unique parameter, rel=”nofollow”. This parameter instructs search engines not to allow the passing of link equity when linking out to another page.

Noindex: Noindex is a command inserted into the page’s header, signifying to search engines not to have the page indexed into the search result pages.

 

O

 

On-Page Optimisation: On-page optimisation refers to optimisation practices that can be implemented on a web page. This is usually done by accessing the back end of the website. Eg. Meta optimisation, content optimisation, and internal linking.

Off-Page Optimisation: Off-page optimisation refers to all optimisation practices and techniques that can be incorporated without needing access to the website’s back end. Eg. Link building, content marketing and article submissions.

Organic Search Results: Organic search results are listings on the search engine results pages that appear because of their natural relevancy to the user’s search query.

Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is natural web traffic from organic listings within a search engine’s result pages.

 

P

 

Panda: The Google Panda update is a Google algorithm update first released in 2011. Panda was released with the focus of targeting low-quality websites, websites that contain minimal content and spammy websites. This encouraged website owners to improve the quality of their websites to rank higher in the search results.

PPC: PPC is an acronym for pay-per-click. Pay-per-click refers to the advertising method of allocating an advertising budget per day and only paying when a user directly clicks on your ad. Each ad click is calculated to cost differently depending on the user’s country of origin and the industry’s competitiveness.

Paid Links: Paid links have been paid for to build backlinks and gain a higher ranking position on the search engine result pages. Paid links are against search engine guidelines and could lead to website penalisation. Google’s Penguin update is hugely focused on tackling websites with paid links.

PageRank (PR): PageRank is a part of Google’s ranking algorithms, named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders. PageRank is calculated and scaled based on 0-10, 10 being the most important. A website’s PageRank is defined through a mathematical algorithm based on the authority value of all incoming links that link to it. A page linked to many other websites with high PageRank would, in return, receive a higher PageRank itself. Increased PageRank means a greater chance of your web pages ranking higher within the SERPs.

Persona: A persona is a profile created for online consumers representing a company’s target market. Key metrics in creating a persona may include identifying their age, sex, salary, marital status and job.

Penguin: The Penguin update is a Google algorithm update first announced in 2012. The Penguin update is focused on penalising websites that contain unnatural link profiles. Penalisation may include being de-indexed from Google’s search results or decreasing rankings.

Penguin 2.0: First released in May 2013, Penguin 2.0 is the 2nd generation of the Penguin update. Penguin 2.0 affected about 2.1% of all English queries and was set out to target a website’s internal pages instead of just a website’s homepage. Websites with unnatural link profiles that were penalised with big brands have been given increased priority in the search results.

Press Release: A press release is an article directed at news websites or news outlets to raise awareness for its brand or, in SEO terms, provide highly relevant content while receiving a high PR backlink.

Profile Links: Profile links are incoming, usually from forum profile pages. Profile links are considered a popular form of link building as most forum profile pages allow at least one profile link to be dofollow.

 

Q

 

Query: A query is a keyword or keyphrase used in a search engine’s search field. The purpose of the query is for the search engines to serve related results in both organic and paid search listings.

 

R

 

Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal links refer to two websites that have returning links linking to each other. Reciprocal links serve the purpose of mutually directing traffic to one another and also act as a form of link building.

Reputation Management: Reputation management ensures all top 10 results with the SERPs relate to your website or brand name. Reputation management also involves the practice of ensuring all well-known review websites found on the SERPs are positive and do not contain unattended negative reviews about your business.

Rich Snippet: Rich snippets are small data summaries compacted into various forms to appear in the SERPs. Rich snippets include authorship, video markups, review markups and more. The primary goal of rich snippets is for the SERPs to provide more information about the page’s relevance and serve the most appropriate results to meet the user’s expectations. Implementation of rich snippets usually results in higher CTR for the marked-up page.

Robot.txt: A robot.txt is a file usually found in the root directory of a website. The robot.txt can be edited to instruct search engines not to crawl and index certain website pages if needed. This can be used to ensure the crawling efficiency of the rest of the website while avoiding unnecessary pages.

ROI: ROI is an acronym for return on investment. RIO measures the cost difference or benefits per each marketing strategy or scheme used.

Root Domain: A root domain is the top-level page of a website.

RSS: RSS is the acronym for rich site summary. An RSS may also be referred to as a feed or webfeed, and is used to compile a website’s most frequently published works. This may include new blog posts, audio and videos. Users can then subscribe to the RSS feed to receive the latest updates to their email inbox.

 

S

 

Sandbox: Known as the Sandbox Effect or Google Sandbox, the sandbox is the effect of a new website ranking well and suddenly dropping all rankings. Many myths have been circulating about this effect, but nothing has ever been confirmed.

Scraped Content: Scraped content refers to web content automatically grabbed and publishing on another site by automated software. This is most commonly done to index new web pages quickly and rapidly, increasing the chances of driving additional traffic to a website.

SE: SE is an SEO acronym that stands for search engine.

SEM: SEM is an acronym for search engine marketing. It is a form of online marketing that increases a website’s visibility in the SERPs by maximising its ranking potential.

SEO: SEO is the acronym for search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation increases a website’s online visibility by maximising its ranking potential on the SERPs. Countless practices and techniques are conducted to ensure a web page ranks as high as possible. Such practices include but are not limited to on-page optimisation, link building, website loading speed, quality of web content and a website’s architecture.

SEOs: SEOs is a noun and stands for search engine optimisers. Search engine optimisers are search engine marketers who conduct the entire process or partial processes of SEO services to ensure a website is maximising its online visibility and ranking potential.

Search Engine Spider/Spider: A search engine spider is a bot that conducts the crawling of web page. The spider crawls a web page to collect information it deems relevant. The information collected then gets the web page indexed into the SERPs and ranked accordingly depending on its authority and relevancy to the search query initiated by a user.

SERP: Potentially the most frequently used term by an SEO, SERP is an acronym for search engine result pages. SERP refers to the website results displayed after a search engine page search. A search engine’s primary goal is to serve the most relevant web pages to the user after they’ve conducted a search. The most relevant website would appear at the top of the SERP, which most users would bear an eye on first. SERPs most commonly only display up to 10 results per page. In the past, Google has changed its SERP, displaying only 7 search results per page for specific search queries. This was a direct part of their strategy to serve more relevant results in the most effective way possible since then, there has been no official news confirming site-wide changes.

Sitemap: A sitemap is a page strategically structured into grouping key pages to provide easy navigation to users and search engine spiders. A special sitemap called the XML sitemap is often created to assist search engine spiders in finding all relevant website pages.

Social Media: Social media is an online social networking website. Mostly used as a primary way of socialising and sharing public or personal content, social media has risen to become a key way of helping businesses build brand presence, increase social engagement and for link building purposes. Examples of social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing promotes a brand or company through social network sites.

Spam: Spam is sending or publishing unsolicited content, usually to contribute worthless or irrelevant information.

Spamdexing: Spamdexing, is also known as search spam, web spam or search engine spam. Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes by using several techniques to trick the search engines into indexing certain content deemed irrelevant, with the sole purpose of increasing its ranking within the SERPs.

Subdirectory: A subdirectory is a page located deeper within the root domain. Eg. www.sydney.com.au/operahouse is a subdirectory.

Subdomain: A subdomain is a part of the root domain. For example, www.operahouse.sydney.com.au is a subdomain within the root domain, www.sydney.com.au. Subdomains are created to segment the topic of choice into entirely new subcategories. One of the most important features of a subdomain is that it holds its authority and PageRank.

 

T

 

Taxonomy: A taxonomy is grouping certain subjects or topics.

Title Tag: A title tag is an HTML tag used by search engines to display a web page’s title on the SERPs. Search engines treat the title tag as a primary indicator of the page’s relevancy. Title tags should contain no more than 70 characters and should contain relevant page keywords for best-ranking performance within the SERPs.

Traffic: Traffic refers to incoming visitors who are entering a website.

 

U

 

Unique Visitor: A unique visitor is a website visitor tracked by a unique IP address. If a visitor were to enter a website 100 times, he/she would be recorded as 1 unique visitor.

Unnatural Link Warning: Google’s unnatural link warning is a warning notice provided through Google’s Webmaster Tools. This warning alerts webmasters that their website has been associated with unnatural incoming links. As a result of having received this message, a website’s page ranking may be severely penalised until they can rectify the situation. Google enables webmasters to submit reconsideration requests upon fixing all unnatural, paid or spammy incoming links.

URL: URL is an acronym for uniform resource locator, commonly called a web address.

User-Agent: A user agent describes the identity of a site visitor, search engine spider or internet browser. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are two popular examples of internet browser user agent.

 

V

 

Viral Marketing: Viral marketing involves creating content and marketing it in a way that will reach vital status online. Social media, in this modern day and age, has contributed greatly to the rise of viral content.

 

W

 

Webinar: A webinar is an online term for a seminar. A webinar is basically a seminar hosted online.

Web 2.0: Web 2.0 refers to websites allowing users to interact and engage with online communities actively. Web 2.0 sites include social booking sites, forums and social networking sites. Eg. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and StumbleUpon.

White Hat SEO: White Hat SEO refers to SEO practices and techniques within webmaster quality guidelines. Typically, white hat SEO is done ethically and naturally; serving highly relevant content and attracting high-quality links is the primary goal of achieving long-term organic success.

Widgets: Widgets are sidebar blocks that contain easy navigational links or content. Online blogs mostly use widgets and typically contain a website’s list of popular items, recent posts, search bar, subscription form or advertisements.

WordPress: WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used as a platform for creating a website or blog. WordPress is commonly known for its SEO-friendly setup and is considered one of the most popular blogging platforms used on the web.

Word Count: The total number of words used on a web page.

 

X

 

XML: XML is the acronym for “Extensible Markup Language”.

XML Sitemaps: XML Sitemaps are special types of pages used to format web pages properly. XML Sitemaps are generated and then submitted to search engines so they can better understand the structure of the host website. This increases crawling efficiency and will give search engines a better understanding of how to rank your pages.

If you’ve read this far, we’re sure you would’ve become an SEO genius. So, thank you for taking the time to read our SEO glossary!

If you think our glossary may do with additional terminology or feel that it is missing anything that would provide more value to SEO practitioners, then we encourage you to contact us at info@redsearch.com.au. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Daniel Law
Written by

Daniel Law

Daniel Law is the SEO Director at Red Search, a specialist SEO agency based in Sydney, Australia. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, Daniel has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in search engine optimisation (SEO). He is passionate about helping businesses achieve success through effective and sustainable SEO strategies and is dedicated to staying up to date on the latest industry trends and best practices.

    Contact Us