You are invited to skim through our SEO dictionary. It will be updated on a regular basis, and we will be adding new definitions as soon as they become common.
SEO Dictionary – Letter A
Adwords Google
Google’s advertising system. Ads are shown above the search results. From the advertiser perspective, it is not related to SEO because the advertiser has to pay for displaying ads on relevant websites and paid search engine positions. But Google Adwords, from a publisher / webmaster perspective, contains information about the most searched keywords for a specific time so you can write optimized content for SEO to get traffic from the search engine.
Agency SEO/SEM
A company that provides professionally SEO and SEM services. Most common customers of a SEO agency are online shops and companies selling certain services on the Internet. There are many models of SEO / SEM agency settlement with clients – pay for ranking, pay for traffic, monthly flat fee.
Alt tag
This is the HTML attribute specified in the img tag, which indicates alternate text when an image on a Web page can not be processed properly or displayed. It is also used by screen readers for people who listen to the content of a website (for example blind people). It is important for SEO and should include a description of what is in the image.
Example:
<img src=”/SEOBasics.jpg” alt=”Graphics – SEO basics” />
SEO Audit of a website
In-depth analysis of a website, a report on how search engines see the web site.The report should contain information on optimization errors on the website, such as description issues, duplicate content, page optimization errors.
Anchor text
This is a text description of a link that makes it easy to navigate between pages. The words contained in the link text may affect the ranking that a page receives from the Google search engine. The text of the link has a different color than the other text on the page, normally blue. After placing the mouse pointer over the link text, the browser displays the link (URL) contained in the link.
Example:
<a href=”http://www.funnypage.com”> funny site </a>
SEO Dictionary – Letter B
Ban
Complete removal of a domain from the search engine. Banned domain is not visible in the seach engine at all, even entering the exact domain name or “site:domainname.com”. A ban is always a result of a manual penalty, it is the highest penalty measure from Google. One can propose lifting the ban via Search Console.
Black Hat SEO (BHS)
Influencing ratings of pages in search engines using techniques that are not approved by the search engine. BHS offers easy and fast jump of a page in rankings, but may result ultimately in Google penalties and even a ban. Illegal techniques include buying links, cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text on web pages.
Bomb (Link Bomb)
An old not working SEO technique involving very fast linking on certain keywords, which allowed to move the page up in the search results for a short time.
Bot (Robot)
An Internet bot, also called a robot, is an application that launches tasks automatically over the Internet, much faster than a human can do. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive. If Google detects that bots are used to improve the SEO of our website, it will place restrictions on our site, and the website may be removed from the search engine.
A special type of bot is the search engine robot. This is a program or automated script that search engines use to scan and analyze web pages in a systematic manner to provide up-to-date data for placement in the search engine. An example of such a bot is Google Bot, for example.
Broken links
These are links that display a blank page or a “Cannot find page” error message. The reason for broken links is usually a mistyped URL or deletion of an existing page.
Buzz Marketing
A form of marketing that encourages people to talk about the product, the brand or services and actively encouraging the customers to start the conversation. Testimonial from an acquaintance is more trustworthy then a regular marketing campaign. In SEO, the additional advantage from Buzz Marketing may be links coming to the brand web page.
SEO Dictionary – Letter C
Cache Google
Complete copy of the web page kept within the search engine and generated by a bot crawling web pages. By browsing Google cache one can check the version of the page that is seen by Google.
Caffeine
Google index introduced in 2010. The novelty is that every page visited by a Google bot is immediately indexed, not after the next complete review of all the pages in the Internet, as it was before.
Cannibalization
A situation where several pages of one website fight for position on a given keyword on Google. The first symptom of cannibalization is that the positions in search results do not stay pegged. In the case of cannibalization, it is a good idea to change the internal link scheme, remove or change one of the fighting pages, or set a canonical tag on one page to show the other.
Canonical URL
The canonical URL tells the search engine that different URLs pointing to the same content should be treated as one so that there will be no problem with the copied content. Repeated content issues occur when the same content is available from multiple URLs.
For example, in an online store we can access a specific mobile phone page with different URLs such as:
https://www.page.com/products?category=phone&name= iphone,
https://www.page.com/products?hl=iphone,
https://www.page.com/products/iphone.html
By placing a canonical URL in the header of the page, we clearly point out which pages should be treated as original by the search engines. Other are skipped.
CF – Citation Flow
An index introduced by Majestic that depends on the number of links leading to each web page. A higher CF means that there is more links to the page. This is try to replace the Page Rank indicator, that was withdrawn from public by Google.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique of Black Hat SEO, Essentially, the content of a page presented to a search engine is different from the content sent to the user’s browser. The purpose of such a masking is to increase the position of your site for certain keywords.
Content
This is all information present on the Internet. The well-known among bloggers phrase “Content is King” means that if you write search engine optimized content of high quality, this will help you get traffic to your page from the search engines.
CMS
CMS stands for content management system. This is a computer program that manages the publishing, editing, modifying, organizing, and deleting content that webmasters and bloggers display on their site.
Examples: WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Blogger, Movable Type are some common names of CMS
Content Marketing
The method of internet marketing concentrating on publishing interesting content on the Internet: blogs, specialized sites and in web magazines. Google appreciates content marketing. Website positioning through content marketing is done by the way, because customers after reading the content know the company and look for it and through the links leading from the article to the brand/product website.
SEO Dictionary – Letter D
Data Center
The computing centre where the Google data are stored and processed. Each data center works as an independent entity and calculates their own rankings. Change of the active data center for a given location or region may result in sudden ranking change.
Dead Link
Link leading to nowhere, usually due to changes on the target web page or a mistyped at creation. Dead links should be removed as they inform Google that the content on our page is not fresh, too it is annoying for the users.
Deep Linking
Linking to individual graphics, movies, and other resources on a site. Deep linking can be unethical because it utilizess the server resources and gives nothing to the server owner because the user is on a completely different page. This is not a SEO methodology.
Directory
Just as we have business directories and phone numbers, there are also directory directories. When uploading a site to a directory, you not only get the link, but also help people who browse the directory to find your site.
Example: DMOZ used to be the most popular web directory.
Domain
An Internet domain is the name of a website in a human understandable form. Each web domain resolves to an IP address that is four numbers and which is difficult to remember.
Example: Instead of using the www.foxnews.com name, you can use this difficult to remember numerical link to open the Fox News, you can use the address http://151.101.193.164. However, this is extremely difficult to remember.
Do-follow
Do-follow is a backlink type that tells search engine robots to analyze the link and pass the link juice (SEO advantage) to improve the page ranking. If the link is not tagged, it is always treated as a do-follow.
All internal site links must be of this type. This means that if you have written a new article and have previously had an article that is somewhat related to a new article, you can insert a link from this old article to a new article to show the Google crawler that your site has a lot of content to crawl. You should comment on some high-ranking blogs that allow for do-follow attribute, as this can help increase the authority of the site.
Example:
<a href=”http://www.page.com”> This is a do-follow link </a>
Domain Authority
Index provided by the company moz. Domain Authority assesses the authority of the domain within 1-100 and tries to replace Google Page Rank. DA is known to be very loosely coupled with the domains ranking in Google.
Doorway Page
It is a type of cloaking. A page that ranks well in Google due to good on-page optimization for Google robot. Real users are redirected from the doorway page to another target page so they do not see the doorway page.
Duplicate content
Content displayed on more than one URL is referred to online as content duplicates. The most common type of duplicates is content on the same page available under different URLs. To eliminate this problem, we use a canonical URL. Duplicate content is bad for SEO.
Dulicate Content Penalty
If a substantial portion of another site is copied, Google imposes a penalty on the pages with copied content. No site flagged by Google as plagiarism appears in search results for any phrase. However, all pages remain in the Google index and the penalty does not apply to other pages of the site that are not copied at all.
FSB – Fresh Site Bonus
There was once a bonus for new websites. The new page, when it appeared on the search engine, was higher than the older ones.
Geolocation
SEO Dictionary Letter I
External link
External link (outbound) is a link pointing to an external domain. If another site links to you, this is an external link from it to your site. Likewise, if your site is linking to another site, this is an external link for your site.
SEO Dictionary – Letter G
Grey Hat SEO
SEO Technique on the Border of White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. It assumes that some actions can be performed that have a positive effect on rankings and are not breaching hard and fast rules set out by Google guidelines.
SEO Dictionary – Letter H
Hreflang
The hreflang tag (also called rel = “alternate” hreflang = “x”) tells Google which language is used on a particular page, so that a search engine can place a page in search results in a specific language.
SEO Dictionary – Letter I
High quality content
The content on the page that Google believes is worth distributing. It’s content that people want to read because it helps them work or play, tells them how to do something or where to find it. This is information that people talk about on their own blogs and during dinner. These are the stories they convey to their circles in social media. They are cited, linked, and shared in Social Media.
Hilltop algorithm
Google Algorithm used to search for documents related to the topic of the query. Google has a dedicated database of expert sites. On these pages there are links to many unrelated expert pages, in addition, the anchor text links from the expert pages are considered strong ranking signal. If there is a match of the query and links on the expert pages, then the query is relevant. It is believed that such experts for Google are the sites of American universities and libraries.
HITS algorithm
Search engine algorithm, taking into account two factors: the authority of the site and the importance of information hub. At each query, these two factors are calculated, with calculations limited to the base set of the main websites that are hubs of information. HITS is not commonly used in search engines, because of the calculation at the query time, was once used in the search engine Teoma.
Hosting
Server on which the web page elements are stored and delivered from. It is important for SEO that pages are stored on fast and responsive servers, as the loading time is a ranking factor for Google.
.htaccess
Apache web server configuration file available to the user on the hosting site. In this file many parameters that are very important from the SEO point of view can be set: friendly URLs, redirects, blocking some robots.
Humming-bird
The search algorithm used on Google in 2013. It analyzes current query and attempts to match other similar and more popular queries before reporting the results. The Hummingbird component is Rankbrain, based on an artificial intelligence.
Incoming link IBL
This is a link that is present on another site that points to a page on your site. Incoming links are very important for SEO because search engines see the various incoming links to the page as a sign that the content of the page is useful. Also known as inlink. The more diverse incoming links, the better for SEO your site. Backlinks have two types: Do-Follow and No-Follow. Excess of low quality incoming links can harm your site’s SEO.
Indexing
The search engine is a process for collecting and storing content on the Internet. Search Engines are constantly browsing the Internet for the latest versions of pages to add them to their database. When a search engine finds a new page, it indexes it, which means that it adds a copy to its database to be able to show it later when the user searches.
Indexed pages
The pages of your site that are stored in the search engine and ready to be shown as a response to a search query.
Invisible text
Black Hat technique, inserting on a page links that cannot be seen. Link locations are outside the visible area of the page, below the images, links in the background color, or as alt to the one pixel image. Invisible text is saturated with keywords in order to influence the rankings of the page. The search engine is able to detect invisible text and such links are ignored by Google.
SEO Dictionary – Letter J
JavaScript
Scripting language that allows site administrators to apply different effects or changes to the content of their site when users browse the site. Search engines often have trouble reading content contained in JavaScript, but are getting better and better at it.
SEO Dictionary – Letter K
Keyword Density
This is a measure expressed as a percentage of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase compared to the total number of words on the page.
Keyword density formula for text: (Number of keyword occurrences / total number of words) * 100
SEO Dictionary – Letter L
Keyword Positioning
Proper deployment of keywords in the content of the web page in the header, title, text, image titles and other places on the page. Proper keyword positioning is vital for the page ranking for the given keywords
Landing Page
Single page without any navigation that contains offer information allowing to close sales. Typical landing page can be scrolled up and down and contains clear CTA (Call To Action), one of: pay, subscribe, enter contact details.
Link
This is a word, phrase, or image that you can click to go to another web page, a new document, or a new section within the same document.
Example:
<a href=”http://www.page.com”> This is a link </a>
Link Baiting
The technique of getting links by sharing interesting, surprising or marry content with links. The user (aware or not) inserts links to our site while copying content to his own website, also. Google has objected to some aspects of link baiting, but generally this is a secure positioning method.
Link Building
The activity and process of getting more inbound links to your site to improve search engine rankings.
Long tail keywords
Longer search terms, usually containing two or more words. Small businesses should consider long tail traffic because it is easier and often users who type them are already familiar with the topic and know what they want. Major keywords such as “software” are more competitive and very difficult to be listed on search results.
SEO Dictionary – Letter I
International SEO
This is a way to set up your site so that search engines can easily identify the countries and languages for which you want your page to appear.
SEO Dictionary – Letter M
Manual Action Penalty
Human imposed penalty on a website. When active, no page of the website ranks, even when searching for the domain name. There are many types of manual action penalties, depending on the type, some or all pages disappear from the Google index (a ban).
Merchant Center Google
Google service for online stores. Allows to enter a shop inventory to the Google Shopping. Snippets from this service appear on some commercial search results.
Metadata
Metadata is data about data. Metadata tells search engines what your site is about.
Meta description
Brief description of your site with less than 160 characters and why someone would like to visit this site. This is often displayed on search engine results pages below the page title as an example page content. Sometimes Google chose displaying an excerpt from the target page to meta description though.
Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords are a specific type of meta tag that appear in the HTML code of a Web page and help search engines determine what the page is about. Most search engines have realized that sites can easily manipulate meta tags, and meta keywords are no longer an important part of the Google ranking algorithm.
Mobile Friendly/Responsive
If your website adapts to the width and dimensions of any mobile device on the market, your site is referred to as Mobile Responsive or Mobile Friendly.
SEO Dictionary – Letter N
My Business Google
Google service that allows businesses to create a virtual business card at the physical location of the business. Snippets from this service appear at the top of the search results for local phrases (phrases with city name). Google My Business also allows everybody to rate the service and is connected with Google Maps, where the location of each business is marked.
News Google
Google tool that gathers online content publishers that meet certain criteria. Snippet Google News is displayed at the beginning of search results for news and current events, so online publishers are part of Google News.
No-Index
The tag tells the search engine that the page should not be indexed in the search results. The page will be read by the search engines, but will not be indexed.
No-Follow
This is a link tag that instructs the search engine not to index the page that the link points to, and also not to submit the “link juice” to the page that the link points to. A no-follow link only affects the link rating, and does not automatically make the linked page inaccessible to Google or not indexed.
Example:
<a href=”http://www.page.com” rel=”nofollow”> This is a no-follow link </a>
SEO Dictionary – Letter O
Off-page SEO
Every action, apart from the website itself, can be done to improve the ranking of sites on the site and the visibility of their clients. Most off-page strategies include link building and Social Media
On-Page SEO
It focuses on changes on the web site that the webmaster can directly make to increase the page rank. This includes elements such as keywords, content, tags, or the site code itself.
Organic results
Also called natural or organic. These are search results for sites that have not been paid for the position, and are entirely dependent on how the site was rated by Google.
SEO Dictionary – Letter P
Page Rank
The non-existent numerical value that was assigned by Google to each web page determined its relative importance.
Penalty from Google (Algorithmic filter)
This is a negative impact on the ranking of sites on your site based on updates to the Google search algorithm or manual actions. Pages that are not trustworthy, have copied content, or use Black Hat SEO techniques such as hidden links and using robots to increase the number of links are penalized by Google.
Example: Google Panda and Google Penguin are Google names for some penalties.
Google Panda: A change in the algorithm for Google’s search rankings involves lowering the “low quality” and poor content rankings and putting higher-ranking sites in search results.
Google Penguin: This is the name of a Google algorithm update that aims to reduce the search engine ranking of websites that use Black Hat SEO techniques to increase artificially ranking a website by manipulating the number of links pointing to a page.
Paid results
Search Advertising. For a fee, search engines place the ads at the beginning of the search results. These ads appear before and after organic results. Which page is displayed according to different criteria in paid and organic results.
SEO Dictionary – Letter R
Reciprocal link
Two different websites that link to each other. Also called a cross link. If the quality of the links in the reciprocal link is high, then the return link is not bad, but most of such links are low quality. Too many low quality links can make it difficult to position your site in search results for relevant keywords, and Google can rate the number of inbound and outbound links and quality of links to determine whether the linking profile looks natural.
Rich Media
Mobile or interactive media. Increasing option among PPC advertisers as the speed of the Internet increase.
RSS feed
Content provided to you through special pages on your website. You may use programs such as message aggregators (Flipboard, Feedly). The popularity of RSS feeds is falling in the age of social media.
Robots.txt
A special file at the root of your site to control how and where search engine robots access the pages. When a robot connects to a website, it checks the presence of the robots.txt file and uses it to crawl or avoid specific or all web pages on the site. In principle, the recommendations from the robots.txt file are respected by search engine robots, but there is no such technical constraint, it is only the will of web page creators.
Redirect 301
This is used to change the page address so that it is visible in search results. The 301 code behind the server seat means that the page has been permanently moved to the new location. Use these redirects when you move your site to a new domain and you want the transition to be as smooth as possible.
Redirect 302
This is a temporary redirect. This redirect does not carry any SEO value or it transfers the link value to a new web page. Redirect 302 is used to show the user the appropriate web page, not a “Not Found” message. Let’s say you have a product that is not in stock – maybe the product is seasonal or unavailable. In that case, you can use a 302 redirect to send the user to the category page in the online store, but do not lose the SEO value – needed when the product reappears.
RSS
Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication: This is a family of web formats that use XML to distribute and share headers and information with other web pages. RSS allows users to deliver new content on a computer or mobile device as soon as they are published and without visiting the site.
SEO Dictionary – Letter S
SERP
Acronym for search engine results page. This is a list of pages returned by a specific query entered into the search engine
Static website
Website containing predefined data for the user with individual pages placed on his server in exactly the form the user will see.
Search Console
Google tool for SEO management. Previously called Webmaster Tools. Lets you see how Goolge sees our website, shows the number of indexed pages, the number of links to the page, and the most popular keywords. Search Console shows crawl errors, copied content, and Google manual action penalties.
Shopping Google
Google aggregator offering multiple online stores (price / offer comparison). This is important for SEO because Google Shopping snippets appear in search results for commercial phrases.
SEO Dictionary – Letter T
Traffic
The number of users on the page and page views on your site.
Title tag
This is the text shown in the topmost part of the browser window. The title is also displayed as a site header when it appears in the search results list.
Taxonomy
Taxonomy in SEO is a way of organizing information on a website or blog. It is very important that your content is well organized with menus and categories so that users can quickly find what they are looking for.
SEO Dictionary – Letter U
UU
Unique visitors – The number of unique visits to all pages of a site, excluding single user visits to additional pages. Determines the traffic and popularity of your site.
URL
This is the Uniform Resource Locator acronym and means the resource address on the Internet. The URL contains two main components: the protocol identifier and the resource name. URL http: //thepage.com contains http as the protocol identifier and thepage.com as the resource identifier.
SEO Dictionary – Letter V
Viral Marketing
Method of disseminating content “mouth to mouth”. Common means of transmission are e-mails, direct blogging and from mouth to mouth. Many social networking sites and social bookmarking sites lead to sharing be viral.
Virtual server
Own server to which the domain is pointing to, but without its own IP address.
SEO Dictionary – Letter W
Webmaster Tools
Former name of the Google Search Console
SEO Dictionary – Letter X
Xenu Link Sleuth
Popular free site checker software for broken links and sitemap creation.
Site Map
Helps search engines browse your site. This is a kind of roadmap that allows you to navigate your site’s pages using your preferred routes. The Sitemap also includes information about when the site updates and which are the most important. Providing the current XML map is a good SEO practice.
Stuffing keywords
Placing excessive number of keywords on the page in order for Google to consider the page is relevant. Google, through statistical analysis of many texts can detect keyword stuffing pretty well.
SEO Dictionary – Letter Y
Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is an extremely popular plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily set up page titles and meta descriptions for your site content, create sitemaps and verify your Google Search Console account and Bing Webmaster Tools.
SEO Dictionary – Letter Z
Zeitgeist
Google Zeitgeist was an annual Google listing that shows what Google was looking for in a given year. To succeed in SEO, you should always understand how people are looking. There are new trends and it is important to follow them continuously. The results for 2016 are called “2016 Year in Search” and the name Zeitgeist seems to be dumped though.