It’s hard to remember and know all the terms that are important for SEO, so we thought a nice illustrated glossary of the most important ones is a great idea.
Everything is kept short and easy to understand. Hope you like the design and be sure to check out clarifications for every term below the infographic!
A
- Anchor Text – a clickable text in a hyperlink
- AdWords – Google’s advertisement program, used for basic website advertisement, with keyword-targeted ads and sold on a cost per click basis
- Algorithm – program used by search engines that determines which pages will be suggested for which search query
- Alt Text – alternative text, a short description added to graphic elements (images and videos) that helps search engines understand what the graphic element is about
B
- Back Link – an incoming link to a website from another website; a few links from high authority sites (those with high domain rating and traffic) carry more SEO “juice” and help you rank better than a bunch of links from small websites
- Blog – an online journal updated regularly and presented chronologically
- Black Hat – marketing techniques that are considered bad and don’t conform to Google’s guidelines; using it can often lead to your site getting penalized
- Bing – Microsoft’s search engine
- Bounce Rate – the percentage of website visitors who visit just one page on the website and leave
C
- Content – every piece of information on a website – text, images, videos, animations, etc; having quality content is the most important part of SEO
- Conversion – a goal, achievement on a website; could be getting a certain amount of visits, subscriptions, sales, etc.
- CPC – Cost Per Click, the amount that is paid per click; measure used in paid advertising such as Facebook PPC (pay-per-click)
- CTR – Click Through Rate, represents the percentage of people who click on an ad they see
- Crawler – a program which moves through websites following link structure and gathering data for search engines
D
- Deep Linking – building links to inner pages of a website (site.com/page1) and not only the home page (site.com), which makes link building campaign look very natural
- Directory – a catalog of websites, divided into categories, usually manually organized
- Duplicate Content – content that is identical or very similar to the content on some other website
E
- External links – links that lead to a website on a different domain, especially good and important when it’s high authority website or blog
F
- Fresh Content – new, interesting and relevant pieces of information (text, images, videos); it’s important to update big content pieces at least once every 6 months
- Feed – content delivered to the user via special programs
- Filter – search crawlers look through websites and use various methods to filter out the spammy and unnatural-looking websites
G
- Google Search – the most used search engine on the Internet with over 3 billion searches every day, so it’s important to have your website optimized for Google Search
- Gateway Page – a page created to bring traffic from search engines and redirect visitors to the actual website with information; also called doorway page
H
- Headings – used to briefly describe and introduce the subject of the next section; should include keywords and keyword phrases to improve SEO optimization
- Hits – happens each time a server sends an object; used to be a measure for web traffic, now replaced with impressions
- .htaccess – configuration file in Apache that is used for protecting files with password or redirect
- HTML – HyperText Markup Language is the programming language used for creating websites
I
- Internal Links – links from one page on a site to another page on the same site; help with spreading link juice and navigation on the site
- Inbound Links – incoming links to one website from another website; best to have more links from high authority and related websites
- Impressions – page views; opening a web page one time counts as one impression or one pageview
J
- Javascript – a scripting language that adds various dynamic features when embedded in HTML; not everyone can see that content so be careful
K
- Keyword – a word or a phrase that the user writes in a search engine; should be mentioned on the website but not too often; it’s recommended to use different forms of the main keyword
- Keyword Density – keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage or within a piece of content as a ratio or percentage of the overall word count
- Keyword Research – a lasting process of finding perfect keywords for a website; takes a lot of variables in consideration – domain age, competition, on page SEO, etc.
L
- Link Building – a process of creating incoming links to your website to increase its authority and search ranking; should be as natural as possible with links from high authority websites
- Long Tail Keywords – more specific and less targeted keywords; used more and more these days; for example, “cheap smartphones” would be your standard keyword, while “best Android 4G smartphone with 13MP camera” represents a long tail keyword
- LSI – latent semantic indexing, used by search engines, means they often index associated groups of words on a webpage
- Landing Page – the page that opens when a user clicks on search engine result
M
- Meta Description – a short description of the content on the page; should be relevant and unique to the page and keyword rich
- Metrics – a measurement used by analytical programs; SEO metrics measure page’s authority, backlink count, domain age, etc.; read more about them in our blog series
N
- Niche – a subject of the website, a topic the content is focused on; important for finding keywords
- Negative SEO – trying to compromise a competitor with building lots of bad links to their site, which usually ends with a penalty
- Nofollow – a command found in the head section of a webpage that instructs search engine crawlers not to index any or specific links on that page
O
- Organic Search Results – unpaid search results, organized by relevancy; most clicks on search results are on the organic search results
- Outbound Links – a link from a website to another website on the different domain; linking to relevant and related websites in your niche is great for SEO
P
- Penalty – a punishment for a website that search algorithms define as spam; prevents the site from ranking highly; could happen after too aggressive link building campaign or really bad on page SEO
- PageRank – used to be the most important metric in SEO, estimates the importance of a website using a formula that takes into consideration the links to the website
- PPC – Pay Per Click, most used pricing model in online advertising; advertiser gets charged only if someone clicks on an ad
Q
- Quality Over Quantity – whether it’s about links or content, quality is always more important than quantity
R
- Redirect – several methods used to change the address of a landing page, usually when a site is moved to a new domain; could be used to avoid penalization when building links aggressively
- robots.txt – a text file found in the root directory of a website; it’s used to control how search engines crawl the website
- ROI – Return On Investment, a measurement of how much you get in return for each dollar spent
S
- Social Media – everyone’s favorite place to waste their free time; can also be used for all kinds of promotional purposes 🙂
- Sitemap – a page within a website that has links to every page on the website, arranged hierarchically; improves the site’s usability and helps search engines understand the site’s navigation
- Spider – a bot used by search engines to find webpages and index them; also known as crawler
- Spam – a low-quality internet content that is often aggressively distributed; search engines hate spam and spammy marketing techniques such as too many ads or unnatural looking backlink profile
- SERP – Search Engine Results Page, a list of URLs and descriptions that show up when you search for something in search engines
T
- Trust Rank – a search relevancy algorithm that gives more weight to links coming from relevant and trusted websites; it’s increased by having more links from high authority sites
- Trackback – a notification that another website mentioned your website; usually a part of blogging websites; great for monitoring backlinks
- Title – an element used to describe content on a webpage, an important part of on-page SEO; should be unique, descriptive and not too long; should contain keywords
U
- URL – a web address unique for every website, made out of letters, numbers, dots and lines, including keywords or keyword phrases
- Unique Visitors – number of unique individuals that opened a website; different from visits since that counts every opening of the website – be it from a new or returning visitor
- Usability – a term that describes how easy a website is for use and navigate; increase usability by having a nice design, easy navigation and avoid pop up and big ads
V
- Visits – number of users that opened a website; increased with quality content, good SEO and more social shares
- Viral Marketing – marketing techniques that use social media and other technologies to increase brand awareness and build links; while there are some things you can optimize to increase your chances, “going viral” is mostly out of your hands
W
- WordPress – easy to use open source blogging platform with thousands of customizable themes and plugins; great for SEO
- White Hat – SEO techniques and methods that are recommended by search engine guidelines; the guidelines change very often
X
- XML – Extensible Markup Language, a simple, very flexible text format used to make it easy to format information using technologies such as RSS
- XHTML – Extensible HyperText Markup Language, HTML specifications and documents used to conform XML formatting
Y
- Yahoo – a popular website and search engine
- YouTube – another great place to “kill” a few hours every day; can be used for viral marketing; embedding YouTube videos inside webpages can increase your overall content quality
Z
- Zopim or Zoom Chat – to answer all of your SEO questions 😉
*some of the terms and definitions are inspired by Moz and Seobook Glossary.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out using this contact form.
