Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the method of driving traffic to the website from organic, natural and non-paid search. It emphasizes on website visibility on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Be it large enterprises or startups, all need to invest on SEO to improve their ranking in the organic search result, attract more viewers and improve the conversion rate.

Why you need a Glossary of SEO Terms

There are different aspects of SEO that digital marketers need to consider like identifying the correct keyword, add meta tags, meta description, build links and URL structures. But, prior to concentrating on the technical aspects of SEO it is important for the digital marketers to understand the SEO terms that are used. And, nothing can be handy than the SEO Glossary in this aspect.

The terms CTC and CTR often seems to be confusing or you might wonder the difference between Link Exchange and Link Building. If the marketers are not sure of SEO Terms, it might hamper the work and prevent the website from ranking well on the search engine result page. A glossary of SEO Terms will expand the knowledge of digital marketers as it defines and describes the jargons along with example when needed.

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 of 131 Absolutely Free SEO Terms 

SEO Glossary

0- 9

200 Status : The page status is OK

301 Status : Moved Permanently: A changeless sidetrack of a website page. Normally utilized for copy pages.

302 Status : Moved Temporary: The website page has been redirect temporarily. This is utilized when you are not prepared making a perpetual Redirect. It is a fleeting measure and does not exchange any area power.

404 Status : Page not found: The URL you are searching for has not been found. 404 status codes are sent when the site page does not exist.

500 Status : Server Error: This is the point at which the server goes down or there is a blip in the server.

A

Above the Fold : The area of content visible before looking over. Here the fold means the scroll and the content that you can see when the page loads.

Absolute Link : A link, which demonstrates the full, URL of the page being connected at. A few connections just show relative connection ways as opposed to having the whole reference URL. Case of a flat out connection: <ahref=”http://seobook.com/envelope/filename.html”>Cool Stuff</a>

Algorithm : A project utilized via web crawlers to figure out what pages to recommend for a given pursuit inquiry. Web indexes consistently redesign their calculations to keep the query items crisp and pertinent to what the client is hunting down.

Analytics : Software, which permits computerized advertisers and website admins to track your site visits, client ways, and transformation measurements, based after deciphering your log documents or through including a JavaScript following code on your webpage. Few are:

• Google Analytics – Google’s free examination program

• Conversion Ruler – a straightforward and shoddy online scientific instrument

• Click Tracks – downloadable and online examination programming.

Anchor Text – The content that a user would click on to follow a link. In case the link is an image the image ALT attribute may act in the place of anchor text.

API – Application Program Interface – a progression of traditions or schedules used to get to programming capacities. Dominant part seek items have an API program.

ASP – Active Server Pages – an element of Microsoft programming language.

Authority – The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engine. Five huge components connected with site and page power are connection value, site age, activity patterns, site history, and distributed one of a kind unique quality substance.

Authorities – Topical powers are locales that are very much trusted and all around referred to by specialists inside their topical group. A topical power is a page that is referenced by numerous topical specialists.

B

Backlink – (see Inbound Link)

Bing – Microsoft’s web crawler, which likewise controls the natural query items on Yahoo! Seek.

Black Hat SEO – Search motors consider certain advertising strategies beguiling in nature, and mark them as dark cap SEO. Systems according to the rules are called white cap SEO methods.

Bot (Crawler) – (robot, spider, crawler) A program, which plays out an assignment pretty much self-sufficiently. Search Engine use bots to discover and add site pages to their pursuit records. Spammers frequently utilize bots to “scrape” content with the end goal of stealing it.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of users who enter a site, then leave it without viewing any other pages.

Blog – A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order.Many blogs not only archive and categorizes information, but provide a feed and allow user interaction like leaving comments on the posts. Most online journals have a tendency to be close to home in nature. Online journals are for the most part very definitive with substantial connection value since they give individuals motivation to as often as possible return to their webpage, read their substance, and connection to whatever they believe is fascinating. The most well-known blogging site are WordPress , Blogger , Weebly , and Typepad .

Blogger – Blogger is a free open blogging area stage possessed by Google.

Blogroll – This is a list of Blog, for the most part connecting to different sites possessed by the same organization or companions of that blogger.

Branded Keywords – Keywords or keyword phrases connected with a brand or substance.

Breadcrumb Navigation – Web website route is a level bar over the primary substance, which helps the client to comprehend where they are on the webpage and how to return to the center territories.

Example of breadcrumb navigation: Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox: Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

Broken Link – A hyperlink that is not working. A connection that does not prompt the sought area. Most sites have some broken connections, however in the event that an excessive number of a webpage’s connections are broken it might be an indication of obsolete substance, and it might give site clients a poor client experience. Both of which may bring about web search tools to rank a page as being less pertinent.

Browser – Clients use it to see the World Wide Web. The most prominent programs are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Buying Cycle – Before making vast buys customers ordinarily inquire about what brands and items fit their needs and needs.

C

Canonical URL – It refers to eliminating duplicate content by assigning one version of a specific page as the legitimate one. By implementing a canonical tag you can tell Google which page is the parent page, and which are the child pages. Only then Google will take the pages into consideration.

CMS – Content Management System makes it simple for web masters to update and add data to a site.

Co-reference – Links that appear adjoining to each other on a page, might be considered to be connected. In Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) words that are close to each other, are often considered to be connected. Including LSI in a link improves relevance of the website.

Code Swapping – (trap and switch) Changing any content after acheiving high ranking.

Cool Outreach – The method of filtering out key influencers, bloggers and web masters in the relevant industry and reach those who are keen on collaborating with you and syndicating your substance.

Comment Spam – Posting blog posts with the aim of building a link with another webpage.

Content – (text, copy) The part of a web page that emphasizes on adding value to the customers and interest them. Advertising, navigation, branding are not typically thought to be content.

Content Syndication – The process of pushing video, sites and blogs to third-party websites either as a full article, thumbnail, snippet or link.

Conversion – When a visitor happens completes an activity like purchasing a product, signing up for newsletter or fillinga form, on the website the advertisers consider it conversion.w

Change Rate – The rate at which visitors convert (i.e. , register, demand data, and so forth.).

CTR – (Click-through-rate) – The quantity of clicks on any ad which is divided by the incidents isolated by the quantity of times the advertisement is appeared, and it is denoted in percentage.

D

Dead Link – A link that does not exist.

Deep Linking – A link that points internal pages of any website.

Deep Link Ratio – It is the ratio of links that point internal pages to that of links pointing website. High ratio is the sign of legitimate link profile.

De-Listing – Temporary or permanent removal of pages from the index of search engines or directories. This can be due to penalties imposed by the search engines.

Description – Search engines look for the description of each listing page and explains the title. It is also known as Meta data.

Directory – A categorized catalog of websites, manually organised composed by editorial experts. Few directories cater to a particular niche and few are comprehensive. Majority of search engines emphasize on the directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Directories need to have editorial control over listings or search engine will not consider the links to be trustworthy.

Disavow – Disavow tool lets the webmasters state that they do not endors any spam link. This tool is used when the website witnesses witness a drop in the ranking or is penalized by the search engine.

DNS – Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming mechanism that helps in ascertaining a particular domain name / host name to specific TCP/IP Address.

Domain – Scheme used for location organization of the web. Many users associate domain with a specific website.

Domain Authority (DA) – It is an important factor that determines the ranking on any search engine result page. Three cvariables that determine Domain Authority are: Popularity, Age, and Size.

Doorway Pages – Pages that aim at ranking high for targeted search requests, it is designed for redirecting the user to pages that contain different advertisements.

Duplicate Content – Content similar to that found on any other site or that in any other page of the website. A website might not be penalized for publishing a duplicate content, but search engines will consider those less trustworthy or authentic. If there is duplicate content, use canonical tags as it indicates which is the master copy and which one you need to ignore.

E

External Link – Link that references the content to another domain or website. This is a good way of explaining your website or page to the search engine. if you are relying on low quality external links then few search engines might not rank you well as the search engines trust only high quality links.

F

Filter – Certain signatures often make a page or site seem unnatural and web crawlers tend to remove or filter those activities from the search result.

Fresh Content – A dynamic content attracts audiences serves as the reason to pay attention to a website. SEO experts lay emphasis on the use of fresh content that is creating new content and not editing an old one.

G

Google Bomb – The joint effort of various webmasters to alter Google results for a humorous impact.

Google Bowling – Maliciously attempting to bring down the ranking of a website by linking it with ‘bad neighborhood’.

Google Dance – Earlier Google updated the index once per month. This was known as Google Dances, but Google has shifted to regular update of index. So, Google does not do what is known as Google Dance.

Google Webmaster Tools – This tool by Google shows the recent trend of search traffic, helps the webmasters to target a specific geographic area and request selected pages to be re-crawled. It shows penalty notification and allows webmasters to disavow links and request manual review by the editorial team of Google.

Guestbook Spam – A kind of low quality links that crawlers don’t trust much.

H

Headings – The heading elements that range H1 to H6 describes the section that it introduces. The lowest numbered heading is the most important one. Webmasters need to use one H1 for a particular page. A H1 looks like <h1>Topic</h1>

Headline – The title of any article or story.

Hidden Text – An SEO procedure that shows search engines or web crawlers text that human users cannot see. A few websites might get away with this technique, but it is too risky for the legitimate sites.

Home page – it is the main page of your website that aims at developing the identity of your brand and set up navigational schemes that will aid search engine and users to explore your site.

HTML – (hyper text mark-up language) or ‘mark-up’, used for adding functionality and formatting to the plain content which makes it easy for the online community to read. Search engines understand only HTML and web pages need to adhere it strictly.

Hummingbird – A Google search algorithm upgrade, that improves conversational search.

I

Inbound Link – A connection from one site to another.

Index – A comprehensive data collection that search engines rely on to search and match the query of users.

Inner Link – A link from a page in a website to a different page in the same website. Experts use descriptive links that makes it easy for the web crawlers to understand the content of a website. c

K

Keyword – A word/ phrase related to service and/or product of a brand that the target audiences might search for. Brand related and long tail keywords rank better than the vague and shorter ones as the former appears in the later half of the buying cycle and is associated with high commitment level.

Keyword Cannibalization : The excessive use of same keyword on different pages in the same website. Over usage makes it difficult for search engines and users to determine which is the most relevant keyword.

Keyword Density – It is the percentage of keywords used in a particular web page. In case, the ratio is high the particular page will be penalized.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) – It is the easiest way to identify potential keywords that will attract more traffic to the site. High KEI signifies high potential of keywords.

Keyword Research – The process of identifying relevant keywords and phrases to focus the PPC and SEO marketing campaigns,

Keyword Stuffing – Content that has many core keywords. A keyword stuffed website do not convert well as it is not worthy of linking and users read it mechanically.

L

Landing Page – The page on which a visitor lands on clicking any ad or link.

Link – A URL that connects a web document with another one or to the same one. Most links serve as a factor of trustworthiness.

Link Baiting – The process of creating and targeting a information that urges target audiences to point out high quality links. Techniques target at bloggers and social media.

Link Building – A method of building links that web crawlers will consider relevant, trustworthy and authoritative.

Link Equity – A measure of how a site depends on the popularity of inbound link.

Link Exchange – The reciprocal linking system by a site with directory pages.

Link Farm – Website or group of sites that while linking has no editorial control. Example: FFA pages.

Link Velocity – The rate at which a page or site gathers new inbound connections.

Long Tail – Longer inquiry questions that are frequently less focused than shorted expansive inquiries.

LSI – (Latent Semantic Indexing): is a path for web crawlers to comprehend and identify the content taking into account the likeness of pages and catchphrase. A result may not have the inquiry term in it. It might contain numerous words similar to that of the like the searched words.

M

Manual Penalty – Website penalties of websites when Google identifies violation of Webmasters Guidelines. It might take time to recover from manual penalty.

Meta Description – HTML properties that explains the content of a web page concisely. Meta descriptions displayed on the search engine result pages (SERP) displays the snippet of the page.

Meta Keywords – Meta keywords pinpoint keywords and key phrases a page targets. The Meta keyword tag codes looks like

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword”>

Meta Tags – Marketers refer Meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags.

N

Navigation – Technique that help users to understand where they are on the website, pages they have been and relation with the rest of the website.

Negative SEO – Attempt to negatively impact the rank of a third-party website. Over the years, Google has shifted the link-building strategy. Reputation management experts can highlight low quality links that have destructive anchor text of a page so that page is filtered in the search results.

Niche – the main focus (topic or subject) of the website.

No follow – The attribute that prevents links from passing the link authority. These are used in sites with user-generated content.

Non-Reciprocal Link – If site A connects to site B, and site B doesn’t link back to site A, it is referred as non-reciprocal.

O

Organic Search Results – The search engine results comprise of unpaid listings and paid ads. Unpaid listing is the organic search result which is organized based on relevancy in terms of linkage data, usage data, domain authority, page content and trust.

Outbound Link – A link from one site to an external site. Linking out to a high-quality and relevant content is an effective way of helping search engines to understand a website.

P

Page Authority – Page Authority is a score on a scale of 100, by Moz that indicates how a page will rank on any search engine. The scoring depends on data of Mozscape Web Index which includes MozTrust, MozRank and link counts.

PageRank – A value assigned by Google Algorithm that quantifies trust and link popularity. It ranges between 0 and 1. It is different from Toolbar Pagerank.

Page Title – Among the different on-page ranking factors this is one of the most important one. In the SERP the page title is shown. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo use title tags as page title.

Panda Algorithm – An algorithm of Google that helps in sorting websites into different buckets based on quality.

Penalty – Websites that are suspected of spamming are prevented by search engines to rank high on the search engine result page. these penalties are applied manually or based on the algorithmic.

Penguin Algorithm – An algorithm of Google that penalizes websites with unnatural links.

Pigeon Update – An algorithmic overhaul to nearby indexed lists on Google, which tied in more flags that have been connected with general web seek.

Position – Where the natural listings appear in search results. High position indicates greater influx of traffic.

Q

Quality Link – Search engines consider link votes to be trust. Quality links that have more votes get more preference than the low quality ones.

Query – The search string that visitors enter into any search engine.

R

Reciprocal Links – Link exchange procedure where websites build authority by three-way link trading.

Redirect – A technique of informing search engines or browsers when a page location moves. 302 redirect is for temporary change and 301 redirect is for permanent change.

Registrar – A company hat registers domain names.

Reinclusion – In case, a site is penalized for spamming, they can fix the issues and opt for reinclusion. Severity of the issue, brand strength of the site are two important determinants for adding the site to the index.

Referrer – The source of the website visitor.

Relative Link – Link that demonstrates the relationship between current URL and URL of the page. A few links show path of only relative links than the reference URL within href tags. However, it is advised to use absolute links than relative links.

Relevancy – The measure of search result usefulness for users.

Robots.txt – It is the file in root directory of websites that control and restricts behavior of spiders.

S

Sandbox – There are different speculations that suggest that Google categorizes new sites under sandbox which prevent them from ranking high. However, this concept of Sandbox is not universally accepted.

Search Engine – It is a software that comprises of index, spider, algorithms, search results and finds information relevant to user query.

SEM – Search engine marketing is a type of Internet Marketing that aims at improving the visibility in SERP or search engine result page. SEM comprises of both paid and organic results.

SEO – Search engine optimization affects visibility of a website or web page in the unpaid result of search engine also referred as organic or natural result. SEO targets various search types like local search, image search, academic search, video search and industry-based search.

SEO Copywriting – Writing a content or content in such a way that it appears to be relevant to various search queries.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page is the page that displays the result of search query of an user. It includes both free and paid search results.

Search Marketing – Marketing of a website on different search engines. It is done through SEO and Pay-per-click ads.

Session – Number of visitors are more than the unique as there are chances that an individual will visit the site more than once in a particular time frame. Visit of every individual to the site is know as session.

Site Map – The page that provides crawlers or search engines a secondary route of navigating through the website.

Social Media – Social media is a tool that lets users and companies to exchange and share information, interests, images, videos and ideas in virtual network and communities. It depends on web-based and mobile technologies which facilitate the interactive nature of different social media platforms.

Spider – Spider, crawlers or search engine bots are the same, they browse or crawl the web pages across the internet and index those. Different search engines have individual spiders. Usually search engines follow the robots.txt protocol.

Stop Words – Common words like a, to, and, is, which do not add much relevancy to any search query. Often these are removed from the query to identify the relevant search result. It is natural to use stop words in the content of a web page, since these words are common they do not have any discrimination value.

Submission – The aim of submission is to make relative websites and information systems aware of the website. Webmasters do not have to submit a website to the search engines as the crawlers follow indexed contents and links. The best way of submission is to submit the site to authentic links.

T

Toolbar Pagerank – Google algorithm quantifies the importance of page importance with values ranging from 0 to 10. This is not same as PageRank. Toolbar Pagerank is not updated regularly-few times in one year, and it is not reliable to know the current status of a website.

Trust Rank – A technique of distinguishing spam and variable pages by quantifying link relationship.

U

URL – Uniform Resource Locator- It is an authentic address of web documents.

Unique Visitor – The count of individual visitors for a website within a given time frame.

Usability – Usability is directly proportional to conversion rates. It determines how easily can customers can perform any desired action. The formatting, structure of content, Call-to-action buttons determine the website usability and conversion rate.

W

Warm Outreach – The procedure of linking webmasters, bloggers and key influencers relevant to your industry on the social media to forge a good relationship. It is perfect for bloggers, key influencers and webmasters who can act as your brand advocate.

White Hat SEO – SEO method, that adheres the best practices laid down by the search engines, and don’t manipulate the SERP results.

Widget – 1) ( gadget or gizmo) applications for web pages that provide specific function like IP address display or hit counter. These are perfect for link building. 2) A term widely used in economics that refers at “any commodity or product”.

Word Press – A famous open source blogging software, that helps in building a website or apps easily.

X

XHTML – Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language is a class designed to make HTML adhere XML formatting.

XML – Extensible Markup Language, is a basic, flexible text that makes it easy to format information with technologies like RSS.

A Glossary of SEO Terms is a helpful resource that makes marketing easy for the experts. It will help the digital marketers them to understand the process, latest algorithm of search engines easily and give them a competitive edge.