Dictionary of SEO Terms
What is SEO Glossary
An SEO glossary is a collection of terms and definitions related to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is optimizing website content and structure to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO glossary includes technical terms and industry jargon commonly used in SEO. It is a helpful resource for anyone who wants to learn about SEO, whether they are a beginner or an experienced professional. Some common terms in an SEO glossary include keywords, backlinks, meta tags, SERPs, and more.
Please let us know if there are other terms you would like to include in our Dictionary of SEO terms. For fast access, click the letter you require.
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The mathematical formula used by search engines to rank the web pages found by their spiders.
ALT Tags
These display a short text description of an image when a mouse cursor is held over the image. The ALT description is also displayed in place of the image if the user is browsing with the image display turned off. Image ALT tags are useful to your page’s visitors. Alt tags can also help with your search engine rankings by increasing the keyword density (if you use your keywords in your ALT tags).
Anchor Text
The “clickable” part of the link structure. Using keywords in the link anchor text of your inbound links will help your search engine rankings for those keywords.
Example:
<a href=”https://www.yoursite.com”>This is the link anchor text</a>
Apache Web Server
Widely used web server software.
A web page that has been penalised by a search engine for using unethical SEO tactics.
Backlinks
Links from another web page to your web page. Most search engines provide an easy way to get a list of all the backlinks to a specific page. Also referred to as Incoming or inbound Links. Sometimes referred to as “IBLs”.
Broken Link
A link that no longer takes the user to the destination page when it is clicked on. This is usually the result of the destination page being renamed or deleted from the server. Also known as a Dead Link. Broken links are links on a website that no longer work and result in a 404 error page or a similar error message. Broken links can occur for various reasons, such as when a webpage is deleted or moved without updating the links that point to it. Broken links can negatively impact a website’s user experience and SEO performance because they can frustrate users and prevent search engine crawlers from properly indexing the website. Therefore, it is important for website owners to regularly check for broken links and fix them by updating or removing the links, or redirecting them to a relevant page.
The act of clicking on a link to visit a web page. Click-through refers to clicking on a hyperlink to follow a link from one web page to another. In digital marketing, click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that measures the number of clicks an ad or link receives divided by the number of times it was shown. Click-through rate is a key performance indicator (KPI) for evaluating the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, email marketing, and other marketing efforts. A higher click-through rate typically indicates that the ad or link is relevant and engaging to the target audience and can lead to higher website traffic and conversions.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
The number of times a link is clicked on is divided by the number of times that same link is displayed (called an impression). Example: A link is displayed 100 times (100 impressions) and clicked on 5 times. The CTR is 5% (5/100=.05).
Cloaking
One version of a page is served to a human visitor, but a different version of the same page is served to the search engine spiders (or ‘bots). This is usually done to “fool” the search engines into giving the page a higher rank than it would normally receive while ensuring the human visitor sees a useful and attractive page. Sites discovered cloaking might be penalised. Note: Cloaking is discouraged by most major search engines, including Google.
Comment Tags
Used in a web page’s HTML source code to indicate certain information about a section of the page code. Some search engines will consider keywords in comment tags for keyword density purposes, others (including Google) will not.
Example:
<!–This is a comment–>
Content
The information is located on a web page. This includes text, images, and any other visible information a webmaster places on the page. Content refers to any information or material that is presented or communicated to an audience. In digital marketing, content typically refers to text, images, videos, and other media created and shared to engage and inform a target audience. Content can be used for various purposes, such as educating consumers about a product or service, building brand awareness, driving traffic to a website, and improving search engine rankings. Effective content is typically high-quality, relevant, and valuable to the target audience, and is often optimized for search engines to help it rank higher in search results.
Content Targeted Advertising (CTA)
Refers to the placement of relevant Pay Per Click ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
Conversions
Conversion refers to site traffic that completes the site’s goal (such as buying a product, registering for a newsletter, and so on). Webmasters measure conversion to assess the effectiveness (and ROI) of their Pay Per Click and SEO campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires scripting/cookies to track visitor’s actions within a website, as log files are insufficient.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The base unit of cost for a Pay Per Click campaign.
Counter
A script that counts the number of hits, unique visitors, and page views that a web page (or an entire site) receives.
Crawler
A program used by search engines to “crawl” the web by following links from page to page. This is how most search engines “find” the web pages that they place in their index. Crawlers are also referred to as spiders, robots or “bots”.
Crawling the Web
Search engines use crawlers to move from web page to page by following the links. The pages “found” are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed in the search engine database.
Cross Linking
This is when two or more website owners link their sites together to boost their search engine rankings. If detected, cross-linking often results in a search engine penalisation.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheet. It gives complete control over how web pages are displayed. Certainly! CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets.” It’s a programming language that styles a web page’s appearance, such as the colours, fonts, and layout. It works with HTML, the language used to create a web page’s content. CSS is an important tool for web developers because it allows them to separate the visual elements of a web page from the actual content, which makes it easier to update and maintain the page’s appearance.
See “Broken Link”.
Deep Linking
Linking to a page, one or more levels are removed from the home directory. Deep linking is often desirable when building PageRank for a specific page on a website. Example: https://www.yoursite.com/helpfiles/seo-copywriting.html
Description
A short sentence or paragraph describing the contents of a web page is usually used as part of a link to describe the page being linked to. See also the link anchor text.
Description Meta Tag
A Meta tag that describes the content of the web page in which it is found. Used by some search engines for keyword density purposes. Also, some search engines will use the description Meta tag for the description provided to a user when the page is returned in a search result listing. It would be best to use a couple of your targeted keywords in the description Meta tag.
Example:
<META NAME=” Description” CONTENT=” This sentence describes the content on this page.”>
Directory
Human editors maintain a categorised list of websites instead of crawlers. Yahoo.com is the most widely recognised directory on the web, but there are thousands of others, although only a few of any consequence.
Domain
The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of a website. When a user types a URL into a web browser, a dedicated computer on the web known as a Domain Name Server, or DNS, translates the URL into a discrete IP address, which is then used to find the actual website being requested. In the URL https://www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com is the domain.
Domain Name Servers (DNS)
These are computers that translate human-friendly URLs into computer-friendly IP addresses. This process occurs every time a user requests a page from a website.
DNS Propagation
Every time a new domain name is registered (or an existing one is transferred to a new DNS), information about the domain and the DNS that hosts it must travel the entire internet. This process usually takes around 24 hours, during which time the domain will be inaccessible to users.
Doorway Page
A page that is usually optimised for a particular search engine and search term. Multiple doorway pages are often used to help ensure that the same basic content is ranked well on several search engines. The use of doorway pages for this purpose is frowned upon by most larger search engines, including Google.
Duplicate Content
This is when two or more web pages contain substantially the same content; the spiders categorise them as containing duplicate content. Search Engine spiders have filters to detect duplicate content. When pages containing duplicate content are detected, they are often assigned a duplicate content penalty, lowering the page’s rankings from what they would have received naturally.
Dynamic Content (dynamic pages)
Web pages are generated from database information within a content management system based on user queries. Dynamic pages often include characters such as question marks in the URL. The URLs of dynamic pages often use these extensions: .asp, .cgm, or .cgi. Though Google is improving, most search engines don’t index dynamic content well.
Dynamic IP Address
An IP address that changes every time a computer logs on to the internet. See also Static IP Address.
A filter is a software routine that examines web pages during a robot’s crawl, looking for search engine spam, and if it detects the use of spam on the page, a ranking penalty is considered. Common filters look for hidden text (such as white text on a white or near-white background), links to bad neighbourhoods, and many other unethical SEO techniques that the search engine doesn’t like.
Flash
Graphic Programme from Macromedia. Fantastic graphics but spiders and robots can’t ‘see’ them. Looks good but doesn’t improve your ranking.
Googlebot
The crawler (there are many) that Google uses daily to find and index new web pages. Googlebot is a piece of software, also known as a spider, that crawls through the pages of public websites. Google’s web crawling bot, also known as a ‘crawler’ or spider.’ In other words, it is a Google programme designed to explore web pages online.
Google Dance
In the past, the term “Google Dance” was used to describe the period during which a major index update of the Google search engine was implemented. Nothing to do with Terry Wogan singing, thank goodness. “Google dance” is an unofficial term used to refer to the period when Google performed the update to its index. At a specific time, updates to the Google indexing servers may be out of synchronisation, leaving results changing position minute by minute. Google may change their index calculation method to allow for a continuous update (which will effectively end the dances, which take place every 2-3 weeks).
Google Toolbar
A downloadable toolbar for Internet Explorer that allows a user to do a Google search without visiting the Google website. The toolbar also displays the page’s Google PageRank (PR), which is currently displayed in the browser. The Google Toolbar can be downloaded from https://support.google.com/toolbar/answer/81376
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HTML tags help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can, if correctly structured, boost search engine rankings.
Examples:
<h1>This is an H1 header tag.</h1>
<h2>This is an H2 header tag.</h2>
Hidden Text and Hidden Links
Using a text font with the same (or nearly the same) colour as the background colour renders the text or link invisible or difficult to read. The same effect can also be achieved by using various HTML tricks. Hidden text and hidden links are often used to artificially increase a web page’s keyword density for a keyword or key phrase and/or to artificially boost the link popularity of other pages on your site(s). Google and most other search engines discourage the use of hidden text and links, and their use may incur ranking penalties.
Hits
The term “hits” is commonly misunderstood. A hit is commonly perceived as a visit to one of your web pages. This is not the case. A hit occurs every time a file is accessed on your website. For example, if your home page has a logo gif file and 18 jpegs, then each time a visitor loads that page, 20 hits will be recorded, including 1 hit for the page itself.
The only meaningful way to evaluate the traffic flow of a site is to consider the average daily or monthly number of unique visitors and page views a site receives.
Home Directory
The main directory is where your site’s main index page is located.
Using separate hyperlinks on different areas within the same image, clicking on different parts of the image will take the user to different web pages, which is not SEO-friendly.
Inbound Links
Inbound links, or backlinks, are hyperlinks from other websites pointing to a particular website or webpage. Inbound links are important for SEO because search engines like Google use them to signal the popularity and authority of a website or webpage. The more high-quality inbound links a website has, the more likely it is to be viewed as an authoritative source by search engines. Inbound links can come from various sources, such as blog posts, news articles, social media posts, and directories. It’s important to note that not all inbound links are created equal, and the quality of the linking website can also impact the value of the inbound link. For example, a link from a well-respected and authoritative website in your industry will likely be more valuable than a link from a low-quality or spammy website.
Index
The list of web pages is stored and ranked by a search engine.
Indexing
When a search engine has crawled the web, it ranks the URLs found using various criteria (see algorithm) and places them in the index. Indexing is how search engines organise information before a search to provide lightning-fast responses to queries. After a website has been crawled, the ranking process begins with indexing.
IP Address
Every computer that connects to the Internet is assigned a unique numerical Internet Protocol Address (IP Address). IP addresses can be either static (never unchanging) or dynamic (changing with every internet connection).
Your computer’s IP address enables it to be “found” online. In simple terms, when you request a web page or receive an email, the IP address tells the sending server where to send it to. You can see your IP by just opening a https://pingdad.com/
IP Spoofing
Returning an IP address differs from the one assigned to the destination website. This is frequently achieved with redirects. A huge no-no for SEO, and it can be a criminal offence.
A word or phrase is typed into a search engine to find web pages that contain that word or phrase. A web page can (and should be) optimised for specific keywords/phrases relevant to that page’s content.
Keywords Meta Tag
An HTML Meta tag that lists all of the main keywords and key phrases that are contained on that web page. Some search engines use the keyword Meta tag to help rank web pages in their databases. Google currently does not.
Example:
<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=” search engine optimisation, SEO, chicken soup”>
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to adding redundant keywords to a web page. The words are added to improve search engine ranking, not for the benefit of human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to visitors. Search engines likely disapprove, and to humans, it detracts from the usability of a page in that it looks like spam.
Link anchor text refers to the visible and clickable text within a hyperlink on a webpage. It is the highlighted or underlined text that users can click on to navigate to another page or resource. Anchor text is typically distinguished from the surrounding text by being styled differently, such as appearing in a different colour or underlined.
Link Building
Link building is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that involves acquiring hyperlinks from external websites to your site. It is a strategy to improve a website’s visibility and authority in search engine rankings. A website can signal credibility and value to search engines by obtaining high-quality and relevant backlinks. Link building requires proactive outreach, content creation, and relationship building with other website owners. Learn from Megri Outreach. It aims to establish a network of trusted connections, enhance online reputation, and drive organic traffic. However, focusing on ethical practices, such as natural link acquisition and providing valuable content, is important to ensure long-term success.
Link Exchange
Linking to another website on your own site in exchange for a return link is also known as reciprocal linking and should be ranked low as a link-building strategy.
Link Farm
A web page created solely for search engine ranking purposes consists almost entirely of a long list of unrelated links. These types of pages are penalised by almost all search engines.
Link Popularity
A measure of how “popular” a web page is on the internet as measured by the number of inbound links pointing to your web page. Link popularity is one of the main factors used to help determine search engine rankings. However, the quality of inbound links is more important than the number, and poor links can even be damaging.
Linking
Placing a URL link on one website takes a user to a page on another website.
Links
Links, also known as hyperlinks, are clickable connections between web pages that allow users to navigate from one page to another on the internet. They are an integral part of the web ecosystem, enabling seamless exploration of information and resources. Links can be textual or graphical, and when clicked, they direct users to a different webpage, website, document, or media file. In addition to facilitating user navigation, links are crucial for search engine optimization (SEO). They serve as pathways for search engine crawlers to discover and index web content, impacting a website’s visibility and ranking in search results. Effective use of links enhances user experience, promotes information dissemination, and improves online discoverability.
Log Files
Files that are constantly and automatically created and updated on your web server provide very specific details about the activities taking place on your website.
This includes referring URLs, IP addresses, pages visited, unique visitors, total page views, total hits (see “Hits”), and much more. Careful reviewing of your log files can provide valuable information about your site’s performance and visitors.
Submitting websites or web pages to search engines or directories for inclusion using their guidelines.
Meta Description Tag
Although not all search engines use them, let you describe the site/page. Some search engines will display this on the listing instead of the first few lines of the site.
Meta Search Engine
A website that takes your search query and passes it on to several different search engines and directories then summarises the results for you to review.
Mirror Sites
Identical but separate websites on different domains. They are frequently used, validly by large websites, to share heavy server loads. Search engine spammers also use them to generate more search engine referrals.
Generally, most search engines’ Terms of Service do not allow mirrors and do not hesitate to assess duplicate content penalties when they feel justifiable. In short, this could be grounds for banning your site from the search engines.
Outbound links are hyperlinks on a webpage that direct users to external websites or resources. They provide additional information, references, or sources to support the content on the current webpage. Outbound links enhance credibility, provide further context, and offer readers avenues for further exploration.
Google assigns a proprietary numerical score to every web page in its index. PageRank for each page is calculated by Google using a special mathematical algorithm based on Google’s measure of the page’s importance. (See also “Google Toolbar”)
PageRank (PR) For Money
Selling or buying a link from a web page with a high Google PageRank to increase the other page’s PR. Google highly discourages this, and it will penalise both pages if Google finds out.
Page Views
Each time a visitor accesses a web page on a site, it counts as a one-page view. Irrespective of whether the same user viewed the same page 5 minutes ago, it still represents another page view.
Paid Inclusion (PFI or Pay for Inclusion)
Some directories will only consider placing your URL into their database if you pay them a fee. Yahoo charges a £250 evaluation fee for commercial sites in the UK and $299 per year in the US. Note that this fee does not guarantee that your site will be accepted and placed in the Yahoo database, but only that Yahoo will consider your site for inclusion promptly. If your site is rejected, you’ll be out of pocket by £250, so it pays to ensure you know what you’re doing before submitting your site. However, you do have an opportunity to appeal against the decision.
Other smaller directories will guarantee to list your site upon payment of their fee, provided that your site meets their guidelines (which are clearly explained in advance).
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engines
This is a traffic-generating method in which a search engine or directory places your link in its searchable database and charges you a fee every time your URL comes up in a search and is clicked on. The fee is usually determined by bidding on keywords or key phrases.
The two largest PPC search engines are Overture and Google AdWords. There are also numerous smaller PPC engines.
Penalty
A punishment levied against a web page by a search engine because of using an SEO tactic it doesn’t approve of. A penalty usually results in a web page being credited with a lower Google PageRank (PR) than it has actually “earned”. Penalties also result in a page being “buried” deep within the SERPS (See “Search Engine Results Pages”), where it will rarely be found again by searchers.
Portal
Term for websites that are either respected hubs for a given subject or popular, content-driven sites that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer hefty content and offer advertising for appropriate sites. Yahoo is an example of a portal.
The order in which individual web pages are returned in the SERPS for a given search query. Search engines rank the web pages based on relevancy to your search terms according to their proprietary algorithm.
Reciprocal Links
Links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs.
Redirect
A tactic is sometimes used to send a user to a page different from the one she found in the SERPS. For example, a webmaster optimises a web page for a popular keyword. When a user finds the page by searching for that keyword, she is subsequently redirected to a different, possibly non-relevant page from which the webmaster stands ready to make money.
Search engines consider this an invalid use of a redirect and will penalise pages that use redirects in this manner.
Referrer or Referring URL
A referring URL is a web page that contains a link to another webpage. The URL of the page that a user was on before clicking a link led them to a different webpage. Referring to URLs are important for tracking website traffic and understanding how users navigate through a website.
Relevancy
The degree to which the content on a web page, returned in the SERPS, corresponds to the topic of information that the user was searching for.
Robot
A program a search engine uses to crawl the web to find, rank, and index new web pages. They are often referred to as “bots”.
Robots.txt
A special file is commonly used to exclude some or all search engine robots from crawling certain files or directories on a website or to tell the robots to include all files. This file should be placed in your website’s root directory.
Scumware is a general label that applies to software that:
Search Engine Friendly
A web page that has been designed and optimised with search engines in mind, often to achieve high rankings. A search engine-friendly page also makes it easy for search engines to follow the links on the page.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising, such as PPC. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of digital marketing that promotes websites by increasing their visibility and relevance in search engine results pages (SERPs) through paid advertising and optimization techniques. SEM includes search engine advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The process of optimising a web page for high search engine rankings for a particular search term or set of search terms. It includes making web pages spider-friendly and relevant to appropriate keywords or keyphrases.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)
The ranked listing of web pages returned for a specific search query. In essence, when you put a search term into a search engine, what you get back are the SERPS.
Search Query
You type the keyword, keyphrase, or list of words into a search engine to find web pages on a topic that interests you. Also known as a Search Term.
Search Term
A search term, or a keyword, is a word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine to find information on a particular topic. Search engines use search terms to match web pages with relevant content, which is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies.
SEMPO
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to enhancing a website’s visibility and non-paid search engine rankings. It encompasses techniques such as optimizing content, structure, and backlinks to make the website more appealing to search engines and improve its chances of ranking higher in search results.
Server
A computer that hosts web pages and delivers them to a user’s internet browser when requested. A dedicated server hosts one website only. A shared server hosts multiple websites, so can be cheaper but often slower than a dedicated server.
SERPS
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the pages search engines display in response to a user’s search query. They typically include a list of websites relevant to the search term, along with other features such as paid advertisements, images, videos, and featured snippets. SERPs are important in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies.
Spam
With reference to search engines, spam is loosely defined as any technique used to give your web page(s) an unfair ranking advantage over other pages. These techniques generally violate search engines’ Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Clearly, spam can be grounds for blacklisting. Here’s what the search engines themselves call spam:
Spider
A search engine spider, also known as a crawler or bot, is a program used by search engines to systematically browse and index web pages. These automated bots follow links and visit websites, analyzing their content and gathering data to determine their relevance and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Spider Trap
A spider trap refers to either:
A constant loop where spiders request pages and the server requests data to render the page or;
A deliberate scheme designed to identify (and prohibit) spiders that do not respect the robots.txt file.
Splash Page
Introduction pages to a website heavy on graphics (or flash video) with no textual content. They are designed to either impress a visitor or complement some corporate branding, usually of little use in impressing visitors or improving search engine positioning.
Stop Word
Words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries, such as “it”, “is” or “the”. Example: a, an, and, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, have, he, her, him, his, in, is, it, its, of, on, or, that, the, to, was, were, with, she, they, this, their, them, there, these, those, we, what, when, where, which, who, whom, why, will, you, your
Static IP Address
An IP address that is permanently assigned to a computer. The IP address doesn’t change with each connection to the internet. See also Dynamic IP Address.
Submitting Your URLs
This is telling a search engine or directory about your web pages. The URLs you submit are placed into a queue for later crawling or human review, depending on the engine or directory. If you have backlinks (See “Backlinks”) pointing to your web pages, there is usually no need to submit your URLs to the search engines because their crawlers will find the pages independently and index them. You do need to submit your URLs to directories because they use human reviewers rather than software robots to visit the sites you submit and evaluate.
Title Meta Tag
This HTML tag provides web browsers and search engines with an “official” title for the page currently being displayed. Using a couple of keywords in your title tag can help boost the page’s search engine ranking for those keywords.
For example: <META NAME=”TITLE” CONTENT=”Here is the page title”>
Top Ten Ranking
A web page that is listed in the first 10 search results for a search query, which in Google, generally means on the coveted page one.
Traffic
A website’s average traffic within a given period. It can be measured in multiple ways, including total unique visitors and page views. Don’t confuse hits with unique visitors and page views. The term “hits” is practically useless when evaluating website traffic statistics.
Unique Visitors
The number of visitors who access a website within a specific period (usually 24 hours) from unique IP addresses. If you visit the same website three times within a 24-hour period, your visits only count as one unique visit for that day.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
Each web page has a specific human-friendly URL or web address. Domain name servers map URLs to computer-friendly IP addresses.
Example: https://www.yoursite.com
A visitor to a website is a person who accesses and views its content. This includes anyone who clicks on a link or enters the website’s URL into their browser. Website owners often track visitor behaviour, including the number of visitors, pages visited, and length of time spent on the site, to improve their website’s performance and user experience.
These are shorthand references to Google’s different data centres. To visit the data centre that corresponds to the term, add “.google.com” to the end of the reference.