- Algorithm: A set of rules that search engines use to rank the listings in response to a query.
- Alt Text: A description of an image in your site's HTML. It helps search engines understand what the image is about.
- Anchor Text: The clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text should be relevant to the page you're linking to.
- Backlink: A link from another website to your site. Backlinks are important for SEO because they signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
- Canonical URL: The preferred URL of a page or set of pages.
- Citation Flow: A number predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.
- Cloaking: A deceptive practice where the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser.
- Content: Any part of a site that could be considered information, including text, images, links, and multimedia.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired action on a website, such as purchasing a product.
- Crawling: The process by which search engines discover updated content on the web, such as new sites or pages, changes to existing sites, and dead links.
- Domain Authority: A measure of how well a website is likely to rank in search engine results. It's based on the site's age, popularity, and size.
- Duplicate Content: Content that is similar or identical to that found on another website or page.
- External Link: A link that points to a domain other than the domain the link exists on, or the same domain but a different subdomain.
- Google My Business: A free tool from Google that helps business owners manage their online presence across the search engine and its growing portfolio of utilities.
- Heading: An HTML element that defines the sections of a web page. There are six levels of headings, from H1 to H6.
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language. A coding language used to create documents on the World Wide Web.
- Impression: The number of times a piece of content, such as a page, post, or ad, is displayed.
- Indexing: The process of adding web pages into Google search.
- Internal Link: A hyperlink that points to another page on the same website.
- Keyword: A word or phrase that describes the content on your page. It's the search term that you want to rank for with a certain page.
- Keyword Density: The percentage of times a keyword appears on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page.
- Keyword Stuffing: The practice of including a large number of keywords on a webpage to increase its visibility in search engine results. This is considered a spammy practice and is not recommended.
- Landing Page: The webpage where a visitor first arrives after clicking a link. In marketing, this is often a page designed to prompt a specific action.
- Link Building: The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own site.
- Long-Tail Keywords: Longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to a point-of-purchase or when they're using voice search.
- Meta Description: A snippet of information below the link of a search result that describes the content of the page.
- Meta Keywords: A type of meta tag that appears in the HTML code of a webpage and helps tell search engines what the topic of the page is.
- Meta Tags: A part of the HTML code that describes the page content to the search engines and website visitors.
- NoFollow Link: A link that does not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index.
- On-Page Optimization: The practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.
- Organic Search Results: Listings of web pages that appear as a result of the search engine's algorithm (as opposed to paid listings).
- PageRank: Google's system of measuring a page's importance on the web.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC): An internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked.
- Quality Content: Content that is unique, purposeful, and engaging.
- Ranking Factor: A characteristic of a website that search engines consider when ranking it in its results.
- Robots.txt: A file that tells search engine spiders to not crawl certain pages or sections of a website.
- Schema Markup: Code that you put on your website to help search engines return more informative results for users.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page displayed by a search engine in response to a query.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of certain keywords.
- SEO Audit: An evaluation of a website to identify its strengths and weaknesses in various areas, such as site architecture, content, and backlinks.
- Sitemap: A list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.
- Social Signal: Data coming from social media sites that may influence a website’s rank.
- Spider: A program that visits websites and reads their pages and other information to create entries for a search engine index.
- Traffic: The number of visitors to a website.
- URL: The location of a page or other resource on the Internet.
- User Experience (UX): The overall experience a user has when interacting with a website or application.
- Webmaster Tools: Free tools offered by Google and Bing that provide insights into how these search engines view your website.
- White Hat SEO: Techniques that are in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google.
- XML Sitemap: A document that helps Google and other major search engines better understand your website while crawling it. It lists the URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL.