SEO Glossary (Terminology & Definitions for Beginners)
انتشار: دی 26، 1401
بروزرسانی: 29 اردیبهشت 1404

SEO Glossary (Terminology & Definitions for Beginners)


The field of search engine optimization (SEO) has its own set of terminology, definitions, and jargon to describe its unique processes and factors that affect a website’s visibility in the search engine results pages.

The SEO glossary on this page contains the most important SEO terms and definitions every beginner should know and understand throughout their career in this industry.

SEO Glossary: Terminology and Definitions

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What Is SEO Terminology?

SEO terminology is the body of terms used in the technical field of search engine optimization. Terminology\xa0for SEO helps you to fully understand specific activities that are part of the search engine optimization process.

SEO Glossary

This SEO Glossary includes an alphabetical list of terms, words, and numbers relating to\xa0search engine optimization with definitions to enhance your SEO vocabulary.


Numbers

301 Redirect: An HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser that signals a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

302 Redirect: An HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser that signals a termporary redirect from one URL to another.

404 Not Found: An HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser that signals the requested web page or resource cannot be found. This condition may be temporary or permanent.

410 Gone: An HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser that signals the requested web page or resource is no longer available on the origin server and this condition is likely permanent.


A

ALT Text: Alternative text that describes the context of an image on a web page. It’s used by screen readers and search engines to understand the content of photos and graphics. Also known as the ALT attribute.

Affiliate Site: A website that promotes affiliate products to earn commissions for each visit, signup, or sale they generate for a merchant.

Algorithmic Penalty: An automated action that search engines take against a website to lower its rankings. It can be caused by manipulative SEO practices or how algorithms are changed during updates to evaluate websites. Not to be confused with the search engine optimization term Manual Penalty.

Anchor Text: The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink.


B

Backlink: A link on a website that points to a web page on another site. Also known as inbound link or incoming link.

Backlink Profile: The collection of inbound links pointing to a website. Also known as a link profile.

Black Hat SEO: A practice of search engine optimization that uses tactics to game the ranking algorithms that violate search engine guidelines.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of website visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one web page.

Branded Keyword: A term or phrase that’s directly associated with a brand, product, or service. Examples of this SEO terminology include Nike shoes, iPhone, and CNN.

Broad Match Keyword: A keyword match type offered by pay-per-click advertising platforms that gives the widest audience reach. Ads can be displayed for the searches that contain the target keyword as well other terms and phrases relevant to the topic.

Broken Link: A link on a web page that points to a non-existent URL. Also known as a dead link.


C

Canonical Tag: A snippet of HTML code (rel=“canonical”) that’s added to a <link> element in the <head> section of a web page to inform search engines that another URL contains the master version of the content. It’s used to prevent duplicate (or near-duplicate) content issues. Example: <link rel=”canonical”>

Canonical URL: The URL used in the canonical tag to define the master version of a set of duplicate or near-duplicate pages. Example: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://domain.com/master-page/”>

Citation Flow: A trademark score by Majestic that ranges between 0-100. It measures the popularity of a URL without considering the quality of the backlinks.

Citation: An online reference of a business’s name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) that’s displayed on a third-party website. Also known as a local citation.

Cloaking: A search engine optimization technique where the content presented to the search engine crawler is different than the content presented to the user.

Content Gap Analysis: A process that compares a website against its competitors to identify any gaps that exist between the content. This type of analysis can be applied on a sitewide level to find missed opportunities for important topics to cover and on a page-level basis to evaluate which elements are missing from existing content to improve it.

Content Optimization: The process of optimizing content so it satisfies users and search engines to help meet key digital marketing goals.

Content Silo: A website architecture structure that groups content around keyword-based themes and isolates it from other topics. Web pages that are part of a silo are interlinked with each other only to help strengthen the topical relevance and authority of the keyword-based theme. Also known as content siloing and SEO silo structure.

Core Web Vitals: A set of metrics that are used by Google to measure user experience based on actual user data. Core Web Vitals consist of three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Crawl Budget: The number of URLs a search engine will crawl on a website on any given day. It’s based on two factors: crawl rate and crawl demand.

Crawl Demand: How much demand a search engine crawler specifies for your URLs based on the popularity and staleness of the pages in the index. Also known as crawl scheduling.

Crawl Rate: The number of requests per second\xa0a search engine crawler can make on a website when crawling it: Also known as crawl rate limit.

Crawlability: A search engine’s ability to access (or crawl) a web page.

Crawler: An Internet bot that systematically\xa0browses\xa0the World Wide Web in order to create an index of data. Also known as a web crawler, search engine crawler, and search engine spider.


D

Dead Link: A hyperlink on a web page that points to a URL that has been deleted or moved. Also known as a broken link.

Deindexed: A web page that has been removed from the search engine index.

Direct Traffic: Website visits that do not have a defined source or referring site. It typically occurs as a result of a user entering a URL into their browser or using a bookmark to directly access the site. Direct traffic can also be reported in analytics dashboard from traffic that comes through inbound links that have been tagged with the rel=”nooppener” attribute. See the Noopener definition for more details.

Dofollow Link: An outbound link that directs search engine spiders to crawl the link and pass link equity (i.e., PageRank) to the target URL. A hyperlink is a dofollow link by default unless a rel attribute for nofollow is added to the <a> HTML element. Also known as dofollow backlinks.

Domain Authority: A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that estimates how well a website will rank in the search engine results pages. Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better possibility of ranking.

Domain Rating: A search engine ranking score developed by Ahrefs that estimates the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile.\xa0Domain Rating scores are based on a 100-point scale.

Duplicate Content: A term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page within the same domain or across multiple domains. The content can be identical (exact duplicates) or very similar to each other.


E

E-A-T: An acronym that stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a set of website evaluation standards that comes from Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and is part of the ranking algorithm systems.

E-E-A-T: An acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google revised the Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in December 2022 to include Experience as another important part of the evaluation process and is a new signal for the ranking algorithm systems.

Editorial Link: A link a website receives that is not paid for, asked for, or traded for, but is acquired naturally by publishing high-quality content that other site owners want to link to for the benefit of their users.

Exact Match Keyword: A term that applies to both search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In search engine optimization, an exact match keyword\xa0indicates that your target keyword exactly matches a search query. In pay-per-click advertising, an exact match keyword indicates a match type that allows your ads to appear for searches that have the same meaning or same intent as your keyword and not necessarily the exact wording.

External Link: A hyperlink that points to a web page on another domain. Also known as an outbound link.


F

Featured Snippets: A highlighted excerpt of text that appears at the top of a Google search results page to provide users with a quick answer to their query. It is also known as position 0 because it ranks above the first organic search result listing.


G

Google Analytics: A web analytics service offered by Google that allows users to track and analyze performance metrics for websites and apps.

Google Business Profile: A business listing service offered by Google that allows local businesses to manage how their information shows up across Google products, like Maps and Search. Previously known as Google My Business.

Google Knowledge Graph: Google’s database of billions of facts it has collected about entities (people, places, organizations, and things) that it uses to serve relevant information in an infobox (Knowledge Panel) beside the search results.

Google Knowledge Panel: Information boxes that appear on Google when a user searches for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that contain information stored in the Knowledge Graph.

Google Penalty: A negative effect applied to a website’s rankings based on a manual review or algorithm update. A manual action penalty will appear in Google Search Console along with a notification explaining why the penalty was applied.

Google Ranking Factors: A set of criteria Google’s algorithms use to evaluate websites and web pages to compile the ranking order of their search results. It’s estimated that Google has more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm systems.

Google Search Console: A service offered by Google that allows users to monitor and troubleshoot their website’s presence in Google Search results.

Google Trends: A service offered by Google that gives a largely unfiltered sample of search requests made to Google to help users discover how often specific keywords and topics have been queried over a\xa0specific period of time.

Grey Hat SEO: A practice of search engine optimization that combines white hat and black hat SEO techniques to help a website ranking higher in search engines. Some of the methods follow search engine guidelines (e.g., creating high-quality content) while other tactics violate those same guidelines (e.g., buying backlinks).

Guest Posting: The practice of writing content that is published on another company’s website or blog with the intention of gaining brand awareness and inserting backlinks into the page for off-site SEO purposes. of Also known as guest blogging.


H

Header Tags: HTML elements used to separate headings and subheadings on a web page to provide a hierarchical structure to the content. Header tags consist of six levels: H1 to H6. Also known as heading tags.

H1 Tag: An HTML element that defines the first-level heading on a web page to mark up the main subject for the content. The <h1> tag is often coded in website themes to be the first visible header tag on the page and includes the title of the content. It also carries the most weight for on-page SEO compared to the H2-H3 tags.

H2 Tag: An HTML element that defines the second-level heading (or subheading) on a web page to mark up a subsection of the content. A web page can have any number of <h2> tags to break up the subsections of the main topic. It carries less SEO value than the H1 tag but more weight than the H3 tag.

H3 Tag: An HTML element that defines the third-level heading (or subheading) on a web page to mark up a subsection of an H2 heading in the content. A web page can have any number of <h3> tags to break up the subsections of the <h2> subheading topics. It carries the least value for on-page SEO.

H4: Tag: An HTML element that defines the fourth-level heading (or subheading) on a web page to mark up a subsection of an H3 heading in the content. A web page can have any number of <h4> tags to break up the subsections of the <h3> subheading topics. It does not carry any weight for SEO.

H5: Tag: An HTML element that defines the fifth-level heading (or subheading) on a web page to mark up a subsection of an H4 heading in the content. A web page can have any number of <h5> tags to break up the subsections of the <h4> subheading topics. It does not carry any weight for SEO.

H6 Tag: An HTML element that defines the sixth-level heading (or subheading) on a web page to mark up a subsection of an H5 heading in the content. A web page can have any number of <h6> tags to break up the subsections of the <h5> subheading topics. It does not carry any weight for SEO.

Hreflang: An HTML attribute used to tell search engines about alternate versions of a web page for different languages and geographic regions.


I

Inbound Link: A link on a website that points to a web page on another site. Also known as an incoming link or backlink.

Index: A database used by a search engine to store information for all the websites it has crawled on the Internet. Also known as a search index.

Indexing: The process a search engine uses to organize and store the website information it found during the crawling process in the index.

Internal Link: A hyperlink from one web page to another web page on the same website.

International SEO: A practice of search engine optimization that optimizes a website for multiple countries or languages.


J

JavaScript: An\xa0object-oriented\xa0computer programming language used to create interactive effects within web browsers.

JavaScript SEO: A practice of search engine optimization that makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index JavaScript code.


K

Keyword Cannibalization: A website issue where multiple pages target the same or similar keywords and end up competing against each other (cannibalizing) for rankings in the search engine results.

Keyword Clustering: A content optimization practice that groups similar and semantically related keywords together on the same web page. The goal is to optimize the page for multiple (and relevant) variations of the keyword phrase so it has stronger on-page SEO signals for the entire cluster as a method to increase overall search engine visibility.

Keyword Density: The percentage of times a keyword phrase appears on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page.

Keyword Difficulty: A scoring metric that keyword research tools use to estimate how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 positions on Google for a given keyword. Keyword Difficulty (KD) is based on the strength of the backlink profiles for the top-ranking URLs. KD scores range between 1 to 100, with 100 being the most difficult.

Keyword Prominence: A content optimization practice that uses a target keyword in prominent locations on a web page to send a strong signal to search engines about what keywords the page should rank for in the search results.

Keyword Proximity: The distance between individual words of a keyword phrase within a body of text. Keywords can have low proximity or high proximity for related search terms based on how close or far out they are spaced.

Keyword Ranking: The organic ranking position in the search results for a particular keyword.

Keyword Research: The process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that information to formulate a search engine optimization strategy. Keyword research helps evaluate the organic traffic, ranking difficulty, and monetary value of potential words and phrases to target on a website.

Keyword Research Tool: A software application for conducting keyword research.

Keyword Stuffing: The practice of repeating the same keywords a large number of times on a web page to try to manipulate search engine rankings.

Keyword: A word or phrase that you target on a web page for search engine optimization.


L

Link Bait: Content that is specifically designed to attract backlinks from other websites.

Link Building: The process of acquiring backlinks for a website using a variety of off-site search engine optimization techniques.

Link Equity: A value that is passed from one web page to another through a hyperlink. All web pages contain some level of popularity and authority (called PageRank) and some of that value is transferred as link equity to the hyperlinked URL. Link equity can be passed internally through links on the same domain or to other websites with outbound links. Also known as link juice.

Link Exchange: The practice of exchanging links with other websites to manipulate search engine rankings. Also known as reciprocal linking.

Link Juice: A slang term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe the power a backlink passes to another website. Also known as link equity.

Link Manipulation: A search engine optimization technique used to manipulate search engine rankings of a website by creating backlinks in unnatural manner. Also known as a link scheme.

Link Profile: The collection of inbound links pointing to a website. Also known as a backlink profile.

Link Rot: A term used to describe a natural process of links becoming broken over time (or rotting) due to content being moved or deleted from websites.

Link Scheme: Any attempt to manipulate a website’s search engine rankings through the use of unnatural links. Also known as link manipulation.

Link Spam: Any links that are intended to manipulate search engine rankings.

Link Velocity: The rate at which a website or web page gains backlinks over a set period of time.

Local SEO: A search engine optimization strategy that focuses on increasing the visibility and rankings of a website in local search results.

Long Tail Keywords: Keyword phrases that include 4 or more words.

LSI Keywords: An SEO term used to describe words and phrases that are semantically related to a particular topic.

Local Citation: An online reference of a business’s name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) that’s displayed on a third-party website. Also known as just a citation.

Local Pack: A section at the top of Google’s search results that displays 3 local businesses when a query has local search intent.\xa0Also known as the map pack or 3-pack.


M

Manual Action Penalty: A penalty that is manually applied by Google to a website for violating its search engine guidelines. Manual actions appear in Google Search Console with a notification explaining why the penalty was applied.

Medium Tail Keywords: Keyword phrases that include 3 to 4 words.

Meta Description: An HTML meta tag that summarizes the web page’s content for search engines and users.

Meta Keywords: An HTML meta tag that provides keyword data to help search engine crawlers understand what the main topics are for the web page. This meta tag is no longer used by major search engines.

Meta Tags: Snippets of HTML code that give important metadata information to search engine crawlers about a web page.

Mobile-First Indexing: An indexing method that uses the mobile version of a website’s content (crawled with the smartphone agent) for indexing and ranking in search engines. Google uses a mobile-first indexing system.

Money Page: A web page specifically designed to generate revenue.


N

Natural Links: Links that occur organically without any effort from the website owner to generate them for search engine optimization.

Negative SEO: A malicious search engine optimization practice aimed at lower a website’s search engine rankings by getting it penalized.

Niche Site: SEO vocabulary used for website that focuses on a specific subset of a broader market with the purpose of monetizing the traffic.

Nofollow Link: A hyperlink that includes the rel=”nofollow” attribute to instruct search engine crawlers not to crawl the link or pass transfer link equity (or PageRank) to the destination URL. Also known as a nofollow backlink.

Noindex Tag: An HTML directive that informs search engines not to index the page in search results.

Noopener: An HTML attribute (rel=”noopener”) that can be added to external links set to open in a new browser tab or window that works as a security measure to prevent malicious links from gaining access to a user’s browser through the original page.

Noreferrer: An HTML attribute (rel=”noreferrer”) that can be added to external links to prevent the external sites from seeing the originating domain as referral traffic in analytics reports. Traffic sent to the external site will be reported as direct traffic in analytics.


O

Off-Page SEO: Any activity taken outside of a web page to improve its search engine rankings. Also known as off-site SEO.

On-Page SEO: Any activity taken on a web page to improve its search engine rankings. Also known as on-site SEO.

Organic Keyword: A type of keyword that attracts free website traffic from the organic search results listings.

Organic Search Results: The unpaid listings that are displayed on the search engine results page.

Organic Traffic: A type of website traffic that comes from the unpaid organic search results listings.

Orphan Page: A web page that is not linked to from any other page on the website. It is completely isolated and the only way users can get to the orphan page is by using a direct link.

Outbound Link: A hyperlink that points to a web page on another domain. Also known as an external link.


P

Page Authority: A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that estimates how well a web page will rank in the search engine results. Page Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a better possibility of ranking.

Page Speed: Refers to the amount of time it takes for content on a web page to load in the browser.

PageRank: A metric used by Google to assign a value of importance to a web page that is based on the quantity and quality of other web pages linking to it.

PageRank Algorithm: An algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term “web page” and co-founder Larry Page.

Pageviews: A metric in Google Analytics that reports the total number of views a web page receives in a given time period. It is different than unique pageviews which aggregates views that are generated by separate users during the same session.

Phrase Match Keywords: A keyword match type offered by pay-per-click advertising platforms that allow ads to be displayed for the searches that include the meaning target keyword. This allows you to reach more searches than with exact match keywords but fewer searches than with broad match keywords.

Pillar Page: A piece of content that serves as the cornerstone for a topic cluster. It provides a broad overview of the core topic and links internally to articles that go in-depth about the subtopics. Also known as a hub page.

Pogo-Sticking: The act of a searcher going back and forth between web pages that are listed in the SERPs. It indicates that the searcher is not finding what they are looking for on a web page and immediately bounces off the site by hitting the back button and then clicking on another SERP result.



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