An Insight into SEO Terminology

SEO i.e search engine optimization is a trending online marketing technique which has helped many business grow in a short span. To become a SEO freelancer or SEO expert, one should have the basic knowledge of few terms related with this advanced marketing technique. Here in this post, I will be sharing some of the most common terms associated with SEO. So, here they are:

1. Search Engine: Search engine or web search engine a program, which searches a information/document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu etc.
2. SERP: A 'web search engine' is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files.
3. SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results.
4. On-Page SEO: On-page SEO oe On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
5. Off-Page SEO: "Off-site SEO" (also called "off-page SEO") refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimizing for off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of a site's popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
6. Link Building: Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.
7. Backlinks: Backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. When a webpage links to any other page, it's called a backlink
8. DoFollow Links: Dofollow links allow search engine bots to follow them and reach the destination website. Giving back the link juice and a backlink.
9. NoFollow Links: Nofollow links attributes do not allow search engine bots to follow link.That means if the website owner is linking back to you with nofollow attributes, it does not pass on link juice.
10. Search Engine Bot: Search Engine Bot also known by names web crawler, web spider, search bot, Internet bot is a automated software program that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering). Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of others sites' web content.
11. Black Hat SEO: In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.
12. White Hat SEO: In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, white hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies.
13. Grey Hat SEO: Grey Hat SEO is SEO techniques that are more risky than White Hat SEO techniques but will not get your website banned from search engines (although a search engine penalty could result). They're questionable SEO techniques but do not fall in the same category as Black Hat SEO techniques.
14. Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink.
15. 301 Redirect: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
16. 302 Redirect: A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. It states that the request page is temporarily moved to new address.
17. Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It is the number of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further.
18. Page Views: Page views refer to a number of pages viewed or clicked on the site during the given time.
19. Exit Rate: Exit rate as a term used in web site traffic analysis (sometimes confused with bounce rate) is the percentage of visitors to a site who actively click away to a different site from a specific page, after possibly having visited any other pages on the site. The visitors just exited on that specific page.
20. Session: In web analytics, a session, or visit is a unit of measurement of a user's actions taken within a period of time or with regard to completion of a task.
21. Canonical Issue: A canonical issue arises when 301 redirects are not properly in place. This means that your website can be accessed by search engines from several different URLs. This means that search engines can then potentially index your site under different URLs, meaning that it will look like a site of duplicated content.
22. CMS: A CMS is a software tool that allows you to create, edit, and publish content. e.g. Wordpress, Joomla, Weebly, Wix, Magento etc.
23. Thin Content: As per Google, thin content is a low quality content which can be full of grammatical errors, duplicate content & low quality.
24. PPC: Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.
25. CPA/PPA: Cost per acquisition (CPA), also known as "Cost per action" or pay per acquisition (PPA) and cost per conversion, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for a specified acquisition - for example a sale, click, or form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc.)
26. CPC: The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than other.
27. CPM: CPM bidding means that you pay based on the number of impressions (times your ads are shown) that you receive on the Google Display Network.
28. Google Dance: In search engine optimization (SEO), Google Dance is used to describe the period of time in which Google used to rebuild its rankings, and as a result of this rebuilding, rankings of Web sites on Google's SERP may fluctuate in order during a several day period.
29. Google Bowling: Maliciously trying to lower a site's rank by creating low quality links for it.
30. Googlebot: Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Google uses a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web.
31. Inbound Link: An inbound link (also referred to as a back link) is a hyperlink on a third-party web page that points to a web page on your site.
32. Outbound/External Link: Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site. Outbound links send visitors away from your web site.
33. Internal Link: Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation.
34. HTML: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
35. Keyword: In terms of SEO, it is a word and phrase that searchers enter into search engines, also called "search queries.
36. Landing Page: A web page which serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website.
37. Link Condom: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content.
38. Link Juice: Link juice or Google Juice is a colloquial SEO term describing the distribution of backlinks within a webpage and the strength or reputation of these links.
39. LSI: LSI stands for latent semantic indexing, which is the method that Google and other search engines use to study and compare relationships between different terms and concepts. These keywords can be used to improve SEO traffic and create more visibility and higher rankings in search results.
40. Meta Tag: A meta tag is a tag (that is, a coding statement) in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that describes the contents of a Web page.
41. Organic Results: Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements.
42. Paid Results: Paid or non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising.
43. Index: An index is another name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes contain the information on all the websites that Google (or any other search engine) was able to find. If a website is not in a search engine's index, users will not be able to find it.
44. NoIndex: It is an attribute assign to a web-page that tells search engines not to index that page in their database.
45. Reciprocal Link: A reciprocal link is an agreement between two webmasters to provide a hyperlink within their own website to each other's site. Generally this is done to provide readers with quick access to related sites, or to show a partnership between two sites.
46. ROI: It stands for Return-On-Investment and it is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI measures the amount of return on an investment relative to the investment's cost.
47. Sandbox: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed.
48. SiteMap: A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site. There are three primary kinds of site map: Site maps used during the planning of a Web site by its designers. Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site.
49. Spam-indexing: In computing, spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat SEO, search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system
50. URL: A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it.

Also Read: Auditing a Website: First Step Towards SEO