Every business has its own acronyms, terms, and jargon that, if heard by someone outside the business, would make zero sense. Search Engine Optimization is no different.
We’ve produced a list of key acronyms, terms, and phrases that you’ll need to know as you embark on your SEO journey.
- Algorithm: A set of rules used by search engines to determine how websites are ranked and displayed in search results.
- Alt Text: Descriptive text added to an image to provide context for search engines and visually impaired users.
- Anchor Text: The clickable text within a hyperlink, which provides context and helps search engines understand the linked page’s content.
- Backlink: A link from another website to your website, considered as a vote of confidence and can positively impact search engine rankings.
- Black Hat SEO: Unethical techniques used to manipulate search engine rankings, violating search engine guidelines.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave a website without interacting with any other pages, indicating low engagement.
- Canonical URL: The preferred URL of a web page when there are multiple versions with similar content, used to prevent duplicate content issues.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of users who click on a search result or advertisement after seeing it.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
- Crawling: The process in which search engines discover and analyze web pages by following links on websites.
- Domain Authority (DA): A metric that predicts the authority of a website on a scale from 1 to 100, indicating its ranking potential.
- Google Analytics: A free web analytics tool that provides insights into website traffic, user behavior, and performance.
- Header Tags: HTML tags (H1, H2, etc.) used to structure the content hierarchy on a web page and indicate the importance of headings.
- Indexing: The process by which search engines collect, analyze, and store web page information to make it available in search results.
- Internal Linking: Adding hyperlinks within a website’s content to connect different pages, improving navigation and user experience.
- Keyword Density: The percentage of times a keyword appears within a web page’s content in relation to the total word count.
- Keyword Research: The practice of identifying and analyzing the search terms that users enter into search engines to optimize content accordingly.
- Long-Tail Keywords: Specific and less competitive keyword phrases that target a more niche audience.
- Meta Description: A concise summary displayed in search results that describes the content of a web page.
- Mobile Optimization: The process of adapting a website to ensure it functions well and provides a good user experience on mobile devices.
- Nofollow: An attribute added to a link that tells search engines not to pass authority or follow the linked page.
- Organic Traffic: Website visitors who arrive through unpaid search engine results rather than paid advertisements.
- PageRank: Google’s algorithmic calculation of a web page’s authority based on the quantity and quality of backlinks it receives.
- Robots.txt: A text file that provides instructions to search engine crawlers on which pages or directories to crawl or exclude from crawling.
- SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page displayed by a search engine that shows the results for a specific search query.
- Site Map: A file or page that lists and provides a hierarchical structure of all the pages on a website for search engines to crawl.
- Social Signals: The impact of social media engagement (likes, shares, comments) on search engine rankings.
- SSL Certificate: A security certificate that enables secure, encrypted communication between a web browser and a web server, enhancing user trust.
- Title Tag: An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page.
- User Experience (UX): The overall experience that a visitor has when interacting with a website, encompassing design, navigation, and usability.
- XML Sitemap: A file that lists all the URLs of a website, helping search engines crawl and index the site’s pages more efficiently.
- White Hat SEO: Ethical and legitimate techniques used to optimize websites and improve search engine rankings while following search engine guidelines.
- 301 Redirect: A permanent redirect from one URL to another, indicating to search engines that the original page has been permanently moved.
- 404 Error: A status code that appears when a web page is not found, typically due to a broken link or removed content.