seo glossary

SEO Glossary : Essential Terminologies of SEO Everyone must know

SEO Glossary: Essential Terminologies of SEO Everyone must know, it can increase your website traffic and increase your brand visibility.

In this article, I will share all the SEO glossaries as a summary of each individual terminology.

Table of Contents

1: What are search engines?

A search engine is an online tool that helps people find information on the internet. Google is also probably the only example you need to know.

So when we talk about search engines in this article, we mostly mean Google. Other search engines work similarly and as long as your website is optimized for Google, you should be all set up for others too.

Google and other leading search engines like Yahoo and Bing have ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ that crawl the internet to find, index, and rank sites.

When someone enters a search, search engines deliver a list of websites with relevant content.

Search engines need to find your site, so that should be your first order of business. You can ask Google to index your URL with their URL Inspection Tool and Bing via their Bing Webmaster Tools.

2: What are the Google search engines?

Google Search Engine is a search engine provided by Google. It is one of the best and top-level search engines on the internet. It handles over 3.5 billion searches per day.

It has a 92% share of the global search engine market. Google search engine is the most visited website in the world. It was developed in 1997 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan.

3: What are the Bing search engines?

Bing is a search engine created and operated by Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed the search engine on 28 May 2009. Bing was fully operational on 3 June 2009. In July 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo Search. Yahoo finished the transition in 2012.

Bing provide a variety of search services, including web page, video, image, and map search products. In Oct 2011 Microsoft stated that they were working on a new back-end search infrastructure. It delivers faster and slightly more relevant search results for users.

4. What are the Yandex search engines?

Yandex is the most used search engine in Russia. It is the most popular worldwide website.

This search engine provides over 70 internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, navigation, mobile application, and online advertising.

5: What are the Baidu search engines?

Baidu means hundred times. It is a Chinese search engine. Baidu search engine was developed by Robin Li in 1996. Baidu was incorporated in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Chinese multinational technology company specializing in internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence. It is one of the largest AI (artificial intelligence) and internet companies in the world.

Baidu search engine is currently the fourth largest website in the Alexa internet ranking. It offers about 57 search and community services.

6: How do Search Engines work?

If you want to rank your site on the search result pages, you need to understand how search engines work.

We know Google is the biggest player in the game. Google search algorithms continuously upgrading. It becomes more difficult to rank into Google search results.

Google search engine always wants to deliver its users the most relevant results. With regular updates and changes, Google always aims towards improving the search experience for its users. It alone drives around 92% of the total search traffic in the world.

Now we need to know how does it work. The process in which search engines work consists  of three primary functions:

7: What is Crawler in Search Engine?

The Crawler is a bot designed by Google. Crawling is the process in which search engines scan all the internet contents continuously. Content could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc,- but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links.

Search engines use small pieces of programs like ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ to crawl billions of pages across the web by following all the hyperlinks and discovering new pages around the web.

In SEO, we want to do everything to make the ‘spiders’ job easier.

Search engines use algorithms to calculate how worthy a page is to a relevant search query. There are hundreds of factors that are used to calculate the authority of a webpage, and page rank is one of them.

Google assigns PageRank to every webpage it crawls. When another website links to your website, some of its PageRank is passed on to you.

The more sites there are out there linking to you, the higher your PageRank will be and the more trustworthy your site will look to search engines.

8: What is Indexing in Search Engine?

Indexing means giving the position of a page in the search engine, When the website is crawled, the information or data is indexed. The search engines try to analyze and understand the content, categorize them, and store them in the index. It could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc.

The search engine index is basically a library of all the crawled websites with a single purpose to understand them and have them available to be used as a search result.

Picking the results

Once the internet user submits a search query, the search engine digs into the index and pulls out the results. To provide the best results, they consider various factors, like:

  • Meaning of the query– the search engine needs to understand what exactly is the user searching for
  • The relevance of pages– the page must be relevant to the search query
  • Usability of pages– the pages should also be usable like accessibility, safety, and readability, etc.
  • Quality of content– the search engine tries to pick the best results in terms of quality of contents
  • Context and settings– the user’s location, settings, and history of searches are considered

If you already have a website and want to know how many of your pages are in the index. To check your indexed pages, type in the search bar “site:yourdomain.com”.

This will return the results Google has in its index for the site.

It does give you a solid idea of which pages are indexed on your site and how they are currently showing up in search results.

For more accurate results, monitor and use the index Coverage report in Google Search Console. You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account.

With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index.

If your site not showing up anywhere in the search results, there are a few possible reasons why:

  • Your site is brand new and has not been crawled yet.
  • The site’s navigation makes it hard for a robot to crawl it effectively.
  • This site is not linked to any external websites.
  • Maybe, your site has been penalized by Google for spammy tactics.

9: What is the Page Rank of a Search Engine?

When a search query is entered, a search engine digs into its index for pages matching the user’s search query, then sorts and displays the most relevant results to the user.

Which pages are displayed are by search engine algorithms, taking into hundreds of ranking factors. Each page is given a ranking score.

In order to rank highly on the search engines, your site needs to score higher than all the other sites.

If you engage in shady methods and try to deceive the search engines, you will get yourself burned. Google is very strict on sites that try to manipulate their rankings, and if you are caught doing so, your site will get penalized.

Ranking factors are a very discussed topic in the world of SEO. Here are some ranking factors:

  • Well-targeted content– you need to identify what people search for and create quality content to their needs
  • Crawlable website– if you want to rank your website must be easy to find by search engines
  • Content oriented at user intent– SEO is not only about what words you use, but also about the type of content and its comprehensiveness- make your visitor happy and Google will be happy too
  • Quality and quantity of links– the more quality pages link to your website, the more authority you will have in the eyes of Google
  • Unique content-be very careful about using duplicate content on your websites
  • Fresh content- some topics require more freshness than others, you should regularly update your content
  • Click-through rate (CTR)- optimize your title tags and meta descriptions to improve the click-through rate of your pages
  • Work on any device- your website must work perfectly on any kind of device and screen size
  • Website speed- make sure your visitors don’t have to wait too long to load the page

Other important factors that may have a positive impact on your ranking likes content depth, image optimization, topical authority, use of HTTPS, and social sharing.

Now you have an idea of the basics of SEO. There are two types of SEO force, which are Black-hat SEO and White-hat SEO. You need to choose the right one.

10: What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of optimization a website’s visibility on the organic search engine results in pages for a target set of keywords and keyphrases.

It focuses only on organic search results and ranking in the search results.

SEO is the art or technique of helping a higher position of a webpage on the search engine results pages. The higher the position of a webpage on the organic search engine results in pages, the more visible the page will be.

It also increases the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results pages (SERP). It is an essential marketing strategy and an ever-growing industry.

11: What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of website and server optimizations that help search engines spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. It refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking in the search engines.

This process makes a website faster, easier to crawl, and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO includes crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.

12: What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher in search engines. This process includes optimizations to visible content and the HTML source code.

13: What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page is the process of action taken outside of your own website to impact your ranking within search engine results pages(SERPs). The off-page SEO factors help your website rank in search engines.

Off-page optimization improves search engine and user perception of a website’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.

14: What is the White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO is a much better method of doing search engine optimization. White-hat SEO refers to the usage of Google-approved website optimization strategies, tactics, and techniques.

White hat SEO consists of creating quality content and a better user experience for people visiting your site.

Play your website by Google’s and other search engine guidelines and not breaking the rules. Optimize your site for humans not for search engines.

What are the Advantages of White Hat SEO?

  • This type of SEO method is ethical and legal
  • Genuine and quality content
  • Better user experience for people visiting this site

What are the Disadvantages of White Hat SEO?

  • The difficult and lengthy way to reach goals for any websites
  • It may take 50 to 60 days to generate revenue and ranking for the website
  • High competition as these methods are in nature

15: What is the Black-Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is a method against search engine guidelines and rules, used to get a site ranking in the search results.

It will likely increase a page ranking in a search result page for some time. They do not use good content, optimize their site for search engines, not for humans.

Black hat SEO refers to the practices that keyword stuffing, link manipulation, and creating articles with duplicate content.

These unethical methods don’t solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.

Appearing in search results is vital for business growth, but the dark art of black hat SEO is the wrong way of search engine optimization.

Black hat SEO goes against the guideline set by search engines and manipulates them to gain higher rankings.

Black hat SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all. This approach results in spammy, crappy pages that often get banned very fast.

Once your website is banned from Google and other search engines, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list your website.

What are the Advantages of Black Hat SEO?

  • The fastest way to reach short term goals for any websites
  • Quick and easy way to generate revenue and ranking for the website
  • Low competition as these methods are unethical in nature

What are the Disadvantages of Black Hat SEO?

  • This type of SEO method is unethical and illegal
  • Once the search engine’s algorithm catches the black hat methods and bans this type of website.
  • There is no good regulation and checking of backlinks, the website is open to the risk of hacking.
  • The target audience of the website will spread negative opinions on social media, which will affect the reputation of the website

16: What is the Gray-Hat SEO?

Gray hat SEO is a process that combines white hat SEO and black hat SEO. Grau hat SEO is risker than white hat SEO because it exploits the search engine guidelines to increase the rankings of a page on the search engine results pages.

17: What is the Google Sandbox?

The Google Sandbox is a metaphorical term to explain why most new websites have very poor ranking in Google search engine results pages. Some specialists decided that this was caused by a new algorithm of Google, while others thought that it was the cause of something else.

18: What is the Google Disavow?

Google Disavow is a tool for disavowing links in search consoles. Google Disavow tool gives you access to manually reduce the impact of specific inbound links- saving your website from destruction.

If you are trying to remove the links from the other site to your site. If you can’t remove those links yourself, then you should use the Google Disavow tool to remove that link to your website.

19: What is the Domain Authority (DA) of the website?

Domain Authority(DA) is a metric that predicts how likely a domain is to appear in the search engine results pages compared to its competitors. It is a good indicator that will help you assess the performance of your website in relation to competitors.

Domain Authority metric is used data from backlinks, referring domains, search traffic, and others. This metric is to know your site’s health in relation to your competitors.

21: What is the Page Authority (PA) of the website?

Page Authority or PA is a score that was created and developed by Moz. Page Authority indicates when doing research in the search results and determining which pages may have more powerful or important link profiles than others.

Page Authority scores range from one to 100. PA is also a comparative metric, which allows a website to analyze how it is performing in relation to its competitors.

22: What is the De-indexing from the search engine?

De-indexing is an SEO process that involves removing a website from the search engine’s index but not from the page where it originates. That means a website or a specific URL stops being seen in the search engine results pages.

23: What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your website from a search engine. Organic traffic is obtained from the appearance of the website in the results of a search that users perform in search engines.

The easiest way to increase the organic traffic of your site is to publish quality and relevant content on your site regularly. Organic traffic is free traffic.

24: What is Direct Traffic?

Direct Traffic is categorized as traffic that does not come from a referring website.

25: What is the Paid Traffic?

Paid traffic is any traffic that comes from a paid search campaign you have launched on a search engine.

26: What is Social Traffic?

Social traffic comes from a social media website like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

27: What is Email Traffic?

Email traffic that comes to your website from an email will show up as email traffic.

28: What is the Referral Traffic?

Referral traffic comes to your website by clicking over to your website from a hyperlink on another website.

29: What are Backlinks?

A backlink is a link to your site on another website. This link can be text, an image, or a button. A backlink tells search engines how your content relates to other websites and pages on the internet.

30: What are  Do-Follow Backlinks?

A do-follow backlink is a link that helps to pass the authority of the origin site to the destination site. This passing of authority is called “link juice”.

Do-follow backlinks help to improve a website’s domain authority or domain rating, which helps to improve keyword ranking.

31: What are  No-Follow Backlinks?

A No-follow backlink is a link that does not pass authority on to the website it is linking to. This attribute tells search engines not to pass authority from the linking page to the destination page. These links do not help in terms of SEO.

32: What is Anchor Text and Hyperlink?

Anchor text is a hyperlink text between the <a> HTML tags. It is the clickable text in a hyperlink. It is also known as the link label or link title. The colored and underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard.

The keyword in anchor text is one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web page. Anchor text can help the page link to rank for those keywords in search engines.

33: What is Internal Link?

An internal link is any link from one page on your site to another page on your site. It is a hyperlink that allows navigation from one page on a website to another page.

Internal links help the readers in accessing more information via related articles or pages. It also helps increase pageviews, reduction of bounce rate, improve indexing, crawling of the website, and increase PageRank on search engines.

34: What is an External Link?

An External link is a hyperlink that points any domain to another domain. If another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. Similarly, if you link out to another website, this is also considered an external link.

35: What is Link Juice?

Link Juice is the term used in the SEO strategy to refer to the value or equity passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks. Search engines see links as votes by other websites that your page is valuable and worth promoting.

There are many ways to earn links juice from the websites, such as document sharing, guest posting, social media marketing, press release publishing, and more.

36: What is a Broken Link?

A broken link or dead link is a hyperlink on a web page that is no longer. In other words, a web page can’t be found by a user for various reasons. Broken links are also known as dead links or link rots.

Web servers will often return an error message like-404 Page Not Found, 400 Bad Request, and Bad URL.

37: What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is calculated by counting the number of single-page visits and dividing that by the total visits. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same website.

Bounce Rate(%)=Visits that access only a single page(#) / Total visits (#) to the website.

38: What are Page Views?

A simple definition for a page view can relate to a user viewing a web page. When a user visits more than one page they are counted as additional page views.

39: What is the Impression?

An impression is when a user sees a page. It occurs any time a user opens a website and an advertisement is visible. It is also known as a view-through.

40: What is Click Through Rate (CTR)?

The Click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page or advertisement.

41:What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup is similar to those sticky neon-colored page markers people use to take notes and highlight certain pages. Google crawls your site and notice4s these markers ensuring that certain information is highlighted when fetching results for your page online.

42: What is Feature Snippet or Rich Snippet?

Feature Snippet or Rich Snippet is the extra bits of information that can appear on a search listing below the meta title or description.

For example, the star ratings for reviews, the cooking time and recipe results, or location on events listings.

This information appears because of structured data used in the code on the page that is being listed. Google uses rich snippets to enhance the SERP listing and provide information directly on the SERPs.

43: What is Sitemap?

A sitemap is a list of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website content. Sitemaps can be lists of pages, posts, or files on a website.

Your site may have one sitemap for your all pages, one sitemap for your all posts, and one sitemap for your all images. It makes it easier to find all of the website pages quickly. It is normally saved in an XML or HTML format.

44: What is Keyword?

A keyword is a word that describes the content on your page or post best. Internet user uses this word to perform a search in a search engine or search bar. So when people search for that keyword in search engines, they should find that page on your website.

Keywords are very important and they should be carefully selected before launching content online.

45: What is the Primary Keyword?

A Primary keyword is the name of your post or an article. It is used always first than other keywords on a post or an article. The Primary keyword must and should be added to your post title, URL, and description.

46: What is LSI Keyword?

LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are conceptually related keywords that search engines use to deeply understand the content on a webpage.

LSI keywords have the power to boost Google rankings. Using LSI keywords in your content helps your rank higher on search results pages.

47: What is Longtail Keyword?

A longtail keyword is a word that is generally made from three to five words. These keywords are also less competitive than generic keywords. It also helps you to attract more high-quality traffic to your website.

48: What is Keyword Density or Stuffing?

Keyword Density or stuffing is the act of repeating the same target keyword over and over to rank the page for the target term. You should avoid this because keyword stuffing goes against Google’s quality guidelines. It can lead to search engine penalties that remove the page from search engine results pages.

There is no definite percent score for ideal keyword density, to rank higher. But good practice is to stick to a 2% keyword density. So avoid keyword stuffing at all costs since it will harm your site and may get your website penalized.

49: What is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword Difficulty is a handy metric that helps you understand how hard it would be to rank for a particular search query. It is based on a number of different factors, including domain authority, page authority, and content quality.

Keyword difficulty on a scale from 0 to 100. 0 to 10 easy, 11 to 30 medium, 31 to 70 hard, and 71 to 100 super hard.

50: What is Keyword Search Volume?

Keyword search volume refers to the number of times a specific keyword is searched for in a specific time frame. It is one of the most important metrics to consider when doing keyword research.

51: What is Meta Description?

The Meta Description is an HTML attribute that provides information about your web page. Search engines often display the meta description in search results, which can increase click-through rates.

52: What is Meta Keyword?

Meta Keyword is a specific type of meta tag which is in the HTML code of a web page and helps tell search engines what the topic of the page is. It is also known as a meta tag that could be used to give information to search engines on what a post is about.

53: What is Permalink?

A permalink or permanent link is the full URL or address of a web page. It is a permanent address or link because it is not expected to change the lifetime of a page.

It could include a date or a category or post name or anything. But an SEO friendly permalink is:https://yoursitename.com/post-name

54: What is Slug?

A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a particular page or post on a website in an easy-to-read form. It usually explains the page’s content.

55: What is HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. When you enter HTTP:// in your address bar in front of the domain, it tells the browser to connect over HTTP.

HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. When you enter HTTPS:// in your front of the domain, it tells the browser to connect over HTTPS. It will redirect to deliver over a secured connection.

56: What is the robots.txt file?

Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots, how to crawl pages on their website. It is a part of the robots exclusion protocol(REP).

57: What is Spammy Link or Link Spam?

Spammy link or link spam refers to backlinks that are placed on pages and websites regardless of context or as an attempt to boost search rankings.

58. What is PingBack in WordPress?

Pingback is like a comment that is created when you link to another blog post where pingback is enabled.

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