You’ve probably noticed by now there is a lot of SEO jargon that can be confusing if you’re new to SEO. This SEO jargon glossary is aimed to help you understand commonly used terms of SEO. Don’t let the SEO jargon deter you, most of the terms are basic an need no prior knowledge to understand.
Common SEO Jargon List
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Enables your blog posts to be loaded almost instantly on mobile devices. This is due to a lighter HTML code. AMP helps with website rankings online.
AdWords: AdWords is Google online advertising platform. There are a variety of types of AdWords which includes display ads (image banners on other websites) and search ads (paying to get your website to the top of the search engine results page).
Alt Text: Alt text means Alternative text which is a text element that provides information about an image for Google. Google can’t ‘see’ images, therefore it is important to provide an alt text to help Google understand what the image is.
Anchored text: The anchored text is the words you can click on a backlink or internal link that will take you to the site. People use anchored texted to help Google better understand what the sites about. This is an example for the anchored text Web Design Newcastle.
Backlink: A backlink is a hyperlink from another website to yours. This is an example of a backlink from our website to Google. You will notice when you can click the word Google, it will take you to the Google website. For SEO purposes, you want to have links from other websites to your website.
Black Hat SEO: Black hat SEO refers to SEO efforts that try to trick the search algorithm into ranking your websites. Although black hat SEO can work, the Google algorithm is becoming increasingly aware of these tactics and penalising sites which use them.
Blog: A blog can be a section of a website or a entire website where news and articles are posted regularly. Regular blogging helps significantly with website rankings.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that don’t navigate past one page on your website. This has a bad impact on SEO as a high bounce rate implies the website is of poor quality, because the user has left the site almost instantly.
Click Through Rate: The click-through-rate tells you want percentage of people click to visit your website. The click through rate is calculated by the number of clicks divided by impressions on the search engine results page.
Content: When talking about SEO, content refers anything that is on your website. This includes written articles, images, videos. High quality original content is a significant ranking factor for SEO.
Citations: Your citation is how many times your business or website is listed on online business directories.
Crawling: Crawling refers to the search engine bot reading and analysing the content of your website. Once your website information has been crawled it will be stored on an index which Google searches every time someone uses their search engine.
Domain Authority: Refers to the amount of the authority of a domain name has. It is one of many search engine ranking factors and is based on three things: Age, Popularity, and Size.
Duplicate Content: Is identical content. Some people believe having the same information on your website twice can have a negative impact on your SEO.
Google Analytics: Is software developed by Google that allows a web master to see comprehensive data about your website. This include sources of website traffic, volumes, times spent on pages and where traffic is coming from.
Google Bot: is the search software Google uses to collect documents from the internet to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine.
Google Keyword Planner: Is a tool provided by Google that allows users to see how many times certain keywords are searched per month, in certain locations.
Heading Tags: Are HTML code that signify a word is a heading. Heading tags give your website structure. Heading tags range from H1 to H6.
Impressions: In SEO, impression refer to the number of people that see your website in the search engine results page.
Internal Link: An internal link is like a backlink; however, the link goes to a page within your website. This helps Google understand what your website is about.
Keyword: Refers to the words or search queries that a user enters the search engine to find what they are looking for. Webmaster us keywords to help get their websites ranking in search engines
Keyword Density: is the number of times your keywords are mention in your written content. Keyword density is measured as a percentage. The optimal keyword density is 0.5% to 2%, this means for every 1,000 words your keyword should be mention between 5 – 20 times.
Keyword Stuffing: Is including your keyword in more than 2% of the content to manipulate your rankings.
Link Building: Is the process of building high quality links to your website from other reputable website to build your websites trust and authority.
Local Pack: The Local Pack is the section on the search results page that shows a map with markers for the physical location of your business.
Long Tail Keyword: is a search query that contains more than four words. Long tail keywords are less competitive and make up a majority of search queries in Google.
Meta Description: Is the small description displayed on the search engine page. It is the section of writing that is under the URL.
Meta Title: Is the blue, clickable title seen in search engines. The Meta title helps the search engine understand what the page is about.
Name, Address, Phone (NAP): is that same as citations but generally refers to ensuring your business name, address and phone numbers are all identical on online directories.
Online reputation: There are many places people can review your business or website. Your online reputation refers to the quality and quantity of online reviews left for your business.
On-page SEO: On-page SEO is the optimisation of a websites code to make it more likely the website will rank higher in search engines.
Off Page SEO: Off-page SEO refer to factors the search engines consider that aren’t on your website. These things include listing your website on online directories, links to your website (backlinks), social media activities, and online reputation such as reviews.
Organic Ranking/Ranking: Organic ranking refers to your position in the none paid for section of the search engine results page.
Position: the position refers to a website’s rank in the search engine results page. A page’s position is dependent on more than 200 factors like content relevance to the search term, or the quality of links pointing to the page.
Ranking Factors: ranking factors are the Google bot and other search engine algorithms consider when ranking websites.
SEO (search engine optimisation): Search engine optimisation is the practice of getting your website to the top of search engines results page. The goal of SEO is to generate more traffic to your website.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): is the page on the search engine where all the search results are shown. This is the page with all the websites and their descriptions.
Search Queries: Is another word for keyword.
Schema: is a semantic language of tags that you can add to your website code to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in the search engine results page.
Structured Data: Structured data is a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines classify and index your content.
White Hat SEO: White hat SEO is the use of online practices that Google wants to see. I refer to genuine SEO efforts that comply with the search algorithms.
SEO Jargon Summary
Once you have a basic understanding of SEO jargon you will be ready to start the next section. It would be a good idea to bookmark this SEO jargon page as you might need to refer to it in the future.
