SEO is not that hard, or so they say. Learning the lingo is key for those attempting to dip their toes in the world of digital marketing. Our SEO glossary part one has the most important terms for you to remember.
Algorithm: A complex process or set of rules used on platforms, search engines, etc.
Alt Attribute: HTML code that provides information used by search engines, defined by Wikipedia as “the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered”.
Anchor Text: Text that is meant to provide contextual information to people and search engines about a certain website. Anchor text is also known as the clickable text.
Black Hat SEO: Perilous SEO tactics that go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and aim to maliciously increase a website’s ranking.
Blog: Content produced based on the author’s interests or lifestyle, normally sorted in chronological order. It’s an important tool in improving a website’s SEO.
Bounce Rate: The amount of website visitors who leave without visiting another page on a certain website.
Cached Page: A glimpse of a website or webpage as it appeared when a search engine recently crawled it.
Canonical URL: An HTML code element that stipulates an ideal website URL. When multiple URLs have similar content, Google sees them as duplicates of the same page. Google picks one URL that it considers the canonical version and crawls that. The others are considered duplicates.
Click Bait: Content that is intended to tempt people to click, normally by intentionally misleading users with overpromising headlines.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The rate at which users will click an organic search result. It is normally expressed in a percentage.
Dead-End Page: A website or page that does not link to other webpages and therefore a user has no place to go further after said page.
De-index: When Google removes a website from appearing in search results.
Domain: A website’s address or URL that normally endless in .com, .org, or .net
Duplicate content: Content copied from a different website.
Engagement Metrics: Metrics that measure how users interact with content and pages. Some examples are:
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Time on page/site
- New vs. returning visitors
- Frequency and recency
Findability: How easily content can be found on a website by either external or internal users.
Footer Link: Links that appear in the footer of the page.
Google Analytics: An important web analytics system that is used to track audience behavior, traffic content performance, and more.
Google Hummingbird: Google’s algorithm was designed to better understand natural language queries, context, and meaning over individual keywords.
Google Trends: Google’s platform, where people can explore data visualizations on the latest search trends.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our SEO glossary list.
