SEO Glossary and Jargon Buster

So, if you work in SEO or just operate in any sort of digital marketing (including blogging), you’ll know there are so many buzzwords and jargon you have to keep up with. It’s a little exhausting. 

I’m a technical SEO at heart but I do literally everything. So I need to know how to optimise content, how to build links through digital PR and remember every god damn term. These terms change too. When I started in SEO a couple of years ago, the trends were completely different.

I could not tell you how many times I’ve been completely thrown off by a client learning a new buzzword or by calling something different to me. Like once a client started called URLs ‘Slugs’ and I had never heard that before, it broke my brain. 

I wished and wished someone who was at my level put together some sort of SEO glossary, so I could keep up to date. There are other SEO jargon busters out there, but they’re not actually relevant. They’re not fit for purpose for those in the industry. 

 Knowledge comes with time, these days not much throws me. 

So, in the hope of being able to help someone else, I’ve put together this SEO glossary.

A/B Testing:
Trying out two marketing strategies which are identical but for one part – so you can see which does better.

Affiliate marketing:
Performance-based marketing where a business pays an affiliate for each visitor or customer introduced via the affiliate’s efforts, e.g. PPC

Analytics:
Discovery of meaningful patterns in data.

Anchor Text:
The clickable word(s) of a link.

Authority:
The combination of signals search engines uses to assess websites and its pages for ranking.

Backlink:
A link from a website to another

Black hat:
Search engine optimization practices that violate Google’s quality guidelines.

Bounce Rate:
The percentage of website visitors who leave without visiting another page on that website.

Branded Keyword:
When a user’s query includes an exact match of a company or brand name.

Breadcrumb:
A navigational element that helps users easily figure out where they are within a website.

Broken Link:
A link that leads to a 404 not found.

Cache:
A technology that temporarily stores web content to reduce future page loading times.

Cached Page:
A snapshot of a webpage as it appeared when a search engine last crawled it.

CTA:
Also known as a Call-to-action. This is the name for wording and links on a website which drive you to do something, like “click here” “read more” “buy now”.

Cannibalisation:
Keyword cannibalization means that you have various blog posts or articles on your site that can rank for the same search query in Google

Canonical tag:
A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.

CTR:
Also known as Click-Through Rate. The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an organic search result. 

Content:
An article, video, image etc which exists to be seen and engaged with. For example, this list!

CRO:
Also known as Conversion Rate Optimization. The process of improving the number of conversions

Crawl Budget:
The total number of URLs search engines can and want to crawl on a website during a specific time period.

Crawling: 
The process by which search engines discover your web pages.

De-indexed: 
Pages that have been removed from Google’s index.

Disavow:
If your link profile includes a high number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality inbound links you can use Google’s Disavow Tool tool to tell Google to ignore those links.

Do-follow:
A link that doesn’t use the “nofollow” attribute. In other words, a link.

Domain Authority:
A score between 1 and 100, that predicts how likely it is for your website to rank.

Duplicate Content:
When a significant amount of content contained on one webpage matches, this can cause a cannibalisation issue.

Featured snippets: 
Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries.

Footer Link:
Links that appear in the bottom section (or “footer) of a website.

Googlebot:
Also known as a crawler or a spider. The web crawling system Google uses to find and add new websites and webpages to its index.

Google My Business listing: 
A free listing available to local businesses.

Grey Hat:
A grey area between techniques that adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but then bend the rules a little.

Heading:
Heading tags (H1-H6) separate content into sections, based on the importance

HTTP:
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is how data is transferred from a computer server to a web browser.

HTTPS:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure uses a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data transferred between a website and web browser. In the Core Algorithm coming in May, this will become a greater ranking factor. 

Image carousels: 
Image results in some SERPs or on your blog that are scrollable from left to right.

Indexing:
The storing and organising of your content that Google finds whilst crawling your site

Intent: 
In SEO, the intent refers to what users really want from the words they have Googled

Keyword:
A word or phrase that you target to rank for to target readers or customers.

KPI: 
A “key performance indicator” is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.

Link Building:
A process designed to get other trusted and relevant websites to link to your website to help improve your organic search rank and visibility.

Link Equity:
The value of inbound links, in terms of relevance, authority, and trust

Long-Tail Keyword:
Highly specific multiple-word terms that often demonstrate higher purchase intent.

Manual Action:
Google’s term for a penalty.

Meta Description:
It acts as a description of a webpage’s content.

Meta Title:
This is the title that Google will show on the SERP

Organic: 
Earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.

Orphan Page:
Any webpage that is not linked to by any other pages on that website.

Page Speed:
The amount of time it takes for a webpage to completely load.

People Also Ask boxes: 
A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.

Query: 
Words typed into the search bar. Is also called a keyword.

Ranking: 
Ordering search results by relevance to the query.

Redirect:
A technique that sends a user (search engine) who requested one webpage to a different webpage.

Rich Snippet:
Structured data can be added to the code of a website to help search engines better understand your content. This information can then be displayed in the SERPs.

Robots:
Robots refer to indexing and link following, if you don’t specify a meta robots tag, they read that automatically set as index,follow. It’s only if you want to change one of those two commands that you need to add meta robots.

ROI:
“Return on Investment”. The measure of the success of a marketing spend.

Schema:
A form of microdata which, once added to a webpage, creates an enhanced description 

SERP features: 
The different features that appear on the SERP.

SERP: 
Stands for “search engine results page” — the page you see after conducting a search.

Sitemap:
A list of all the URLs on a website.

Stopwords:
A frequently used word that search engines ignore.

Subdomain:
A subdomain is an additional part of your main domain name. 

Traffic: 
Visits to a website.

URL: 
Uniform Resource Locators are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web.

Webmaster guidelines: 
Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results.

White hat: 
Search engine optimization practices that comply with Google’s quality guidelines.

SEO is everchanging, terms that are relevent today could change in a years time, and with that it mind I will keep this list up to date.

If you have found this SEO glossary helpful, or have found a term that I haven’t included, please let me know. 

If you’ve enjoyed this post, why not check out my blog posts on the basics of SEO?