Important SEO Terms to know
Algorithm: A set of rules or instructions used by a search engine to rank webpages.
Anchor Text: The clickable text in a hyperlink.
Backlink: A link from one webpage to another webpage.
Canonical Tag: An HTML tag that helps webmasters tell search engines which version of a URL to index.
Cloaking: A black hat SEO technique of presenting different content to search engines than to visitors.
Crawl: When a search engine’s spider/bot visits a website.
Crawl Budget: The number of pages that a search engine spider/bot can crawl on a website.
Crawl Depth: The number of levels a search engine spider/bot will crawl down a website’s hierarchy.
Crawl Rate: The speed at which a search engine spider/bot visits and indexes webpages.
Doorway Page: A page created solely for search engine spiders/bots to get indexed.
Dynamic URLs: URLs that contain characters such as “?” and “&”.
Googlebot: The name of Google’s search engine spider/bot.
Google Dance: A name given to the period where Google updates its rankings.
Header Tags: HTML tags that are used to structure a webpage’s content.
Image Alt Tags: HTML tags that describe an image for search engine spiders/bots.
Index: The database of all websites that a search engine has stored.
Keyword Density: The number of times a keyword appears on a webpage.
Keyword Research: The process of finding keywords to target with SEO.
Keyword Stuffing: A black hat SEO technique of overusing keywords on a webpage.
Link Building: The process of obtaining links from other websites.
Link Popularity: The number of other websites that link to a webpage.
Meta Description: A HTML tag that summarizes the content of a webpage.
Meta Keywords: A HTML tag that lists the relevant keywords of a webpage.
Meta Robots Tag: A HTML tag that tells search engine spiders/bots which pages to index.
Organic Search Results: Results that appear in search engine results pages that are not ads.
PageRank: A metric used by Google to measure the importance of a webpage.
Paid Search Results: Results that appear in search engine results pages that are ads.
Penguin: A Google algorithm update that targets websites with unnatural links.
Quality Score: A metric that measures how relevant a keyword is to its target page.
Ranking: The order of results in a search engine results page.
Robots.txt: A file located in the root directory of a website that tells search engine spiders/bots which pages to index.
Sandbox: A period where new websites do not appear in search engine results pages.
Search Engine Friendly: A webpage that is optimized for search engine spiders/bots.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page that is displayed when a search query is entered.
Search Intent: A user’s goal when searching on a search engine.
Search Query: The words or phrases entered into a search engine.
Site Map: A list of all the webpages on a website.
Structured Data: Data that is marked up with HTML tags to make it easier for search engine spiders/bots to understand.
Snippet: The description of a webpage that appears in the search engine results page.
Social Signals: Signals from popular social media websites that are used to rank webpages.
Spider: A software program used by search engines to index webpages.
Spam: A black hat SEO technique of using techniques to manipulate search engine results.
Title Tag: A HTML tag that contains the title of a webpage.
Trust Rank: A metric used by a search engine to determine a website’s quality.
Universal Search Results: Results from multiple sources that are displayed in search engine results pages.
URL: The address of a web page.
User Experience (UX): The overall experience of a user when interacting with a website.
Webmaster: A person responsible for managing a website.
White Hat SEO: SEO techniques that follow search engine guidelines.
XML Sitemap: A file that lists all the webpages on a website for search engine spiders/bots.
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