HOME » A COMPLETE SEO GLOSSARY – DIGITAL MARKETING GLOSSARY – ESEARCH LOGIX

SEO Glossary

SEO	Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a form of digital marketing used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link building so its web pages can be discoverable, appear on the top of search engines, and as a result, rank better.
SMO	Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of using social media networks to promote your product, service, or company. It is marketing on social media in an organic manner. It helps to increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and drive traffic to the website.
SMM	Social Media Marketing (SMM) is posting media files of a business on various social networking channels to promote the business, product, or service. It is simply business marketing with paid advertising on social media.
SEM	Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is considered one of the best digital marketing strategies widely used to increase and improve the visibility of a website in SERPs or search engine results pages.
Search Volume	Search volume is the number of search queries for a particular keyword in search engines like Google. It can help you recognize the best priorities for SEO and content optimization.
Structured Data	Also termed Organized Data, a way to structure your data by labelling it with further information that benefits search engines to comprehend it better. It is the markup that allows Google to understand how to interpret and display your content.
Scraped Content	Taking content from that site that you don’t own and republish it without approval on your site. This is where fraudsters use bots to steal or scrape your quality content and publish it on their sites.
Sitelinks	Sitelinks are referred to links to other pages visible below the main URL of Google search results. The system analyzes the link structure of your site and finds shortcuts to save users ample time and help them navigate information quickly. There are two kinds of sitemaps, including: • HTML – generally organized by topics, helping users to navigate a site • XML – provide crawlers with a list of pages on a website
SSL Certificate	Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is a security measure for websites. They are small data files installed on a web server, enabling a padlock that ensures a secure connection from a web server to a browser. In Google’s rapidly evolving algorithm for SEO rankings, SSL is one of the factors of ranking and trustworthiness. Common HTTP status codes essential for SEO include: • 200 (OK) • 410 (Gone) • 404 (Not Found) • 500 (Internal Service Error) • 503 (Service Unavailable)
Social Signal	Social signals are referred to web pages’ collective likes, shares, and overall visibility perceived by search engines. These activities and influences give a signal to search engines that your social content is seen as useful and relevant. As more web communication has shifted to social media, Google and other search providers have integrated social signals as a ranking factor. Relevant social signals include: • Number of tweets and retweets • Number of followers on social media channels • Facebook shares • Google +1s • Special mentions of community sites like Reddit
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)	Search Engine Results Pages are Google’s response to a user’s search query that contains organic search results and video results. They may vary from one user to another depending on several factors including where someone is registered into the search engine account, their location settings, language preferences, and search history.
Secondary Keywords	Secondary keywords are closely associated terms that play a supporting role and help boost SEO. They help to enhance the perceived value of a site to a search engine by improving the possibility of ranking higher in the search results.
Semantic Search	An information retrieval procedure that is generally used by the modern search engine to return the most relevant search results. They also allow the search engine to differentiate between dissimilar entities, such as people, places, and things, and understand explorer intent depending on several things including: • User search history • User location • Global search history • Spelling variations
Schema.org	Often called Schema, is a semantic vocabulary set of tags you can add to your HTML to enhance the way search engines read and present your web pages in SERPs. Schema markup is crucial for SEO because it allows your site to look better in the search results and users to get the exact information they’re looking for. Schema vocabulary can be used with many encodings, such as RDFa, microdata, and JSON-LD.
Search Console	Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that helps you track, maintain, and troubleshoot a site’s presence in search results. The tool allows developers, site owners, and SEO professionals to understand how their website is performing on a Google search. It gives an overview of metrics associated with site performance and user experience to help marketers improve their sites and drive more traffic.
Search Engine Penalty	A search engine penalty is an action taken against a site involved in deceptive, fraudulent, or black hat SEO practices, such as suspicious links or keyword stuffing. A Google penalty is an adverse effect inflicted on a site ranking based on updates in Google’s search algorithms. In the case of Panda and Penguin, Google eventually demote websites in search results that don’t meet quality standards, as stated by https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en.
SEO Copywriting	A procedure of producing keyword-optimized content that is generally designed for appealing to users and search engine algorithms. In other words, you can say SEO copywriting is content that Google can recognize. There are some content types that may be produced with SEO copywriting principles, including: • Final checkout screens • Product descriptions • On-site navigation instructions • Advertising content • Website copy • Brand messaging • CTA buttons • Landing pages
Site Architecture	Site Architecture is the classified structure of the site pages that helps users simply find information as well as help search engine crawlers to recognize the relation between dissimilar pages. It also helps to describe the significance of your content. When it is done properly, Site Architecture provides several SEO benefits, such as: • Better indexing of pages • Enhanced user engagement • Higher rankings & traffic
Social Bookmarking	A procedure of tagging a website page with a browser-based tool so users can visit it again. This is also one of the most effective ways to build your online presence. When you add social bookmarks to the web, it supports search engines comprehending your site.
Split Testing	Also known as A/B testing, which means dividing pages of similar context on the website into two groups, making a change to one of them, and tracking the impact on an SEO metric, including traffic, click-through rate (CTR), or keyword ranking positions. SEO split-testing works by dividing pages into Control and Variant groups, such as category pages on an ecommerce website or vendor pages on a marketplace.
SEO Audit	SEO audit is the process of evaluating how well your web presence responds to the best practices. This is a primary step to create an implementation plan that will give measurable results. An audit is a standard process performed on a regular basis to check website health and performance. SEO audit will reveal: • Technical SEO issues • On-page/off-page SEO issues • Website structure issues • User experience issues • Content gaps and opportunities • Competition insights
Spamdexing	Spamdexing is a combination of spam and indexing. It is an inappropriate SEO practice that attempts to manipulate search engine rankings. It became a serious cybersecurity issue in 1990 and after some time, Google came to the rescue by using strict algorithms and page ranking systems to promote quality content and authoritative websites. Spamdexing comes in various forms, including spammy keywords, spammy links, spammy ads, and spammy posts and pages.
Search Engine	A search engine is basically a web-based tool that lets users search for the content via World Wide Web. An internet user needs to enter keywords or key phrases into the search engine and they get a list of web content results in the form of images, videos, websites, and other data that match the keyword.
Search History	Search history is generally website history that is stored in the browsers. It allows you to go back to see which sites you visited and what you searched on search engines. A user can delete their search history to clean it up or to prevent others from seeing sites they visited. Observing and deleting search history is straightforward in all browsers.
Social Media	Social media is any digital tool that allows you to share content quickly, efficiently, and in real-time with the public. There are several types of social media apps and websites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and many others that can be used to promote brands, market products, connect to customers and foster new business.
Sneaky Redirects	A redirection technique that is generally used for redirecting a user to a dissimilar page with the intent of displaying content other than that was made accessible for search engine crawlers. On the other hand, you can say sneaky redirects send a visitor to a different page than the one they requested. This technique is basically used in Black Hat SEO.
Static Page / Static URL	A static page or URL is a URL that doesn’t change based on input from a distant database or service but stays the same with each page load. It doesn’t comprise interactive elements depending on the consequences of a web administrator’s remote data.
Subheading	Subheading helps to make a clear text structure that can be easily read by both users and search engines. It captures attention, delivers an organized flow, and highlights the position of each section. Subheading also offers a good opportunity to place your focus keyword where it matters.
Splash Page	Also known as splash screens, are introductory pages that visitors see before exploring the rest of the website, but it is different from landing pages. A splash page allows you to convey all the key elements before someone clicks through your homepage. Many marketers call it a virtual business card. More than that, it can be used to deliver information like upcoming events, promotions, and evoke a sense of exclusivity. It typically has a single message and exit link.
Supplementary Content	Supplementary content on web pages is focused to enhance the user experience and function without any interruption. It can add more value and utility to your main content. If you have interactive supplementary content, it can lead to a good user experience, which is Google’s criteria for high-quality pages, as per Search Quality Raters Guidelines. Types of supplementary content include: • Photo or native video uploaded within the content • Embedded social posts • Call to actions button • Header/navigation menu bar
Supplementary Results	Supplementary results usually appear in the search index after the normal results. This is the way for Google to extend its search database while avoiding questionable pages from getting broad exposure. They are basically URLs or pages that are considered less important and placed in Google’s supplementary index, also called the secondary database. Run a few checks on crucial things like: • Page authority – Are you receiving enough backlinks? • Duplicate content – Is your content very similar or partially similar to the other pages? • Internal linking – Are adequate internal pages linked to affected pages?
Structured Data Markup	Structured Data Markup is basically an annotation system that is added to a website to allow Google and other web platforms to inevitably read your site and directly pull product data from your HTML. They must be existing in the HTML returned from the web server.
Subdomain	A subdomain is a further part of the main domain name that is created for organizing and navigating different segments of a website. You are able to generate a range of subdomains or child domains on your main domain.
Stop Word	Stop words are those words that are partially or entirely overlooked by search engines. They provide little or no context for the sentence or phrase in which they are used. When stop words are used in a sentence or a phrase, they just connect other, more important words.
Search History	Also known as web browsing history, referring to the list of web pages a user has visited, alongside presenting page title and time of visit. It allows a user to go back to previously visited pages and manage their activities, including what they’ve searched for and websites they’ve visited. You can also see and delete your activity using the control setting on the page.
Search Operators	Search operators are a set of commands to filter and refine your search engine results. The characters are used in a search engine query to narrow down your search. For instance, with the search operator site: you can see results from one website in search engine results. Other common Google search operators include site:, link:, related, OR, etc.
Search Terms Report	Search Terms Query Report (SQR) is a reporting function in Google DoubleClick and Google AdWords online advertising platforms. It provides a complete list of every query entered by a user that results in an advertiser’s ad being displayed. It helps marketers to understand the efficacy of individual campaigns while offering actionable insights into user search behavioural patterns.
Spider	A Spider, also known as a web crawler, is basically a bot search engine that depends on to crawl websites and take back information for allowing search engines, such as Google, Bing, and others for indexing them. They are generally programmed to visit sites that are submitted by their owners as new or updated.
Status Code	A status code is a response code that is by a sever following a request. There are some common status codes, such as: • 2xx Status Codes: This type of status code is sent by the server to say that the request was effective. • 4xx Status Codes: Code that is directed by the server to say that the request was ineffective and the info was not found. • 5xx Status Codes: This code is sent by the server to know that there was a problem with the server.
Shared Hosting	Shared hosting is a hosting service where multiple websites are hosted on a single server. It is generally used by small businesses, blog owners, and new websites. Shared hosting is also one of the best solutions for those who want to swiftly start their website with inadequate funds.
Sitemap	A sitemap is a file that tells search engines to find, crawl, and index all of your site’s content. Sitemaps also inform search engines to determine which pages on the website are most important. These files are simply a list of URLs that contain additional information about pages, such as when they are last updated. Sitemaps are divided into four main types – XML sitemap, video sitemap, news sitemap, and image sitemap.
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PPC	Pay-per-Click (PPC) is a form of digital marketing that businesses use to drive traffic, leads, and conversions from search engines. It is an online advertising model where marketers run ad campaigns on different platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads and pay a fee when someone clicks on it. Within each platform, there are different ad formats, including: • Search Ads • Shopping Ads • Video Ads • Display Ads • Gmail Ads
PageRank	PageRank is Google’s core method of ranking web pages on SERPs. It is termed the system and algorithmic method that Google uses to rank pages and the numerical value is assigned as a score. A number from 0-10 indicates how good your overall SEO is performing and it is technically called ‘Toolbar PageRank.’ A PageRank score of 0 indicates a low-quality website while a score of 10 represents the most authoritative sites on the web.
Page Authority	Page Authority (PA) is the score created by Moz that anticipates how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is determined using a 100-point logarithmic scale. It is also a comparative metric, which allows a site to analyze how well it is performing as compared to competitors. It is based on data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank, MozTrust, and other factors.
Page Speed	Page Speed is generally the time between the snapping of a link and the display of every element on the web page the browser has wished. This is one of the most imperative factors that Google uses when ranking websites. Page Speed can have an enormous impact on the SEO of your website.
Page Title	A page title is a short description of a webpage that seems at the top of a browser web page and in SERPs. This is one of the most imperative elements of an improved SEO page. A page title should have the page’s keywords in the title tag.
Pagination	Pagination is a technique that divides content across a sequence of pages. It is one of the most widely used processes for websites to divide the lists of articles or products into a consumable format. They are generally found on the following kinds of websites, including: • eCommerce • News Publishers • Forums • Blogs
Panda Algorithm	Initially released on February 23, 2011, by Google, a search results algorithm update that filtered out websites with low-quality content. The purpose of the Google Panda algorithm is to reward high-quality websites and affect the presence of low-quality sites in Google SERPs. Google Panda update targets websites with the following: • Thin onsite content • Duplicate content • Machine-generated content • Excessive onsite adverts
Penguin Algorithm	Early in 2012, Google launched a Webspam algorithm update to specifically target link spam and manipulative link-building practices. It later became Penguin algorithm update, which is another effort to reward quality websites and diminish the SERP presence of websites engaged in manipulative link-building schemes and keyword stuffing.
Pigeon Algorithm	The advent of Google Pigeon is one of the biggest shakeups for local organic results to date. The Pigeon was designed to link Google’s local search algorithm to their web algorithm and to boost ranking parameters based on location and distance. It is considered the most impactful local algorithm update since Google Venice update in 2012. It emphasizes traditional, organic signals, hyperlocal content, local SEO basics, and spam reporting.
Paid Links	Paid links, also known as backlink building, are one of the best processes of paying a third party to place a followed ad or followed link on their websites to point directly back to your domain. They are also evaluated as one of the simplest ways to get your website rapidly ranked in SERPs.
Paid Search Results	Paid search results are generally referring to any search procedures where results are dictated by payment from advertisers. A business can get several benefits using paid search, including: • Generates immediate results • Delivers an impressive ROI • Provides keyword data for SEO • Provides actionable data • Supports other marketing channels • Attracts ready-to-buy users • Accommodates every budget and many others
Primary Keywords	Primary keywords are terms with high search volume that can take a significant amount of traffic to a website. Generally, they should be battered to a wider audience and should be spread out across the text on a site. A business should contain a maximum of 2-3 primary keywords per page, a maximum of one.
Private Blog Network (PBN)	A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of websites developed to link out to other websites and boost organic search visibility. The concept behind this is ‘feeder’ sites that will pass links to the main site, which in turn improve authority and ranking scale. SEO experts often choose to use PBNs to build links and stay in full control of their link-building practices. Note: Don’t use PBNs as an attempt to manipulate the algorithm. Google classes take such action as a link scheme that violates webmaster guidelines.
People Also Ask	People Also Ask is Google rich snippet feature that gives users additional information they may be looking for. For instance, a user searching for “how to start a farm business” and People Also Ask results show questions following the original search. As a marketer, understand these questions and create the content around them to optimize your website for People Also Ask.
Personalization	Personalization refers to Google’s ability to tailor search results as per individual user based on distinct characteristics like previous search history, location, language, and interests. For marketers, this means having an opportunity to utilize search data to create different variations of content for target audiences. If done properly, search engines may elevate that content to appear more often and easily for users. Hence, consider personalizing content not only for Google’s algorithm but also to maximize SEO results and drive conversions.
Pageview	A pageview is a common metric that is used for monitoring activity on a website. They generally count the number of times a page is loaded by the browser. It also supports considering the performance of your site and the efficiency of your content if you know how to construe them.
Penalty	The penalty is a manual action occupied by Google if your website disturbs the google webmaster strategies, while an algorithm update disturbs the Google search consequences. They vary from site to site and change based on the strictness of the violation.
Pogo-Sticking	Pogo-Sticking is an SEO term that is used for re-counting a situation where a searcher rapidly circumnavigates back and forth between pages in search results. It’s a condition dreaded by some SEOs. They believe this user performance is chased by Google and consequences in websites being castigated.
Press Release	Press release content submission is termed as writing on upcoming events, products, and services of the company and submitting them to authoritative PR websites. It serves as an off-page SEO strategy that promotes your brand, products, or services on the web to drive organic traffic and increase your online presence. It can also be used to complement your existing SEO plan which may include a social presence, blogging, blogger outreach program, or content marketing.
Proximity (Local Search)	Proximity is a key factor that differentiates local SEO from search giant’s core organic algorithm. For small businesses, it is a path to getting found online. Be sure your business is close enough to searchers’ exact location, with an emphasis on three factors, including relevance, prominence, and proximity as local search behaviors evolve.
Persona	Personas in SEO are fictional characters used in the user-centric design process to represent different user types of a site. This can help you find relevant keywords for your target audience and create attractive content for effective link building. A persona marketing includes the following characteristics: • Social-demographic profile • Bio • Objectives • Personality • Motivations • Preferred channels • Interests
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White Hat	White hat is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique designed to increase the website’s position in SERPs. It is the opposite of Black Hat SEO, referring to a practice that improves search rankings while maintaining the integrity of the site and staying within the terms of service of search engines. Examples of white hat SEO include: • Quality content and services • Fast loading times and mobile-friendliness • Keyword-oriented meta tags • Making the site easy to navigate
Website Development	Web Development is referred to tasks related to creating, building, and maintaining websites and web applications. It may include web design, web programming, and database management. Programming languages used for web development are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Your website is where users connect with your business, learn about your products or services and buy from you. And it all starts with website development.
Website Design	Web design is what brings the overall look and feel to the site. It is the process of planning and building website elements, including structure, layout, images, fonts, colors, and graphics. Web designers work with various aspects, such as UX/UI experience, SEO, graphic design, logo design, branding, and content optimization. A well-designed site can help you attract prospective customers and nurture your leads and conversions. More importantly, it provides a good user experience and allows visitors to access the website with ease.
Website Navigation	Website navigation is a way to show the importance of pages, content, and information on different web pages. It can be presented in multiple ways, including spider bars, footer, or menus in the header. The technology behind it is known as hypertext or hypermedia. Website navigation uses menus with internal links that make it easier for visitors to find a page or information they are looking for.
WordPress	WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and develop professional websites. It contains plugin architecture and a template system, so you can easily customize any website to suit your business requirements, blog, portfolio, or ecommerce store. Here’s how you can build a WordPress website: • Pick a WordPress plan • Establish a domain name and hosting provider • Install WordPress • Choose a theme • Add posts and pages to your site • Customize your site • Install plugins • Optimize site to increase page speed
Word Count	A word count is the number of words in a document, file, or string of text. There are many programs where the word count feature is already installed, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Notepad++, TextPad, and Word Perfect. Hence, review word count, otherwise too little content indicates a low quality to search engines.
Web Page	A web page is a document, written in HTML, which is viewed on the Internet browser. It can be accessed by entering the URL address into the browser’s address bar. It may contain text, images, and hyperlinks to other web pages. It can be displayed in a web browser like Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, or Apple’s Safari.
Website	A website is a collection of web pages located under a single domain. These web pages contain and showcase information about a business and typically carry many elements like photos, videos, and text. Users need a device with a web browser and internet connection to access the site. Here’s why you should develop a website for your business: • 24/7 online presence • Establish trust and credibility • Boost sales and revenue • Promoting products/ or services • Growth opportunities
Webspam	Web spam is a code, text, or web page that is trying to manipulate Google’s search algorithm and inflate search engine rankings. It directly violates Google’s webmaster guidelines and is considered a black hat SEO technique. Common types of spam fall into four categories – search spam, traffic spam, link spam, and email spam.
Web Application	A web application is a program or software that is accessible using any web browser. Its frontend is typically developed with programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while the backend can use programming stacks like LAMP, MEAN, etc. Web applications are easier to maintain by using the same case in the entire software. They support all modern browsers on any platform like Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Web Analytics	Web analytics is gathering, reporting, and analysis of data produced by users’ behavior of visiting and interacting with a website. The purpose is to evaluate user behavior, optimize website user experience, and gain valuable insights that could help meet business goals and increase sales and conversions. For instance, if you discover the majority of your target audience is using a mobile device, then you should focus on making your website more mobile-friendly.
Wireframe	Wireframes are simple black and white layouts that highlight a specific size and placement of page components, website features, conversion areas, and site navigation. They need font choices, colors, logos, or any vital design elements that predominantly focus on the site’s structure. Having a wireframe gives a designer a proper roadmap to follow pre-determined functionality and content.
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Above the Fold	Above the fold refers to a part of the website that users notice in the first place without scrolling. Although this concept has been around for years, many believe the information you display at the top of your page can impact user experience, bounce rates, and SEO results. As a general rule of thumb, quality above-the-fold content should include internal links to other pages on your site and inform users about the page’s content with images and an H1 header.
Algorithm	Algorithms are complex systems utilized to retrieve information from their search index and deliver the best results for a query. Google uses an amalgamation of algorithms and numerous ranking factors to deliver web pages ranked by relevance on SERPs. Major algorithmic updates include Penguin, Vince, Jagger, Panda, Pigeon, RankBrain, EMD, Hummingbird, and Fred.
Ahrefs	Ahrefs is a popular SEO software suite that involves tools for link building, competitor analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, and site audits. It is a SEO tool that marketers generally use to get higher rankings on Google. It is mainly used to analyze the site’s link profile, keyword rankings, and overall SEO health.
AMP	Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source framework designed to boost load times for mobile internet users. It was released as a joint initiative by Google and other technologies and created with one goal in mind – to create fast load times for mobile users. Features include reduced JavaScript and CSS elements and the use of a content delivery network.
ALT Attribute	Also known as ALT text, used within HTML code to explain the appearance and function of an image on a page. ALT tags are descriptive of an image to inform search engines and users about the nature of the image. Applying images to ALT tags like product pages can significantly impact a site’s search engine rankings.
Artificial Intelligence	Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science associated with building smart machines capable of performing functions that generally require human intelligence. This technology has completely transformed the marketing game. Users can get search results based on past behaviors, locations, devices, interests, and other factors. AI in SEO can be used for content creation, site optimization, and site hosting decisions.
Algorithmic Penalty	The algorithmic penalty refers to sanctioning of a site by one of Google’s algorithms to lower its search rankings. Google crawlers will determine one or more signals with a website that merits lower rankings. Typically, this can be a result of any violation against Google Webmaster guidelines, such as Panda update and Penguin update.
Algorithm Update	Google algorithm updates are periodic improvements made to procedures used to rank websites in organic search results. Google periodically introduces statements that showcase recent algorithm changes in Penguin, Panda, Caffeine, Fritz, and Florida. Apart from search engine ranking signals, Google makes continuous updates to its index and makes new results available for users.
Analytics	Analytics is the process that uses statistics, machine learning, and advanced capabilities to discover meaningful patterns in data. It involves evaluating through massive data sets to discover, interpret, and communicate new insights and knowledge.
Absolute URLs	Absolute URLs contain the address from protocol HTTPS to the domain (www.example.com) and location within the website in your folder system (/foldernameA or /foldernameB) names with the URL. It provides all the available information to find the location of a page. Search engines like Google and Bing follow sitemap guidelines that require absolute URLs in the sitemap to eliminate confusion about what pages to crawl and index. Here’s an example of an absolute URL: https://www.example.com/about/team/
Anchor Text	SEO is a complex technique that consists of many crucial details and anchor text is one of them. It is a text you click to move from one internet destination to the other. While anchor can generally link webpages, they can initiate downloads and link to documents or files. It usually appears as blue underlined text, but you can change your site’s link colors and styles via HTML or CSS.
Authority	In terms of SEO, authority refers to the significance or weight given to a page relative to a given search query. Google uses many factors for evaluating the authority of a web page. There are three levels of authority exist within SEO, which are as follows: • Domain Authority – an indicator of a domain’s potential to rank, encompassing signals to appear website as high-quality and trusted. • Page Authority – an indicator of a page’s ability to rank. It is based on three factors, including age and trust, the value received from links, and the freshness of the latest update. • Link Authority – an indicator of a link’s ability to rank better. It can be influenced by the Nofollow attribute, page authority, number of page links, and location of the link.
AJAX	AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which is a web technology that includes various techniques that offer a reliable way of updating website content. AJAX can send and receive information in JSON, XML, HTML, and text files. In 2015, Google has announced that it will be able to crawl, read, and parse JavaScript without any issues, which in turn, makes AJAX crawling scheme outdated.
Author Authority	Author authority is a concept that defines the authority built by an individual author on a web for a certain topic. In 2011, Google started showing author images in combination with Google Plus profiles for articles that include authorship markup (rel=” author” link relationship). It revolves around three crucial factors, including the about page, links to social media profiles, and biographies for every published article.
Auto-Generated Content	Auto-generated content is the one created via code for publishing and indexing large amounts of pages in SERPs. This type of content is not relevant, useful, and definitely, not original. It can adversely affect your site ranking and even lead to a penalty.
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Backlink	A backlink is created to link one website link to another, also known as inbound links or incoming links. Backlinks to your site are a signal for search engines that your content is worth linking to and therefore, surfacing on SERP. Thus, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a website’s ranking or search visibility.
B2B	B2B stands for Business to Business, wherein companies involved create products and services for other businesses and organizations. This can include software as a service (SaaS), marketing firms, and businesses that create and sell supplies.
B2C	B2C or business to consumer is a business model wherein a company sells a product or service directly to a customer. It generally involves a high volume of clients, but a lower revenue with shorter sales cycles. Examples include Walmart, Amazon, and others where individual customers are the end-users of a product or service.
Bing	Bing is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. But that’s not the only way you can access its web searching services, those who wish to use Bing can also use it via Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app. This search engine is often compared to Google in terms of search results quality, advanced search options, mobile searching, and rewards programs.
Bing Webmaster Tools	Bing Webmaster Tools is a free Microsoft service that enables webmasters to incorporate their sites into the Bing crawler so they appear in search engines. It also allows the site admin, a marketer, and a website developer to monitor and maintain the website’s presence. You can use tools and reports to find keywords driving traffic, impressions, clicks of terms, and find websites linking to you. You can also perform: • Monitor your website’s performance and see what keywords you rank for • See how Bing crawls and indexes your site • Submit your site/new pages to be crawled • Disavow links • Remove content you don’t want to be indexed • Resolve potential malware or spam issues
Black Hat SEO	Black hat SEO techniques attempt to manipulate search engine algorithms to boost a site’s rankings on SERPs. Search engines, like Bing and Google, make it very clear using these tactics may lead to a site penalty (either algorithmically or with a manual action), which affects ranking positions and traffic.
Blog	A blog is an informative website that shows information in reverse chronological order, with the latest posts appearing at the top. It is a platform where a writer(s) can share their opinions on different subjects. The main purpose of a blog is to connect your brand with the relevant audience, boost traffic, and drive quality leads. When you use niche knowledge for an SEO blog and create engaging posts, it builds brand awareness and credibility.
Bounce Rate	Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors leaving your site without taking any action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase. The site’s bounce rate is crucial because it tells how well people are engaging with your web page’s content and user experience. To reduce the high bounce rate, make sure your site is mobile-friendly, content is keyword-oriented, and avoid disruptions that might harm UX.
Breadcrumb	A breadcrumb is a text at the top of a page indicating where the user is on the site. For instance, on https://www.esearchlogix.com/, the path to our blog page is Home > ESL blog > blog. Every step is clickable, all the way back to the homepage. They also appear in Google search results so you can take the best advantage of this for SEO or add an accurate form of structured data to your site.
Broken Link	A broken link is a web page that cannot be found or accessed by a user for many reasons. Web servers often deliver an error message when a user tries to access a broken link, also known as dead links or link rots. This happens because a website is experiencing one or more of these issues: • The destination web page has been moved or no longer exists • An invalid URL has been entered • A web page was made private and can’t be accessed by a user
Blog Commenting	Blog commenting is an effective strategy for SEO to make your blog section interactive, get backlinks on your site and drive traffic. It is all about exchanging views about what people think or feel about a specific subject. This can help businesses to capture quality leads and add a social touch.
Bot	Bots, web crawlers, or spiders are largely used by search engines to find out how high to display a website in search results. Bots discover new pages to visit or crawl by following links. For example, seeing how many authoritative websites are linking to your site is the most crucial ranking factor bots can track.
Block-Level Link Analysis	This algorithm breaks down a web page into small sections and then evaluates the significance of the information and links within that block. A link in the footer may not be counted as a link in the header.
Blog Comment Spam	It is considered a black hat SEO technique wherein users don’t ask a relevant question or contribute an ideal thought or compliment to the post to manipulate search engine ranking signals. If your blog is popular, the likelihood of receiving spam comments is quite higher.
Branded Keywords	Branded keywords, also known as branded search, are any query via a search engine that involves the name of your company, brand, or business. The use of a brand name in the search represents the user is already aware of who you are, has heard of you, or is looking for your business specifically.
Brand Mentions	Brand mentions are online references to your company, brand, product, or service. These show up in product reviews, social media posts, blog posts, and news articles. It affects a brand’s reputation, thereby, it is crucial to monitor them and address negative mentions. Social media monitoring tools like Google Alerts and Sprout Social are used as social listening campaigns.
Bookmark	A bookmark is a web browser feature used to save and mark a specific URL address for future references. It is created for opening the desired web page and accessing the browser’s bookmark menu. Instead of typing a web page on a search engine, clicking the bookmark will direct you to that page.
Browser	A browser is a software program used to explore, retrieve, and display information available on World Wide Web. It can be in the form of web pages, pictures, videos, and other files that are connected through hyperlinks and categorized with URLs. Google Chrome is one of the commonly used browsers, others include Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, etc.
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Cache	In computing, a cache is an effective storage layer that stores data into hardware or software so that further requests can be served faster. It allows you to seamlessly reuse previously retrieved or computed data. The primary purpose is to increase data retrieval performance by reducing the need for accessing the underlying slow storage layer.
Click-through-rate (CTR)	Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks to impressions on an advertising campaign. The aim of any PPC campaign is to get qualified users to visit your website and perform the desired action. It is the primary step to improving the ad’s relevance and generating the best results. If you have a: • High CTR – means users are finding your ad highly relevant • Low CTR – means users are finding your ad less relevant
Content Marketing	Content marketing is a type of marketing approach used to attract, engage, and retain the audience by creating high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and others. When done right, it conveys expertise, nurtures relationships, and presents your platform as a valuable source of information and guidance. The goal is to drive qualified leads and increase brand recognition, sales, engagement, and loyalty.
Canonical URL	A canonical tag is a way of informing search engines like Google that a specific URL presents the master copy of the page. Using a canonical tag avoids issues caused by duplicate or identical content appearing on multiple URLs. In simple words, a canonical tag tells Google which version of the URL you wish to appear in search results. Duplicate content is a major subject, when Google crawls many URLs with identical content, it may cause SEO problems. Thus, using canonicalization helps you prevent duplicate content and maintain the site’s credibility.
Citation	Citations are a key ranking factor in local SEO. They are typically an online reference to a business that involves a business name, address, and phone number (NAP). If we talk about citations in the context of SEO, it means a group of individual business listings on multiple sites. For a local business, the SEO community considers some must-have citations on Google My Business, Facebook, Bing Maps, and Yelp. Citations are important to improve local rankings, earn referral traffic, and boost visibility on Google maps.
Cloaking	Cloaking in SEO is the method used to serve users information or content that is different from what’s presented to search engine crawlers. This is considered an attempt to deceive search engines to rank the site higher in search engine results. It is a violation of Webmaster Guidelines and leads to a Google penalty, also resulting in a significant decline in rankings, less exposure, and engagement.
Conversion Rate	Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site that completes a goal of conversion out of a total number of visitors. A high conversion rate is a clear indicator of a successful marketing campaign. It means people are appreciating what you’re offering and they are easily getting it. It is best to take steps to increase your conversion rate, meaning more site traffic converts into meaningful actions that accelerate your business growth.
Crawlers	A crawler is a program used by search engines that give signals to the internet to collect and index data. Content may vary, it could be an image, a video, a PDF, or a web page, but irrespective of the format, content is navigated by external and internal links. SEO is influenced by crawlers in many ways. Firstly, if a site is easy to navigate, with most pages a few clicks away from a homepage, it will make your site readable for crawlers and also user-friendly. Secondly, internal link structure is important for a crawler to index all pages on a website.
Cross-Linking	Cross-linking in SEO is a technique of creating links between two websites. It is done by either linking another site you own or any third-party site. The purpose is to increase the number of inbound links to a page using the relevant SEO keywords. Cross-linking can help a page rank higher in search results for a specific keyword phrase, increase inbound links, boost domain authority, and increase referral traffic.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)	A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers in multiple geographical locations cohesively working to let content load faster by serving it from the nearest location of the visitor. CDNs work as a traffic intersection path where various internet providers and servers connect and deliver each other access to website traffic. It is becoming an industry standard for SEO to improve speed, website rankings, and overall user experience.
Content	Content is simply any sort of information that provides an answer to customer queries and concerns. It can be presented in the form of text, video, image, audio, or whatever your target audience prefers. Content is crucial for SEO, as search engines provide search results that are relevant and valuable for users. Quality content can help increase online visibility, generate backlinks, boost CTRs, and attract more customers.
CMS	Content Management System (CMS) is software that allows users to create, manage and edit the content on a website without any advanced technical knowledge. CMS is vital for SEO strategy because it enables users to upgrade their website whenever required based on search engine metrics and monitor its progress. To maximize your efforts, look for a CMS platform with built-in functionality for optimizing your on-page and technical SEO.
Click Depth	Click depth is the number of clicks it takes a user to reach from a homepage to another page on a website. According to John Mueller of Google, when it comes to the search ranking factor, page depth carries more weight than a page’s URL structure. Click depth impacts Google’s crawl, rankings, and site traffic. With the right approach for click depth, you can get more out of Googlebot’s crawl and ensure all the content is visible to users.
Code to Text Ratio	Code to Text Ratio, also called Text-HTML ratio or Text to Code ratio, refers to the amount of text your web page has as compared to the amount of code on the same page. Anyone who has developed a site may understand the pain points of code to text ratio can have on the UX, index pages, and page speed. It is often used by search engines to identify the relevancy of a web page.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)	Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an effective marketing strategy for increasing users and visitors taking specific action on your site, social media channels, or other campaigns. This involves a thorough understanding of how users interact with your content, find your site, and eventually, take actions that drive quality leads and business revenue. CRO brings significant benefits to SEO, including increased user engagement, better ROI, valuable user insights, enhanced customer trust, and scalability.
Comment Spam	Comment spam is a fundamental issue dealt by plenty of websites that allow users to comment on articles and blog posts. When a bot or person leaves an irrelevant comment or links to a spammy website, it adversely affects user experience and search engine rankings. Search engines are likely to penalize sites with comment spam because visitors may click links that expose them to insecure sites, viruses, malware, and phishing tactics.
CSS	Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a coding language that gives a website an ideal look and layout. CSS brings various innovations to web page layout, such as specify fonts, specify the color and size of text and links, and apply colors to backgrounds. This is a part of code that defines how different elements (ex: headers, links) of your site look, which eventually impact your search engine rankings and online marketing campaign.
Curated Content	Curated Content is a way of choosing, accumulating, packaging, and sharing content from all over the web. It contains a list of authoritative resources on a given topic. It is simply a practice of bringing relevant and high-quality content to your audience without a ‘publish or perish’ mindset. A well-structured content curation strategy adds value to brand reputation, resulting in qualified leads, social shares, and better rankings.
Country-Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD)	ccTLD is a top-level domain generally assigned for each country or territory. It is extremely crucial in international SEO as ccTLDs are used to show search engines and users that site content is particularly targeting a certain country or region. When a website uses ccTLD, Google assumes that the site is relevant to the targeted geographic area and should appear on SERPs in that specific area.
Click Bait	Click Bait is misleading content crafted to earn page views on the site. Publishers use clickbait to drive site traffic, so they can earn more advertising money, clicks, and revenue. Language of clickbait is more emotional than informational, including headlines like “you won’t believe” or “try this simple trick” to spark curiosity and other strong emotions. It can appear in different formats, such as blog posts, banner ads, and SERP ads.
Content Hub	A content hub is a centralized platform where users can find the content of any specific topic. Significant benefits of creating a content hub include more backlinks, web traffic, quality leads, increased authority, and strong brand recognition. Even better, it can serve as an SEO powerhouse that grows your market share and drives conversions. Hubs can contain a range of content formats about a subject, including images, articles, videos, audio, and tools.
Core Update	A core algorithm update is announced by Google when significant changes are made to be largely felt by publishers and search marketers. It simply means broad changes to the company’s search algorithms and systems. While most launches go overlooked, core updates get attention because people will see their impact on search results.
Core Web Vitals	Core web vitals are a set of standard metrics designed by Google that allow developers to understand how users experience a web page. It identifies user experience based on three primary areas – page loading performance, ease of interaction, and visual stability of a page.
Crawl Error	Crawl errors occur when a search engine isn’t able to crawl the site because access is denied. Internal crawl errors and redirects can have an impact on user experience, crawlability, and rankings. Googlebot is blocked by Access Denied errors because of various reasons: • Your robots.txt file prevents Googlebot from accessing URLs, directories, or the entire site • You require people to log in to view the URL • Your hosting provider is preventing Googlebot from reaching your site
Crawl Budget	Crawl budget is the number of pages search engine crawls and indexes on a site within a certain timeframe. Google calculates crawl budget based on crawl limit and crawl demand. Once your budget has been exhausted, a web crawler will stop accessing your website’s content and move on to other sites.
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Domain	A Domain is precisely a particular website’s address that ends with an extension like .com, .net, .org., .edu., or others. esearchlogix.com is the Domain.
Disavow	If there is a backlink in your link profile that is spam, low-quality, artificial or from an unreliable source, then you can use the Google’s Disavow tool to ignore Google to ignore that particular link. When you find an inbound link present on a source you have no control over and can’t get that removed, then Disavow tools helps to eliminate the negative effect of that link.
Do-Follow Link	Do-Follow link means a backlink that instructs search engine crawlers to follow the link to the destination site. It is a link descriptor that directs the search engines to count a link as a vote of quality.
Domain Rating (DR)	Domain rating (DR) is a metric created by Ahrefs that measures the relative strength of backlink profile of a website on a scale of 0 to 100. Higher the scale number, stronger the backlink profile. It works in the same way as MOZ’s Domain Authority (DA) metric. This metric enables Google and other search engines to assess and rank websites.
Duplicate Content	When a content piece (significant amount of a page’s content or sentences or paragraphs) present on a single page is extremely similar to or matches exactly with content present on any other page(s) of the site, any other website(s) or anywhere on the web.
Dead-End Page	A dead-end page is one which consists of no links to any other page. Once the reader or viewer arrives on this page, they don’t have a path to move forward, and can only return back from that.
Doorway Page	A doorway page is a web page designed to rank for specific keywords (often long-tail keywords) while sending visitors to a different page. Creating doorway pages is considered the most malicious black-hat SEO technique. For Google, these pages are spam because they add no value to searchers. It can send visitors to malware or phishing websites. That’s why Google continues to improve its anti-spam algorithm that helps them detect and punish doorway pages.
Dwell Time	Dwell time is the amount of time that spends between clicking one of the search results and heading back to them. It is not similar to bounce rate, time on page, or any other metric in Google Analytics. It is a calculation of users’ dwelling time – how much time they linger on a page, beginning and ending with SERPs.
Dynamic URL	A dynamic URL is a web page URL that is dynamically generated from the database. It contains parameters that request data from the database to settle the page content. It is often used in ecommerce sites where all information about products is stored in the database and pulled when people search for products or apply certain filters. It is also used in web forms, product lists, sessions, or interactive websites.
Deep Link	A deep link is a hyperlink that points traffic to a specific page on the site rather than the site’s homepage. It is a link-building strategy wherein links are built to a web page other than the main pages of a website. It is used for links to connect web resources and mobile applications as well as to create push notifications or marketing emails.
De-Index	De-indexing is the process of removing pages from a search engine’s index. It occurs when you update your website or misconfigure your server, which causes search engines to remove content without warning. While this may seem an inconvenience, it doesn’t mean your site gets down permanently. Google might de-index content that is duplicate, plagiarized, or doesn’t seem legitimate or with authority.
Data	Data is simply defined as a collection of individual facts or statistics. In SEO content, data is associated with traffic, impressions, page rank, or other topics. You can get these numbers and results in ordinary analysis tasks. SEO data helps you understand the level of web optimization strategies you can apply to websites and content.
Deep Link Ratio	The deep link ratio is a calculation of the total number of inbound links to every page on your website compared to the overall number of inbound links to your homepage only. A high deep link ratio indicates that a webmaster has built up a legitimate natural link profile. Webmasters looking to increase deep link ratios on their sites should add additional content and promote it accordingly.
Direct Traffic	Direct traffic is any traffic that doesn’t derive from a referring website. Visitors arrive directly on the website without having to click on a link from another website. If the traffic is coming from an unknown source, it will be categorized as direct traffic as well. This means a person navigates your website through another channel, such as a search engine or social media platform.
Directory	A directory for SEO is similar to business directories or business listings, where a directory complies with a list of businesses. On the other hand, a web directory for SEO is a website that journals topics in one or more categories and can also serve as a search engine. Many directories have listings for local businesses, articles, services, and more. Often, they use paid advertising so you can have various ways to improve your site traffic.
DMOZ	Domain Name Mozilla (DMOZ) was introduced in 1997 as “the encyclopedia of the internet” or the “directory of the web.” It started as an open directory project and aims to help internet users find a website they want – much like search engines do. It has no commercial background and was maintained by volunteer editors.
Domain Age	Domain age refers to how long ago a website owner first registered the domain of a site. It describes how old the website is and how long the website has been active. For search engines like Google, domain age is based on when it is identified through a link on the internet and when the website is first indexed.
Domain Authority	Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in SERPs. DA scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. Finding out the DA score can help you with brand building and creating a website that you know clients and customers would like to engage with. It also helps you discover areas that need improvement.
Domain History	A domain history gives search engines an overall impression of how your website has performed over time. This not only includes a record of your site’s rankings but also content history, link-building practices, and traffic. If your website has been penalized in any regard, your domain history will show that.
Domain Trust	Domain trust is a crucial element for measuring the trustworthiness of a website. The quality of content and links is considered decisive for the calculation of domain trust. It refers to a trust value attributed to a domain by search engines. If it’s a positive value, a high level of trust will be a huge ranking factor in search results. The trustworthiness of a domain is influenced by several factors and evaluated by Google’s algorithm.
DuckDuckGo	DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused search engine, which means the service doesn’t gather any personal information while you use it. As DuckDuckGo doesn’t get access to private data, it can’t share it with third parties. It does monetize its platform by selling ads. But its ad platform is entirely based on keywords and not on personal data collected from users. The fundamental is simple, “no tracking, no ad targeting, just searching.” It calls Google by pointing out how much Google is tracking you and using data for ads.

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E-A-T	E-A-T in SEO refers to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, a concept discussed in Google Quality Raters’ guidelines to determine whether the content is valuable and whether it should rank higher. Google search quality evaluators need to pay attention to: • The expertise of the content creator • The authoritativeness of content and the website • The trustworthiness of the content and the website
E-commerce SEO	E-commerce SEO is a set of search engine optimization techniques used to rank your website higher in search results. SEO for ecommerce matters to drive qualified leads, traffic, and sales to help grow your online store.
Editorial Link	Editorial links are a part of strong link-building practice, wherein a website points back to your site. This kind of link is a result of publishing valuable content that people find trustworthy and promote your brand to a larger audience. These links aren’t requested or paid for by you, it simply comes from authoritative sites that have impressive metrics.
External Link	An external link is a backlink that targets a webpage on another domain. In SEO terms, the external link refers to links that are created on other sites and point back to your domain. These are measured for volume, quality, and relevance of how search engines support the ranking of your page. An outbound link is also an external link as it targets outwards from your domain to another domain.
Engagement Metrics	Engagement metrics or user engagement measures how a visitor is interacting with your website’s content. These metrics may include the total amount of time users spend on the site, how many comments they leave, and whether they share it on social media channels. They show how your marketing or content strategy aligns with user interest.
Email Outreach	Email outreach is a crucial part of the SEO strategy used to build links. It is an effective process of finding potential prospects to promote your content and reach out to encourage them to link to your site. It is all about prospecting people who genuinely find your content useful and who can add real value to your brand and asking them to take an action if they like what they see.
Ego Bait	As the name suggests, Ego Bait content means ‘stroking the ego’ of whichever website owner or influencer you want a link from. While various link-building techniques aim to create content that attracts a broad audience, ego bait uses a highly targeted, more personalized approach. The content can be crafted around a specific person, business, or group of people.
Entry Page	The entry page is the first page users reach the beginning of a session. It isn’t necessarily your home page, can be any important page that users see at first when entering your site because further engagement depends on it. Entry page data is very useful when analyzing and optimizing your SEO results.
Exact Match Domain (EMD)	An Exact Match Domain (EMD) is a domain name that matches a search query to drive traffic to your website. For instance, if the search query is ‘buy jeans online’ then you can call your website ‘http://buyjeansonline.com/,’ as a shortcut to appear on top of SERPs. But the recent EMD update meant SEO is getting more complex and unfair advantages will not be given to exact match domain. If you use EMD, make sure your site has quality content and link acquisition to achieve successful outcomes.
.edu Links	.edu domain is a generic top-level domain for educational institutes. If you are involved in a university or college, run a scholarship fund, or otherwise have a good relationship with the .edu site’s organization, create high-quality content that serves your audience and improves your rankings.
Error 404	Error 404 or 404 page not found is a status code that informs a user that the requested page is not available. It simply means a server could not find a client-requested page. It may be a sign of flaws associated with a hosting service or DNS configuration settings. These dead-end pages hinder search engines’ ability to crawl your website.
Everflux	Everflux is a term used to explain the constantly changing data in search engine result pages (SERPs). Everflux means permanent fluctuation, although Google keeps refining its techniques to make updates quick and more sophisticated. Everflux ensures all ranking factors are measured closely in real-time to present the most relevant and valuable information to the user.
Exit Rate	Exit rate indicates how often visitors exit from your site after visiting any number of pages. It is calculated as the number of exits or number of pageviews for a particular page. A high exit rate means visitors are leaving your site quickly and you need to focus on crucial metrics to boost your revenue.
Earned Media	Earned media is content written about your business by third parties and published on platforms you don’t own, such as posts on social media. This kind of content isn’t paid for, it is earned, either organically or via promotional efforts. Examples include social media posts, articles, and reviews from outside sources about your business.
Earnings per Click	Earnings per Click (EPC) is an affiliate marketing term referring to the average amount of money you earn when someone clicks your affiliate links. EPC marketing generally runs through pay-per-click (PPC) ads. It can help determine whether or not a product is worth your time and money. Once you learn to increase EPC, you can expect great profits from affiliate sales.
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Featured Snippets	Featured snippets are highlighted excerpts of text that appear at the top of Google search results to answer a searcher’s query. The content that shows inside of a featured snippet is pulled automatically from web pages in Google’s index. Common types of featured snippets include definitions, tables, lists, and steps.
Findability	SEO is a part of findability, at its core, it is referred to the ability of a person to access products, services, and information they need. It is the quality of a website to be discovered easily by users and search engines. Two aspects of findability include on-site findability and external findability, which can make a big difference for any business.
Fresh Content	Fresh content or freshness factor is a crucial part of the search engine algorithm that gives more priority to newly updated content for search queries. For instance, when you look for breaking news, you are likely to see high-ranking pages that are a few minutes old as compared to old content that may have received more views over time. Google uses Query Deserve Freshness (QDF) to decide when or when not to serve users new information.
FLASH	Adobe has released new technology to search engines so that they can crawl Flash files. Typically, FLASH is a programming language that search engines have trouble crawling and understanding content designed with it.
First Link Priority	First link priority refers to the concept that Google will ignore all links after the first when a page links more than once to the same page. Search engines will only pass link juice to the first link it comes across on a web page and overlook the rest of hat links to the same page.
Forbidden Words	Forbidden words or poison words may degrade the quality of the page for search engines. These usually involve words and phrases that trigger mistrust, low-quality page, or loss of respect. While there is no precise list of forbidden words, politically incorrect terms and abusive language can get your page buried in SERPs.
Facebook Advertising	Facebook Ads is a powerful advertising platform of a popular social network Facebook that allows marketers to promote products and services through publications or ads of text, video, or image. This marketing approach is used by all sizes of businesses due to its larger audience and endless possibilities for segmentation.
Forum	A forum is an online discussion platform, where you can publish your content or website link and drive traffic from it. People come here to ask questions, clear doubts, and share their knowledge on a specific topic. Forum posting is a crucial part of off-page SEO techniques because it helps you get quality backlinks from authoritative forum sites.
Frequency Capping	Frequency capping is a useful tool that allows you to limit how often an ad is shown to the same user in a certain period of time. In simple words, it is referred to the number of times the user will see each ad. This setting allows you to place a limit on the number of times a single customer will see your ad campaign, so they aren’t overwhelmed with repeated content.
Friction Element	Friction is referred to any on-page element or user action required that declines the profitability of a conversion. For instance, a user clicking to a second page before conversion possibility is itself a case of friction. Or, a popup ad on a page proposed to produce signups or sales increases friction.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)	FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a network protocol for transferring files between computers over TCP/IP connections. It is considered an application layer protocol to help webmasters upload files to their respective sites.
Frames	Frames are laid down in HTML code to create clear and quality structures for website content. When you use frames on a web page, you will be utilizing the same URL but displaying different content from an external source. This can be perplexing for search engines, resulting in the page not getting indexed.
Footer Link	Footer links are tags placed on the bottom of web pages that enable easy navigation upon clicks. This internal linking structure is crucial for SEO for helping users navigate products and services. If Google determines those links aid in exceptional user experience, they are considered a positive aspect and search engines will likely crawl those links.
Faceted Navigation	Faceted navigation is how ecommerce websites enable users to filter and sort results based on product attributes. It creates a new URL for every filtered search, which can result in duplicate content and hurt search engine visibility of pages. Google encourages marketers to use this element for better usability but warns against the SEO problems it may cause.
Favicon	A favicon is a visual representation of your brand on browser tabs, search history, bookmark lists, search ads, and search results. They are 16×16 pixels small icons, which typically contain the logo, the first letter of the brand, or a generic image that presents the business type. It brings legitimacy to your website and helps boost the branding and trust of potential customers.
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Google Alerts	Google Alerts are a way to monitor the search results for a specific query. Users can set notifications daily, weekly, or monthly, allowing them to save ample time as they receive an email from Google whenever a given search query shows up on the web. These web alerts are useful for brand monitoring, link building, reputation management, job search, blogging, and staying up-to-date with the newest trends.
Google Analytics	Google Analytics is a web analytics service that gives relevant statistics and basic analytical tools to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. The service is a crucial part of the Google Marketing platform and is free to anyone with a Google account. It is used to monitor web performance, collect user insights, determine top sources of traffic, and the success of marketing efforts, discover trends and track goal completions.
Google Bombing	Google bombing is a black-hat SEO practice to increase a web page rank for a specific Google search by exploiting its algorithm. It typically involves artificially inflating the number of web pages that link to a page and the words used in its anchor text. These practices are considered spam and would no longer be taken into account for SERP ranking.
Googlebot	Googlebot is a web crawler used by Google to collect the information required and build a searchable index of the web. It has mobile and desktop crawlers, plus specialized crawlers for news, videos, and images. It uses sitemaps and databases of links discovered during previous crawlers to identify where to go next.
Google Search Console	Google Search Console is a free tool to help users determine their site’s traffic, keyword performance, fix issues, and receive alerts from Google about their website. It provides relevant insight into how a website is performing in organic search and suggests ways to make site adjustments in the Google Index.
Google My Business	Google My Business (officially known as Business Profile) is a tool that allows users to manage and optimize their Business Profile on Google. It provides your business the ability to list your business location on Google Maps and local search results. You can display crucial information about your business, such as timings, contact details, or a link to your website.
Google Trends	Google Trends is a free tool that determines how frequently a specific search term is entered into Google using real-time data. It shows users what people often look for as impacted by time, location, and season. It can be used for comparative keyword research, including search volume index and geographical information of search engine users.
Google Webmaster Guidelines	Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are fundamentals to achieve desired SEO results using techniques aligned with the search engine’s expectations. Those who strictly follow general guidelines can expect their website not to be penalized and can continuously gain good rankings.
Google Sitelinks	Sitelinks are links to other pages that appear under Google search results. They help users to navigate relevant information on a site quickly. They are used to provide users with convenient access to various web pages within your main website.
Google Keyword Planner	Google Keyword Planner is a tool designed to help marketers discover crucial keywords and find data for specific keywords like search numbers, competition, and ad pricing. It is often used for SEO purposes, mainly because it is free and provides keyword suggestions directly from Google.
Google Slap	Google slap is a situation where Google identifies that an advertiser is sending ads to a page or user that is not related, is poor in quality, and even loads very slowly. It is the action to discourage such behavior and may result in advertisers paying a higher CPC. To avoid this, advertisers need to gain high Quality Score.
Google Suggest	Google Suggest, also known as autocomplete is a Google search engine function that provides relevant suggestions to users as they enter their query into the search box. Through a function called Google Instant, SEPRs adapt to keywords or phrase as it is being entered. Every suggestion is based on how frequently the term is entered by the user.
Google Supplemental Index	Google database involves the main index and supplemental one, where non-important pages from the search engine’s perspective are placed. When search engine algorithms evaluate any page of a website and if it turns out to add less value to the main index, it goes to supplemental results. Pages in the supplemental index can adversely affect business promotion and don’t allow traffic to the site.
Google Hummingbird	Hummingbird is a search algorithm introduced by Google in August 2013, as a replacement for the Caffeine algorithm and affects about 90% of Google searches. Unlike Penguin and Panda, Google Hummingbird isn’t a penalty-related update, but a change in the way Google reacts to different kinds of queries. Google has always used synonyms, but with this algorithm, it is able to judge context and understand the intent of a search to determine what exactly the user is looking for.
Google RankBrain	RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm by Google to better understand the user intent of a search query. It understands what you’re asking and provide an accurate set of results that go beyond simple keyword-matching concept. It was the primary push into machine learning technology being applied to search results on Google, but definitely not the last.
Google Dance	Google Dance describes significant changes in the keyword ranking in search results within a short period of time. It occurs when the position of specific keywords jumps from low to high and inversely. It is most often linked with new websites or those at the beginning of the SEO process. These sudden changes determine how users respond to a given site.
Google Sandbox	Google Sandbox is an alleged filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top search results. Consider it as a probation period, even if you follow good SEO tactics, your site won’t get enough rankings until it comes to an end. Although Google has never confirmed that Sandbox exists, it is often discussed on black hat forums and could be an anti-spam filter.
Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines	Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines is a frequently updated document that Google Quality Raters use to rate websites. These guidelines highlight conditions and elements that need to be considered and how the site should be rated by an individual. Although guidelines are written for Search Engine Raters, SEOs and webmasters can use them to improve their website or page and boost their search visibility.
Google Algorithms	Google algorithms are a set of rules Google uses to rank websites on several parameters such as quality, relevance, and page usability. The complex system retrieves data from pages and seeks to comprehend what users are looking for and ranks pages accordingly.
Google Knowledge Graph	It is a knowledge base for making broader connections between entities and searchers. Suppose, if you search for a specific company, Google’s Knowledge Graph will show a complete profile, depending on how well they did their SEO campaign. Therefore, search engine collects and reviews information about people, places, and things, and develops ways to present findings in an accessible manner.
Google Penalty	Google penalties are negative impacts or punishments caused due to manipulative practices that harm your site’s rankings and even remove it from search results entirely. If Google suspects any violation of its policies or you are using black-hat SEO techniques, it may issue a penalty, both manually and algorithmically.
Google Top Heavy Update	Launched in January 2012, Google Top Heavy Update aims to downgrade web pages with plenty of ads at the top or if ads are distracting for users. As soon as you remove excessive ads, Google will re-crawl your site and you can see an increase in your rankings.
Guest Blogging	Also known as Guest Posting, is an act of writing quality content to publish on another company’s website. By sharing your knowledge on other companies’ sites, you can establish yourself as an authoritative figure, build relationships with other leaders, and expose your business to a new audience.
Grey Hat SEO	Grey hat SEO is the practice of using tactics that are not strictly against Google’s guidelines but certainly not the one that would be considered the best practice. It combines white and black hat SEO techniques as it exploits search engine guidelines to increase page rankings on SERPs.
Guestographics	It refers to a guest infographic or infographic marketing that is created in collaboration with other brands. From an SEO perspective, guestographics combine three proven digital marketing tactics – infographics, guest posting, and link building. It involves repurposing and republishing an infographic as a guest post on authoritative sites.
.gov Backlinks	Gov backlinks are links from a .gov domain to a site. These domains include official websites of state, local, and federal governments. It is good for SEO purposes because they have high domain authority and credibility that can help boost ranking on SERPs.
Gated Content	Gated content is a type of content that includes white papers, videos, product demos, ebooks, case studies, and anything that needs to fill out the form to access them. The form may ask for user details or others like jobs and organizations. Gated content serves the purpose of lead generation – acquiring user information for potential leads or prospects.
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HTML Heading Tag	HTML heading tags, more commonly known as <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags, make it easy for people and search engines to obtain a good understanding of what a page is all about. Above all, they can influence how high your pages can rank on SERPs. The World Wide Web Consortium explains six levels of heading sections in HTML, with <h1> being the important one while <h6> being the least important.
Hidden Text	Hidden text is the information on a web page that is invisible to users but viewable to Google crawlers that index and rank a website. It is considered a black hat SEO tactic and when used as spam, it can get you penalized. Google sees some hidden texts as essential to improve user engagement, accessibility, and mobile user experience.
Hilltop Algorithm	The hilltop algorithm is adopted by Google in 2003 to recognize authoritative web pages to rank. It is considered a solid foundation for modern SEO to identify pages that work with PageRank, another ranking algorithm. It forms a relationship between ‘expert’ and ‘authority’ pages, where expert pages are linked with other relevant pages and authority pages have links pointing to them from expert pages.
HITS Algorithm	Hyperlink Induced Topic Search (HITS) is an algorithm used in link analysis. It helps web link structures to discover and rank web pages relevant to a user’s search. HITS algorithm uses hub and authorities to define a relationship between webpages. The idea is to link an ideal website to other relevant sites and being linked by other authoritative sites.
HTML Sitemap	Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) sitemap consists of every page of your site – think of it as a table of contents. An organized list of pages is recommended so that users can easily navigate the content they are looking for. Every page on the website, from high to low levels is included in HTML sitemap SEO and creates a general overview of websites. It is an important factor for Google to rank a site in SERPs.
Head Term	Also known as the head keyword, is a common keyword that generates high search volume. When it comes to ranking, head terms are very competitive and are opposite to long-tail keywords. These short terms are based on a well-distribution of keyword usage that shows a high number of most-used terms.
Homepage	A homepage is the main entry point to a website, appearing when the user begins a session. It is the page where you welcome people to your site, highlight your crucial elements, and help users to navigate other pages. It can rank for non-relevant keywords and help other web pages on the website gain a higher ranking as well.
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a basic set of rules for transferring files, such as text, video, images, sound, and other multimedia files over the web. When you open a web browser, you will be indirectly using HTTP, an application protocol that operates on a TCP/IP suite of protocols.
HTTPS	HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and is considered an encrypted version of HTTP. It is used to make secure communication across the web or a network. It uses a secure certificate from a third-party vendor to verify that the site is legitimate, known as SSL Certificate. This is what creates a secure connection between a browser and a server, which offers an extra layer of protection for sensitive data.
HTML	HyperText Markup Language is a standard structure for creating web pages. It consists of a series of elements that explain to the browser how to display the content. It enables the creation and structure of sections, links, and paragraphs using HTML elements like tags and attributes.
Hub Page	Hub pages are the main page for themes that has a series of interconnected and relevant content that links back to that page. They generally include content that targets high-volume keywords and attracts many users. The main advantage of a hub page is to create well-structured internal linking to improve your chances of ranking higher on SERPs.
.htaccess File	The .htaccess file is a website file that controls the configuration of your website. On servers that run Apache (web server software), the .htaccess file enables you to make changes to your site’s configuration without editing server configuration files.
Hijacking	Hijacking in the SEO context is a negative SEO technique. It means duplicating the content of a domain in another domain with more authority. When it happens, Google’s algorithm gives more preference to a page with higher authority. If someone hijacks your site by copying the content and transferring it to a domain with more authority, the domain with original content may be penalized.
Headings	Headings can help users and search engines read and understand the text. It also defines which parts of your content are crucial and shows how they are interconnected.
Hreflang Attributes	Hreflang is an HTML attribute to specify the language and geographical targeting of a web page. If you have several versions of the same page in different languages, you can use the hreflang tag to inform search engines about such variations. Google uses an attribute to serve regional or language URLs in its search results based on searchers’ country and language preferences.
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Image Sitemap	Through image sitemaps, Google receives metadata regarding images contained on a website. Using Google image extensions in sitemaps, you can provide search engines with additional information about images on the website. It can help Google see images if not found through crawling.
Image Title	The image title is simply the name of your image. It allows users and search engines to discover what is in the picture. Image title can be visually rendered on the web page, seen as tooltips, and helpful in enhancing user experience. It is shown to users if they touch, clicks, or hover over the image.
Inbound Link	An inbound link is a link coming from the other site to your website. They are also known as backlinks because they refer back to your site. Websites that receive inbound links from authoritative sites are likely to rank higher in search engines. Like World Wide Web, your internal linking structure helps search engines understand the reason behind its existence.
Internal Linking	Internal links are hyperlinks that point to web pages on the same domain. Both your users and search engines use links to navigate content on your website. Internal linking allows Google to find, index, and understand all pages on your site. If used strategically, these links can send page authority to important pages. This means it is key for any site to rank higher on SERPs.
Indexability	Indexability refers to the search engine’s ability to analyze and add a page to its index. Although Google could crawl a website, it may not necessarily be able to index all pages, often due to indexability issues. Indexability simply means allowing search engines to show your site’s pages in the search results. If your site is indexable and crawlable, you can generate better leads and revenue for your business.
Infographic	Infographic has become a crucial form of visual communication that includes graphics showing data, copy, or both. It is an excellent combination of images and text, which helps you explain a complex message creatively and easily to a target audience. Infographics, when combined with other elements can facilitate higher ranking in search engines.
Index	The index is the other name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes comprise the information on all websites that Google was able to find. It includes not just the URLs, but all content, including images, text, videos, and everything within HTML code. This ultimately determines the value of search terms and keywords.
International SEO	International SEO refers to optimizing your website so that search engines can determine which countries you wish to target and which languages you use for business. It is the process of growing the website’s presence in international markets. It can help you reach users in specific countries and increase your brand awareness.
Inverse Document Frequency (IDF)	TF-IDF stands for Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency, which is a way of identifying how important a term is to a particular document in a collection of documents. Search engines typically use different variants of the TF-IDF algorithm as a part of their ranking mechanism. It evaluates the importance of a keyword phrase by comparing its frequency in a large set of documents.
Indexed Page	Indexed pages of a website are the pages visited and analyzed by a search engine. Pages are generally indexed either because the website owner asked the search engine to index web pages or through the discovery of web pages by a search engine bot. They are often found by search crawlers and deemed to have adequate quality for relevant search phrases. Indexed pages will eventually appear in search results and bring organic traffic to your site.
Information Retrieval	Information retrieval simply means gathering information – more precisely, information recovery. The information is gathered from a large unstructured database and selected that matches the request of a user. It is one of the key tasks of a search engine and therefore, the collected data is evaluated, saved, and recovered.
Information Architecture	Information architecture is the process of organizing and labeling content on websites to support usability and findability. It is a crucial aspect of achieving high organic SEO rankings. Organizing your site’s data and content can drive higher organic traffic and site conversions. It also has a substantial impact on website content structure and navigation.
IP Address	IP address stands for Internet Protocol Address, which can be used to identify computers and other devices and connect them to a network. It underpins communication on the web and is used to access websites, stream media, play games, and more. Owing an IP address makes it easy to set up a private SSL certificate and provides a better experience.
Image Filename	Just like alt text you use to describe an image, Google will read the filename of the image to understand it. Generally, it is the same name as the image file that lives on your computer before you upload it. A user will know about a photo without opening the file, which eventually improves the user experience.
Impression	Impression refers to the number of times a given page is displayed in organic or paid search results. The impression is counted every time the page shows in the search results when a user enters a given search query. The URL of the link registers the impression whenever the user opens a page in Google.
Intrusive Interstitials	An intrusive interstitial is a web page pop-up that makes it difficult for the mobile user to access the content they want. It is a form of intrusive marketing that can drive higher click-through rates but can annoy users to a large extent. Google is cracking down on intrusive interstitials when page experience gets affected but there are still instances where they are accepted.
Informational Query	It is a search where the users’ main goal is to receive answers to a certain query or find a relevant piece of information. The query is informational if there is an intent to find data, facts, or knowledge. Marketers should target informational search queries if they want to gain organic search traffic.
Informational Keywords	Informational keywords for SEO are used when an online searcher is seeking more information on a particular subject. Whether it is a product, service, guide, or whatever else, the user intent is to learn and find accurate information about the topic they are looking for. This can be valuable for brands looking to attract prospects and build their credibility.
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JavaScript SEO	JavaScript SEO is a technical search engine optimization technique that makes JavaScript-heavy websites easier to crawl, index, and search-friendly. The goal is to make these websites easy to navigate and rank higher in search engines. It is focused on optimizing content incorporated via JavaScript for crawling, rendering, and indexing by search engines.
JS Rendering	JavaScript utilizes a document object model (DOM) to manipulate related components. In this, rendering refers to showing the output in the browser. There are two types of rendering involved, client-side and server-side rendering. The purpose is to display a particular HTML code inside the specified HTML elements for a better user experience.
jQuery	jQuery is a feature-rich and open-source JavaScript library that simplifies communication between HTML and CSS documents. It streamlines HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and AJAX interactions for rapid web development and SEO-friendly pages. JavaScript and jQuery usage both can have serious impact on SEO performance on the site.
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Keyword	Keywords in the SEO context are words and phrases that users enter into search engines to find information on a specific topic. They are used in web page content as a way of appearing on top of search results for the same keyword. Keywords are the foundation of SEO and PPC marketing campaigns.
Keyword Cannibalization	Keyword cannibalization means you have multiple pages on a site that target the same or similar keywords and eventually harm the website’s organic performance. One of the two pages affects the other’s capability to rank higher, and therefore, neither page will perform well.
Keyword Research	Keyword research is the process of finding words and phrases your target audience is using to search for websites and answers to queries on search engines. You research popular search terms and incorporate them strategically into your content to let your site rank higher on SERPs. It is a fundamental approach in SEO that helps you understand customers’ needs, your competitive landscape, and how to form a content strategy.
Keyword Density	Keyword density tells you how frequently a keyword is used in a text in relation to the total word count. For instance, if you have a text that is 100 words and 5 of those are your main key phrase, your keyword density is 5%. It is important for SEO because Google tries to match users’ search queries to the best-fit web pages.
Keyword Ranking Performance	Keyword performance metric allows your keyword rankings to understand how effective your SEO campaign is at driving organic traffic to your site. It is a key indicator that provides useful information about your potential to improve on existing rankings or rank on new keywords.
Keyword Stuffing	Keyword stuffing is the practice of saturating the page with keywords to increase the page’s rankings on SERPs. Although it doesn’t work anymore (considered a black-hat SEO technique), many companies accidentally involve in it during the beginning of SEO campaign. It can result in search engine penalties, loss of users, and brand damage.
Keyword Stemming	Google has used keyword stemming in its algorithm for years. It refers to Google’s ability to understand various forms of a specific search query. These variations come in the form of prefixes or suffixes that can be added to the root keyword. Search engines’ ability to understand user intent and context is a technology that has been enhanced over years.
Keyword Categorization	It is the process of classifying and grouping keywords depending on user intent and context at the time of the query. Keyword categorization can help with identifying keywords that users ask at different stages of buying. This is usually applied on landing pages that were meant to drive higher conversion.
Keyword Competition	Keyword competition is the way to measure how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword. The competition for a keyword may vary depending on how popular the keyword is and the industry competition. Keyword competition analysis aims to determine how you can improve your keyword usage to reach a target audience.
Keyword Rankings	Keyword rankings in SEO context refer to a page’s specific place on search engine result pages for a particular search query. When a user enters search terms into Google that relate to a page’s subject matter, whichever place your URL is shown is called keyword ranking. One web page can rank for many relevant search keywords and phrases.
Keyword Research Tool	A keyword research tool helps you navigate topic ideas that people are looking for on search engines. This helps you find content ideas, plan your content strategy, and place long-tail keywords where your competitors are appearing on the top. Popular keyword research tools include SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, etc.
Knowledge Panel	A knowledge panel encompasses information that Google considers as relevant and fact, established by an algorithm. It takes the data gathered by GoogleBot, with trusted sources, and derives facts that appear on SERPs. On a desktop, knowledge panels are easy to navigate. They are on the right side where you will see a small ‘share’ icon.
Keyword Prominence	Keyword prominence is the best practice of SEO that involves using a page’s target keyword early to give a strong signal to Google about what the page should rank for. You should always use important keyword phrases at the beginning of your title, description, H1, and H2 tags. The closer keyword appears at the beginning of the text and specific HTML elements, the more prominent it becomes for SEO relevancy signal to the web page.
Keyword Optimization	The purpose of keyword optimization is to ensure that chosen keywords are valuable to drive traffic to your site and increase rankings. It is all about researching, analyzing, and selecting the best set of keywords to target for a website. SEO keyword optimization allows your site to rank for queries that are relevant to your products and services.
KPI	Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is measurable values used to analyze how successful an organization is at reaching a target. SEO KPIs are metrics related to various elements of search engine marketing. These metrics provide you with information about your search rankings, the audience you’re reaching, and the way SEO impacts your website. You can find KPIs for SEO using a tool like Google Analytics or Ahrefs.
Keyword Frequency	In the SEO context, keyword frequency refers to the number of times a specific keyword or key phrase appears on a given web page. It is crucial to limit how many times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page to avoid spam or getting flagged in Google for keyword stuffing.
Keyword Funnel	The keyword funnel is to monitor the relationship between keywords used by search engine users. It is about using the keyword searches by users and categorizing them into stages of the purchase journey. Funnels help categorize keywords based on popular search terms as a component of the keyword research technique.
Keyword Analysis	A keyword analysis is a process of evaluating search terms to determine which keywords are ideal for an SEO campaign. Factors applied to assist with keyword analysis include a level of SERP competition, monthly search volume, and conversion potential. Popular keyword analysis tools include Semrush, Ahrefs, Long Tail Pro, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ubersuggest, etc.
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Landing Page	A landing page is any web page where a user can land, but in the marketing sphere, it’s a standalone page, different from the homepage or any web page, which serves a single and focused purpose. It allows you to make a trade, exchange information, give some offers, and in return, for offering contact details. It is a crucial part of an SEO campaign, which aims to increase total search traffic within your industry.
Link Acquisition	Link acquisition is a fundamental aspect to achieve success in organic search. Alongside good content and a technical approach to SEO, obtaining links from authoritative sources drive traffic and boost rankings, which eventually makes your site appear on top in SERPs.
Link Bait	Link bait is offering quality content on your website so that other websites will naturally link to it without even asking. Linkable content can be anything, ranging from depth research project to a newsworthy piece, tutorial, or popular video. When done right, it makes it easier to earn authority links at scale and can have a huge impact on organic search visibility.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)	Latent Semantic Indexing, also known as latent semantic analysis, is a practice that can classify and retrieve information on specific key terms and concepts using singular value decomposition (SVD). LSI keywords are related terms that search engines use to thoroughly understand the content of a web page. When you incorporate LSI keywords in your content, it makes it easy for Google to index your content and give your site enhanced visibility.
Link Buying	Buying links simply means paying for a link back to your site from another website. The aim is to purchase backlinks to increase site rankings within search engines. However, buying backlinks in bulk from disreputable sources is considered a black hat SEO technique, a way of misleading Google to rank your site higher than it deserves.
Link Diversity	Link diversity is a technique of gaining inbound links from different types of pages, for instance, articles, directories, and new links. It also means obtaining links from a variety of domains like .edu, .net, .com, and more. This can keep a website’s backlink patterns within a normal range so they don’t appear to be spammy.
Link Authority	Link authority refers to a ranking power a link carries over. In SEO context, it is simply importance or weight given to a web page relative to a given search query. Google uses many factors when evaluating the authority of a page.
Link Exchange	A link exchange is two or more websites linking out to each other based on a mutual agreement. In simple words, each site agreed to receive backlinks from one another. It is an ideal backlink strategy to increase search engine rankings or traffic. It makes the process of gaining quality backlinks easier and passes on the benefits to each party.
Link Farm	A link farm is a website or group of websites designed for the sole purpose of boosting another website’s PageRank by linking the site to many pages. Operating link farms is highly prohibited by search engines’ webmaster guidelines. It is considered a black-hat SEO technique because the content on a website linking to one another is often not related and of low quality.
Link Hoarding	Link hoarding is a practice used by some websites to keep one’s link popularity by not linking out to others. Some sites also provide a clear outbound link by embedding in JavaScript or using a redirect that doesn’t link directly to another website. It is considered disreputable because, with the PageRank algorithm, it can hurt a website to not link more than it would hurt to include links.
Link Reclamation	Link reclamation is the process of figuring out broken or removed links to your site and fixing and replacing them with updated URLs. It is a crucial part of getting the most out of your link profile and maintaining good rankings. It preserves link juice, maintains a positive user experience, and builds new backlinks.
Link Rot	Link rot refers to the natural disappearance of links, which often happens when publishers update a website. It also means a gradual reduction of link power that every link undergoes. It happens naturally over time because of the following reasons: • Pages get moved, renamed, or deleted during site maintenance • Website cease to exist because their owners start other businesses • Censored content is removed • Hackers corrupt the content or redirect URLs to other places
Link Relevancy	Link relevancy means whether or not a hyperlink comes back to your website from another site that should make sense for your business. It is an indicator Google uses both for individual links and the entire backlink profile. The whole point of a natural link is showing your content, website or product is good enough to share on their website.
Link Text	Link text is the text linked with a link target. This can be a word, character, or words with several sentences. The clickable link text is further associated with a URL and described as a hyperlink. In the SEO context, the use of link text plays a crucial role in link building.
Link Velocity	Link velocity refers to the speed at which backlinks to your domain or website are added over a specific period of time. It is measured in the number of new links obtained per month. High link velocity doesn’t guarantee your top spot on SERPs, but still, it plays an important role in SEO, especially if you focus on building high-quality links.
Local SEO	Local SEO is a technique of optimizing a website to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local searches. Common tasks include finding local keywords, optimizing Google My Business profile, and building NAP citations. On Google, it means helping your business listing in Local Pack and ranking higher in response to relevant search queries.
Local Citation	A local citation is any mention of your business name, phone number, and address online. It appears in many places, including business directories, social networks, or anywhere users might be looking for information about local businesses. Citations can help people navigate local businesses and also affect search engine rankings.
Long Tail Keywords	Long tail keywords are specific search queries that tend to have relatively low search volumes and competition levels. They are likely to be longer in length than other keyword types and therefore, have a higher conversion rate. Although few people search for individual long-tail queries, when you add them together, long tails create a large chunk of all Google searches.
Link Equity	Link equity or link juice is referred to as a search engine factor to pass value and authority from one page to another. It depends on various factors, including topical relevance, linking page authority, HTTP status, and more. It is important because it’s connected to PageRank, the more link equity a page receives, the higher its chances of ranking.
Link Profile	A link profile is an assessment of all backlinks from a variety of high-authority sites. Creating the right link profile includes placing links on social networks, review sites, blogs and forums, and news services. It indicates to search engines that you’re earning your links and authority.
Lead Generation	Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects and converting them into someone who has an interest in your company’s products and services. Lead generation strategies include blogging, email marketing, networking, social media marketing, website landing pages, etc. This can help target the right consumers, increase awareness, and build a larger community.
Link Scheme	A link scheme is a practice to manipulate search engines and website ranking through unnatural links. This involves any behavior that manipulates PageRank or a site’s ranking in SERPs and violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If links are considered unnatural or intended to manipulate search engine rankings, it can be problematic and may result in a penalty.
Link Popularity	Link popularity refers to the number of backlinks pointing to a website. It is recognized by the authority level of a site giving the link and its relevance to the website it’s pointing to. It is considered a crucial factor for influencing page rank. The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the more relevant the site is.
Link Spam	Link spam is a technique of posting out-of-context links on discussion forums, websites, blog comments, and any other online platform that displays user comments. Also known as comment spam, blog spam, or wiki spam, link spammers typically don’t leave comments of any value alongside their links. The purpose is to increase the external links and their position on SERPs.
Local Business Schema	Local business schema is a structured data markup code that can be added to your business site to make it easier for Google to identify what type of company you are and the products/or services you offer. It was designed by search engines to better comprehend and display data using common groups of tags. It can help optimize your website for local SEO and make your content rank higher in SERPs.
Local Pack	Local pack, also known as Map Pack, Google-3 Pack, and Snack Pack, is a SERP feature that shows at the top of SERPs when a user makes a search with local intent. It encompasses a map and three local business listings relevant to the search. Businesses are listed alongside their geographical location, contact info, hours, and other key information.
Local Search Marketing	Local search marketing, often called local SEO, is a type of digital marketing technique that allows businesses to show up in the local results when their target customers go online and search for their offerings. It is all about appearing on top in the local pack, Google Maps, and in localized standard organic results.
Log File Analysis	Log file analysis is crucial for technical SEO to see how exactly Googlebot and other web crawlers interact with your website. A log file provides valuable insights that can improve your SEO strategy and resolve problems related to the crawling and indexing of a web page. It uses logs or records from web servers to evaluate the crawling behavior of search engines and determine potential opportunities for SEO.
Lead Magnet	A lead magnet is an effective source for lead generation, encouraging site visitors to exchange information, such as their contact number for access. This can be any piece of content like a whitepaper, eBook, or newsletter. It is a type of content that brings awareness but also provides valuable information that helps customers engage and find interest in your product/ or service. Or, it can be a free product sample, demo, trial subscription, or other product/service-related incentive.
Link Burst	Link burst means gathering a large number of backlinks in a short period of time. It can be a red flag for the search engine because it may indicate that you are using a link farm or techniques that are resulting in link spam. As good backlinks usually take a long time, getting mass links in a short span means you are using manipulative SEO practices.
Link Stability	Link stability is when a web page remains for an extended period without any changes. Anything that could disrupt the link’s stability including swapping out on URL and making adjustments to anchor text. Also known as a durable URL, which is stable and could be updated with fresh content while continuing to rank for original keywords.
Link, NoFollow	A nofollow link or backlink doesn’t pass authority to the website it is linking to. These are links with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag that tells Google to ignore that link. As nofollow links do not pass PageRank, they don’t impact search engine rankings.
Log File	Your website’s log file is stored on your server and keeps the information about the performed requests. Every time a user or bot visits a web page, an entry is recorded in your log file for all structures. The log shows how exactly users, search engines, and other crawlers are interacting with your website.
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Meta Description	A meta description is an HTML element that gives a brief summary of a web page. It is displayed as a part of a search snippet in the search engine results page (SERP) intended to provide the user with an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to a search query. It can influence click-through rate (CTR) and overall SEO efforts.
Meta Keywords	Meta keywords are specific kind of meta tag that shows in the HTML code of a web page and tell search engines the overall context of a page. These are distinguished from regular keywords because they are found in the source code of your web page and are not visible to visitors.
Meta Tags	Meta tags are snippets of code that tell Google all the crucial information about your web page, such as how they should display it in search results. Every web page certainly has meta tags, but they are only visible in the HTML code. It can potentially help your SEO rankings and increase your traffic by letting Google know who you are and what you offer.
Meta Refresh Redirect	A meta refresh redirect is a client-side redirect. Unlike 301 and 302 redirects that occur on the web server, it tells the web browser to visit a different web page after a specified time span. Although Google claims to treat meta refresh redirects like any other redirect, they are not suggested to use besides certain cases, including: • When you cannot use a .htaccess file • When you want to redirect only a single file in a directory with many files
Meta Robots Tag	A robot meta tag is an HTML snippet that instructs search engine robots how to crawl or index web page content. While robots.txt file directives give bots suggestions on how to crawl web pages, robot meta directives provide companies with information on what they can and cannot do on a certain page. It allows you to control crawling, indexing, and how information is displayed in the search results.
Manual Action	Manual action is a penalty imposed by Google for not adhering to webmaster guidelines. There are two types of manual actions, site-wide and partial. In site-wide manual action, the entire website is affected by Google penalty and all keywords get lower positions. In case of partial actions, Google penalizes only some pages and as a result, the visibility of certain keywords suddenly declines.
Mirror Site	A mirror is a copy of a website hosted on the other server. It may utilize the same URL as the primary one, with a subdomain or a completely different domain. It is often used to distribute the traffic load across various web servers and locate servers in proximity to users. If a subdomain or different domain is used for the same content, canonical tags should be used so that it won’t be considered duplicate content.
Mobile-first Indexing	Mobile-first indexing means Google continuously uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. If you monitor crawl bot traffic to your website, you may notice an uptrend in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot and caches versions of pages will be the mobile version of the page. With mobile growing to encompass the bulk search traffic, Google decided to bring a change.
Machine Learning	Machine learning (ML) is the usage of computer algorithms and statistical approaches to help computers learn and make decisions from data, without human supervision. Computer programs can obtain details within a massive volume of data much faster and with high accuracy than human users can. Google RankBrain ML process interprets queries and delivers personalized search results, making SEO smarter, not harder.
Minification	Minification is the practice of shortening source code to eliminate unnecessary characters, empty spaces, delimiters, comments, long-name variables, and other related elements. In the SEO context, it is applied to languages used for web development such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is crucial to improve site speed and search robot crawlability, which in turn increases user satisfaction.
Meta Charset	Meta charset determines how text is transmitted and stored. <meta charset=”utf-8″> tells the browser to use utf-8 character encoding when translating machine code into human-readable form or text to be displayed in the browser. If you implement the charset properly, it can help prevent a high bounce rate and boost your SEO efforts.
Metasearch Engine	A metasearch engine focuses on the query user has entered and gather relevant results from multiple search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. They aggregate the best results for users so they can narrow down key information. The search engine sort the list of results that came, by subject or relevance.
Meta Title	A meta title, also known as a title tag, refers to the text shown on search engine result pages and browser tabs to indicate the topic of a web page. Crafting interactive meta titles is crucial to boost your SEO efforts and rank higher in organic search. Often it is mistakenly categorized as a meta tag, however, that’s not correct because it is a unique HTML element. The meta title is an important element for Google to determine the relevance of a website for a particular search query.
Meta Viewport	The viewport is the visible area of a web page for users. It is located on the <head> tag of the HTML, which you can see from your device or monitor. Meta viewport tag ensures a site display well on all devices and plays a significant role in creating responsive and mobile-friendly sites. Moreover, Google recommends including a meta viewport in the head of the document to outline basic SEO guidelines.
Metric	Metric is a way to measure activity and SEO performance to review the success of an SEO campaign. SEO metrics indicators can help you understand whether your SEO is gaining attention. Worth-tracking metrics include organic traffic, keyword rankings, search visibility, indexed pages, organic conversions, core web vitals, etc.
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Natural Link	A natural link is any link that occurs on the web organically without any effort of generating them from the site itself. If a business gains a link to its website from an external entity that used it organically because it holds a significant value, then it is called a natural link. Properties of natural links SEO are as follows: • They don’t have tracking parameters • They don’t redirect users through any monetization tools or JavaScript • They don’t exist in paid or sponsored content • They exist as a reference or source of useful information within the content
Negative SEO	Negative SEO also sometimes called black hat SEO, which involves the use of any malicious practice on your site to tarnish your reputation with Google and steal search engine rankings for keywords used on competitors’ sites. It usually happens when another company or individual has a strong desire to push you out of the rankings for a specific keyword.
Navigational Query	A navigational query is an internet search with the aim of finding a specific web page or website. Most often, navigational queries include brand-specific terms, such as Ahrefs, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, etc. It helps users to find a particular web page or URL address from Google.
Noindex Tag	A noindex tag is an HTML tag (<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>) used to control the way bots treat a given page and stop them from indexing that page. When a search engine crawls a page with a noindex tag, it won’t index it. You should use the noindex tag to prevent pages from being indexed by Google. As a result, ranking signals of that page will not be passed to the pages it links to.
Noopener	The term “noopener” refers to “rel=noopener” HTML attribute that’s added to a set of links to open in a new browser tab for security reasons. The aim of this attribute is to give an additional level of protection for site visitors, particularly by preventing a third-party site from taking control over the browser tab via a window object.
Noreferrer	The rel=”noreferrer” tag is an HTML attribute that can be added to a link tag (<a>). It prevents passing the referring information to a target site by removing the referral info from the HTTP header. This means Google analytics traffic coming from links having rel=”noreferrer” attribute will show as direct traffic instead of referral.
Not Provided	In Google Analytics, when you are shown “not provided” instead of queries that led searches to your site, this means Google covers organic keywords data to protect the privacy of searchers. Back in 2011, Google made its search more secure by hiding its personalized search results. As a result, you will see not provided in the report if you try to find out keywords.
Niche	Niche SEO is a specific portion of the market or target audience that you focus on building and promoting your website. These niches fall into two categories: white (gains traffic from many sources) and gray (primarily depends on SEO).
Noarchive Tag	Noachive tag tells Google not to share a cached copy of your page. When a website owner creates a web page, it naturally keeps all options enabled. However, for a well-optimized website, you need to establish certain limitations for what a web page can do. For this, you need a noarchive tag, it will communicate with Google to not cache a particular page.
Nofollow Attribute	The nofollow link attribute refers to links having a “nofollow” value in their rel attribute. The nofollow value for the rel link is used to tell search engines that they shouldn’t follow these links and thus, shouldn’t pass any link authority to the link target. It should be used when a link hasn’t occurred naturally or isn’t being earned through genuine interest.
Nosnippet Tag	The nosnippet tag is a directive provided to search engine crawlers like Google to prevent them from showing the text snippet of content, image, or video preview in SERPs. In other words, if a website has a nosnippet tag written in the code of a page, then a snippet of that page will not be available in SERP, and the page will not be cached by a search engine bot.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)	Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a change in Google’s algorithm that may affect SEO. It focuses on understanding the content of Google searches, not only selected keywords. Google’s latest NLP algorithm enables a deep understanding of search queries in a way that humans would naturally. NLP techniques analyze both query and content in its index.
Newsjacking	Newsjacking is when you produce content that refers to breaking news and relevant, trending stories, allowing you to drive publicity and media attention for your brand. It involves jumping on a trending topic and using that coverage to capture a more targeted audience. This content can include any form, such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, videos, custom graphics, and more.
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On-page SEO	On-page SEO, also sometimes called on-site SEO, is the practice of optimizing parts of your web page so that they rank on top of SERPs and get more organic traffic. This involves updating on-page content, title tags, internal links, and more. It covers anything you could do on a web page or internally to boost your rankings.
Off-page SEO	Off-page SEO involves techniques applied outside of a website to improve its rankings. These strategies may include link building, social media marketing, guest posting, and more. The goal is to get search engines to see your site as trustworthy and authoritative as possible.
Organic Search Results	Organic search results, also called natural search, refer to unpaid listings that appear on SERP. These results are based on factors such as relevance to the users’ search query, quality SEO efforts, incoming links, and domain authority. It doesn’t contain ads and differs from paid search results – designed to boost the site’s SERP position without paying for unscrupulous practices.
Organic Traffic	Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors reaching your website by unpaid search results. It is a major traffic source that most inbound marketers use to generate qualified traffic to their sites. It is attained from site appearance in the results of a search that users do on search engines like Google. The best way to increase organic traffic is to publish quality content and redefine your SEO strategy.
Open Graph Meta Tags	Open graph meta tags are considered snippets of code that control how URLs are shown when shared on social media. They are a vital aspect of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and are used by other social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Twitter. You can locate them in the <head> section of a web page. Any tags with og: before a property name are called Open Graph tags.
Orphan Page	Orphan pages are those that are difficult to discover by search engines because they have no internal links from elsewhere on your site. These URLs are likely to fall through the cracks as search engine crawlers can only find pages from the sitemap file or external backlinks, and users can only navigate the page if they know the URL.
Outbound Link	Links from your website to another site are called outbound links. These are often used within the content to add more context and to link a reader to another source that will give more importance to the topic. They are a vital part of writing good content naturally and adding depth to your subject.

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Query	Queries are related to users those who are looking for something over the web. What users write/enter to search for anything on Google or other search engines is called a query. This is something you cannot predict and therefore, you have to capture that query using the relevant keyword to master SEO efforts.
Quality Content	Quality content is a subjective matter. Some people would like a beginner-level summary while others may want more depth and expert insights. Many people make a query intend to locate information in a quick and easy format. So, make sure to craft quality content that is useful, organized, and simplified for both users and search engines.
Quality Link	Quality links are those that come from a high-quality website. Backlinks are the backbone of a successful SEO strategy. They are crucial for driving organic traffic and increasing your site’s authority. Your site needs to be well-optimized and provide useful information to those sites that share the same values as you to rank higher in SERP.
Quality Deserves Diversity (QDD)	Quality Deserves Diversity (QDD) is one of Google’s ranking algorithms that aim to display relevant results related to specific queries but in a broad spectrum. It provides a varied set of results that fulfill different needs while understanding user behavior and search patterns. QDD allows Google to provide a more diverse range of results even when search intent is not evident.
Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)	Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) is a search engine algorithm designed to reward websites with fresh and relevant content and penalize sites that haven’t been updated on regular basis. By using QDF Google can identify topics and search requests where a user has a desire for new content, to position up-to-date information on search results.
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RankBrain	RankBrain is Google’s machine learning (ML) algorithm designed to sort search results. It is a system by which Google comprehends the user intent of a search query. Depending on the keyword, RankBrain will increase or decrease the importance of backlinks, content length, content freshness, domain authority, and more.
Reciprocal Links	Reciprocal links are all about mutual links that are exchanged between two site owners, typically within a short period of time. In other words, you’re getting links from other people in exchange for linking back to their pages. It derives from the content you’re creating for your own site or guest posts you might be writing on other websites’ pages.
Resource Page Link Building	Resource page link building is where you get backlinks from web pages that collect and link out to other useful industry resources. For instance, there is a food blog about Olives that might have a resource page dedicated to Olive recipes. It is simply the process of getting your site included on the page as one of the resources. It is an effective strategy to build backlinks by getting links from resource pages.
Rich Snippet	Rich snippets are more visually appealing search results with additional valuable information displayed along with the title, description, and URL. The extra data is derived from structured data on the page. Common rich snippets include reviews, events, and recipes. They are more attractive than normal search results, which in turn leads to higher organic CTR.
Reconsideration Request	A reconsideration request is a request to have Google review your site after solving issues in a manual action or security problem notification. It is vital to demonstrate your effort to determine all issues on your website or any results when you submit a reconsideration request. If a domain is affected by an algorithmic penalty, sending a reconsideration request will have no effect.
Related Searches	Related searches are search queries located at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) that are related to the keyword a user types into a search engine. They are generated based on Google’s algorithm to determine terms related to your search. Related searches help you find suitable keywords for the content and offer valuable insight into what customers are looking for.
Robots.txt	Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine spiders not to crawl certain pages or sections of a website. It is a part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that facilitate how robots crawl the web, index content, and serve content to users. Most search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo recognize and honor robots.txt requests, which in turn plays a significant role in SEO.
Rank	Ranking in SEO is referred to a website’s position in search engine result pages. A website ranking for a keyword may vary depending on the search engine. A domain may rank for a certain keyword at the top of Bing, but not even on the first page of Google. The same applied to all – every search engine uses its own method for calculating rankings and therefore, ranks websites differently.
Ranking Factor	The ranking factor refers to the criteria applied by search engines when evaluating web pages to compile rankings of their search results. Ranking factors can include the website’s content, user signals, technical implementation, backlink profile, or any other features that Google considers relevant. Ranking factors are signals that search engines use to sort search results according to the quality and relevance of a specific query.
Redirect	Redirect is a way to send users and bots to URLs other than the one they requested. It tells search engines where content has moved and whether the move is permanent or temporary. This affects how pages appear in the search results. If you don’t want visitors to get hit with a “page not found” warning, a redirect can help solve this problem by sending visitors to the content’s new location.
Referrer	Referrers are links that drive traffic to other websites, allowing people to move around the web. A referrer site is simply a platform that a person was at before they visited your page. It is an optional field that is transmitted via the HTTP header when a web page is requested from a server. It makes it possible to recognize referring websites and trace a customer journey from one website to another.
Relevance	Relevance is one of the important pillars of SEO that will increase brand opportunities and attract more organic traffic over time. The relevance of the linking page or site impacts how valuable a link might be considered. Relevance in SEO shows how well SERP aligns with searchers’ intent and provides a seamless experience.
Reputation Management	Reputation management in the SEO context uses search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve the way companies, products, services, people, and other entities are seen online. It starts with being familiar with what people are saying about your brand, taking charge of your actions, and working towards recovering the damage.
Responsive Website	The responsiveness of your website is a highly important factor in improving user experience and avoiding common SEO pitfalls that can affect search engine rankings. A responsive website is simply an approach to a web page creation that uses flexible layouts, flexible images, and cascading style media queries. The goal is to build websites that detect visitors’ screen sizes and change the layout, accordingly, be it on mobile devices or desktops.
Return on Investment (ROI)	Return on Investment (ROI) is a way to measure SEO performance from all your SEO activities. It is the relationship between what you spend on SEO and the results you obtain. You could achieve positive ROI if the revenue generated by your SEO strategy is higher than the cost. SEO isn’t a quick fix, though, and to measure SEO ROI, you can focus on a key performance indicator (KPI) to see significant results.
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Technical SEO	Technical SEO is all about improving the technical aspects of a website to boost the rankings of its pages in search engines. It refers to tactics used for creating and optimizing a website so that search engines can readily crawl, index, and render it. It is a part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving website components to obtain higher rankings.
Taxonomy SEO	Taxonomy SEO is the practice of organizing the structure of content to optimize and rank it higher for search engines. Optimization includes adding content such as text and images, updating SEO elements like Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions, and understanding how the site is crawled by search engine spiders.
Top-Level Domain (TLD)	A Top-Level Domain (TLD) is the domain segment that follows the last dot symbol in a domain name. It has the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. It serves as an instant notification to see what the domain is all about. Types of TLDs include: • Generic TLD (gTLD) • Country-Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLD) • Sponsored Top-Level Domains (sTLD) • Infrastructure Top-Level Domains • Test Top-Level domains (tTLD)
TF-IDF	TF-IDF stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency, which is a text analysis technique used by Google as a ranking factor. It represents how important a word or phrase is to a document in a corpus. When used for SEO, it helps you see beyond keywords and into relevant content that can reach your target audience. TF-IDF measures the importance of keyword phrases by comparing them to the frequency of the term in a large set of documents.
Thin Content	Thin content is a form of content that has little or no value to the user. Google considers them as doorway pages, low-quality affiliate pages, or simply pages with little or no content. Avoid producing similar content – non-original pages and pages with scraped and duplicate content. Also, Google doesn’t prefer pages stuffed with keywords either. Google has become smarter and has learned to differentiate between valuable and low-quality content, especially since the Panda update.
Title Tag	A title tag is a piece of HTML code that indicates the title of a web page, which shows in search engine results, social media posts, and browser tabs. It is ideal to optimize your title tags to improve your rankings on Google. Typically, it is best to keep it between 50-60 characters. It should be an accurate and concise description of the page’s content to tell Google what the page is all about.
Transactional Query	A transactional query is where someone is looking to purchase but hasn’t decided yet where to buy from. It indicates buyers’ intent and common words include “buy,” “purchase,” “order,” or “discount.” As a result, ranking for these terms is vital because it can capture market demand prior to purchase. Getting organic traffic from transactional keywords is a valuable one, especially for e-commerce.
TrustRank	TrustRank is an algorithm designed to distinguish between good and bad sites and help search engines rank pages. It determines trust signals to evaluate whether or not core ranking links and content are legitimate. In other words, Google ranks websites that they find authoritative, and they measure that trust using their algorithm TrustRank.
Time on Page	The time spent on a web page is determined as the time elapsed between when a user lands on the page and the moment they move to the next. The time on the page is measured when you click a link to proceed to another website. Average time on page is a web analytic statistic that measures the amount of time all website visitors spend on a particular page.
Traffic	Traffic in SEO is the number of visitors a website drives from search engine results pages (SERPs) as a result of SEO techniques. Organic traffic is also important due to its sustainability and if you reach the first page of search results organically, you don’t need to pay for search traffic. You will receive monthly traffic based on the popularity of the search queries you target. SEO traffic is important to gain more leads, customers, and sales from search engines.
Trust	Trust is one of the most crucial SEO ranking factors. Trust is built over time by things like owning an aged domain, updating the site, the site’s popularity, and other security factors. If your site ranks in each of these elements, it can help increase your rankings and leads. The best way to earn trustworthiness is to form reciprocal links, link out to other authoritative websites, and create useful content.
Traffic Rank	Traffic rank in the SEO context is the measure of website popularity. It shows how a website is performing in relation to other websites and provides a competitive analysis. This tool gives an overview of where pages rank in search engine result pages and how to improve their positioning. It is a ranking of a site as compared to other websites across the web in regard to the amount of organic traffic.
Transport Layer Security (TLS)	Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a more advanced and secure version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It is a security protocol used to establish secure and encrypted online communication between browsers and servers. TLS helps web developers to protect website users from data theft and fraud. This eventually improves user experience and has become an important ranking factor for search engines.
Top Heavy	Top Heavy is a page layout Google algorithm that is intended to downgrade websites showing too many ads above the fold. The update demoted websites with excessive ads at the top part of the page and those that made it difficult to navigate the original content on the page. The update also encourages websites to be more moderate and judicious with the ads they place on their pages, which makes the user experience better for searchers.
Thumbnail	The thumbnail is simply a preview page, which is a smaller-sized version of a large image. Google uses thumbnails in image search to display many pictures on a single page with little loading time. This gives search engine users an overview of search results. When clicking a thumbnail, the image is displayed alongside alternatives and links to the website where it was found. A high-quality preview image can help improve click-through rate and traffic on your website.
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Universal Search	Universal search is the ability of search engines to expand search results by combining results from different indexes like images, maps, videos, news, etc. into a single search, wherever relevant. Google introduced universal search in 2007 to better meet users’ search intents and make SERPs more user-friendly by offering a wide range of relevant search results.
Unnatural Links	Unnatural links are artificial links that intend to manipulate a page’s ranking. These can include purchased links created by spammers that are attached to your site and potentially link your site in a bad neighborhood over the internet. They violate Google’s guidelines, and a website can be penalized for them.
User-Generated Content (UGC)	User-Generated Content (UGC) is original, brand-focused content created by customers and published on social media or other channels. UGC comes in several forms, including videos, images, reviews, testimonials, or a podcast. It is used across all stages of buyers’ journeys to boost engagement and conversions. The customer-centric content can be used on social media and other channels, including email, checkout pages, or landing pages.
URL Rating (UR)	URL Rating (UR) is an SEO metric developed by Ahrefs that shows the strength of the page’s backlink profile. It is evaluated on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being strong. Both internal and external backlinks are taken into consideration when calculating URL ratings. This metric is correlated with Google ranking and measures the link profile quality. It is a page-level metric and shouldn’t be confused with Domain Rating (DR).
URL Slug	URL slug is a part of the URL that follows a slash (/) after the domain name or subfolder which refers to a unique page on a website. It should be easy to read because they play a crucial role in describing what is on a page to both search engines and visitors. It will come after the directory and before any additional parameters. While URL slug itself won’t directly impact rankings, it will influence visitors’ decision-making process for whether or not to click on your website. It is a part of the snippet shown in SERP and serves as an indicator to visitors if the page will have relevant content and provide what they are looking for.
UGC Link Attribute	UGC link attribute (rel=“UGC”) gives signals to Google that the link is placed in user-generated content. It was introduced in 2019 when Google changed the way how “nofollow” attribute works. Simultaneously, another link attribute was introduced: “rel=sponsored.” Both were designed to help Google understand how people are linking across the web. They give a signal to search engines that content was generated by website users and refers to comments, forums, and other places on a site where users can add content.
URL	A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a unique identifier used to locate a resource on the internet. It is referred to as a web address and consists of several parts, including protocol and domain name that inform a web browser how and where to retrieve a resource. URL protocols include HTTP and HTTPS for web resources, mail to for email addresses, FTP for files, and telnet for a session to access remote computers.
URL Parameter	URL parameters, also called query strings or URL query parameters are elements incorporated in your URLs to filter and organize content or track information on your website. Parameters are added at the end of the URL after the ‘?’ symbol and multiple parameters can be included when separated by the ‘&’ symbol. They are primarily used to specify and sort the content on a web page, but they are also used for traffic tracking. Here’s how URL parameters look like: https:/www.domain.com/url?variable=value&variable=value
Usability	Usability is a measure of how well a user in a specific context can use a product/design to achieve a defined goal effectively. It is all about people’s behavior after they visit your site, with the primary aim to increase the conversion rate. Therefore, it is important to enhance usability throughout the development process from wireframes to final deliverables to ensure maximum usability support.
User Agent	The user agent is an HTTP header field that is used to transfer more or less detailed information regarding the device making a network request. This is done via the HTTP header and the information can be used to deliver certain components only to those browsers that are capable of managing them. If you know what information Google’s crawlers use, you can configure your browser to send the same identifier, either via browser extension or Developer console.
User Experience (UX)	User Experience (UX) is a vital part of SEO to rank higher in organic search engine results. People discuss UX in terms of design, products, websites, and even staff. Concerning website, rich UX keeps people coming back for more and provide them with an enjoyable experience, which in turn increases conversions. SEO and UX work together to improve positive user signals, backlinks, page speed, and mobile-friendliness.
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Vertical Search	Vertical search includes all searches focused on one thing, such as a type of content, industry, or sub-industry. It is referred to as specialty or topical search and used to describe niche or specialty search engines that focus on a single industry vertical, type of content, or specific segment. By giving relevant results to people looking for a specific query, this type of search engine can offer an improved user experience.
Virtual Assistant	Virtual assistant, also called AI assistant, is an application program that understands natural language voice commands and completes tasks for the user. Popular virtual assistants include Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. They can be helpful because they use deep neural networks, machine learning, and other advancements in artificial intelligence.
Voice Search	Voice search leverages technology that allows users to conduct online searches using voice commands. It removes an extra layer of effort and works through an automatic speech recognition system to turn voice signals into text. Then, search engines use the text to deliver relevant search results. Natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can help better understand questions and commands given by the end user. Voice search is compatible with smartphones, smart speakers, and virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa.
Visibility	Visibility in the SEO context is an indicator of how much a website is visible in the organic search results when users enter queries into search engines. It is an index that allows marketers to analyze problems and identify the potential for optimization. SEO visibility is the amount of traffic a website receives from its ranking in organic search results.
Visibility Index	Visibility Index, also known as visibility score, is an SEO metric used to measure the visibility of a website in Google’s search engine rankings. It is an indicator based on the ranking of individual keywords used on the page. It is measured using two factors – the website’s rank and the number of times it appears in search results. Tools like SEMRush use visibility scores for specific keywords and help you compare those in a single metric with your competitors.
Video Optimization	Video optimization is the process of making SEO video indexed and ranking top in SERP for relevant keyword searches. Gaining rank with a video has plenty to do with the authority of your website, how video-focused it is, and how it ranks for video-related queries. It is all about creating video metadata that is relevant for people who are searching for and creating video content that drives traffic.
Viral Content	Viral content is online content that reaches a high level of awareness due to shares and exposure on many platforms, including social media, aggregators, news websites, email newsletters, and search engines. You can generate large amounts of brand awareness and traffic with a single piece of viral content. Viral content is relatively more economical than paid advertising because it generates a lot of traffic through social sharing.
Visits	Visits is a metric used in the SEO context to measure the total number of times a user navigates to a website. It is primarily used in relation to conversion rate to gauge the performance of an online store. It is an important metric to track as it provides valuable insights into the performance of the website and helps marketers understand how many people are visiting their site.
Vanity URL	A vanity URL is a unique web address that is intended for marketing purposes. Although they look similar to domain URLs, the main difference is domain URL is your main URL, and a vanity URL is the link you want visitors to see. It could also be a sub-domain that uses 301 Redirect to make it easier for users to reach there. A vanity URL can include any content you want, such as keywords, product names, calls to action, and more.
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X-Robots-Tag	X-Robots-Tag is an optional component of the HTTP response header of the URL. It is an alternative way to control how search engines crawl and index your web pages. Unlike robots meta tags, X-Robots-Tags are used in HTTP protocol response headers and can be used for non-HTML files like images, text files, PDFs, etc.
XML	XML stands for Extensive Markup Language and provides rules to define any form of data. It is a flexible way to create information formats and electronically share structured data via the public internet as well as corporate networks. This markup language is based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) for defining markup languages. Its primary function is to create formats for data used to encode information for documents, database records, transactions, and other types of data.
XML Sitemap	An XML sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website, making sure Google can find and crawl them all. It also helps search engines understand your site structure. An XML sitemap provides a standardized way to list posts and pages to make them discoverable for search engines. Having one certainly increases your chances of being crawled and indexed, particularly if your navigation or general internal linking strategy doesn’t link to all pages.
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YMYL Pages	YMYL stands for “Your Money Your Life,” referred to websites that sell products/ or services and information that can impact users’ happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. The term ‘YMYL’ comes from Google’s guidelines for quality evaluators, which aims to educate AI-based algorithms and improve the quality of search results. Examples of YMYL pages include news and current events, finance, shopping, health and safety, groups of people, etc. YMYL pages are different from any content because they can potentially harm human well-being.
Yahoo	Yahoo is a web services provider that offers both a search engine and a directory of World Wide Web pages organized in a hierarchy of topic categories. While this web portal started as a web directory, it soon added other services like finance, news, and email. Yahoo search is a competitor to sites such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Yahoo account holders can access other web-based services, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports. It also provides weather forecasts, online news, and horoscopes.
Yandex	Yandex is a Russian tech company renowned for creating the Yandex search engine. It offers different types of products and services, including online advertising, email services via Yandex.Mail, self-driving cars, music streaming, data management, etc. Founded in 1997 by Arkady Volozh (current CEO), Arkady Borkovsky, and Ilya Segalovich that functions mostly like other popular search engines.
Yoast SEO	Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin designed to help Webmasters optimize their WordPress websites for search engines. It can optimize your site’s content and keywords to boost its rankings on search engines. Key features include post and page optimization, Google preview, readability, social cards, focus keyphrase, internal linking, and more.
YouTube SEO	YouTube SEO is a strategy to optimize channels and videos to enhance placement in search results. It is all about ranking your videos at the top of organic results. YouTube is a popular video platform on the internet and is also considered one of the largest search engines. It adopts the same search intelligence as a search engine and serves the same purpose: offering the best search experience to users.
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Zero-Click Searches	Zero-click searches are queries in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yandex that don’t send you to a third-party website from organic search results. It occurs when SERP displays the answer to a user’s query and that doesn’t lead to a click. It is also referred to as Quick Answers, Knowledge Boxes, Featured Snippets, or Top Stories (news).
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301 Redirect	301 is an HTTP code sent by a web server to a browser. It signals a permanent redirect from one URL to another, which means all users requesting an old URL will automatically reach a new URL. It is commonly used when a page has been permanently moved or removed from the site.
302 Redirect	302 redirect is a temporary redirect when a web page is available at a different location for a while, but the permanent location remains the same. This type of redirect doesn’t pass link juice and trustworthiness to a new but temporary URL.
303 Redirect	303 Redirects are simply called ‘see other’ redirects. It tells search engines that the requested resource exists on a different URL. It doesn’t pass the link value and should be avoided.
304 Redirect	304 Redirect tells search engines that the requested resource is not modified. Therefore, it will not be returned to the client and instead, the cache version should be used. They are also known as ‘Not Modified’ redirects.
305 Redirect	305 Redirect tells agents to locate resources using a proxy. The location field must be specified that contains the URL of the proxy. Many HTTP clients, such as Mozilla[4] and Internet Explorer don’t correctly handle responses with this status code, primarily for security reasons.
307 Redirect	307 redirects are temporary in nature and are mainly used by web developers. It means the requested URL has been moved temporarily and the user agent can use the original URL for future requests. The difference between the 302 and 307 status codes is that a user agent should request the new URL with the same HTTP request to request the original URL.
10x Content	10x Content is a common term used in content marketing to explain content that needs to be 10 times better than what’s already ranking for a given keyword or topic. 10x content applies to more than just articles, such as video content and landing page copy. It is a crucial concept for SEO because it encourages creators to focus on quality and reader experience. When you use a 10x content strategy, your goal goes beyond just ranking and focusing on creating content that’s better than what’s already available on the internet.
404 Error Not Found	404 Error not found is an HTTP status code which means the requested page can’t be found on the website server. It may indicate a flaw with a hosting service or your domain name system configuration settings. The dead-end page hinders search engines’ ability to crawl and index your website. Variations of error status codes include ‘404 Error,’ ‘404 Page Not Found,’ and ‘The requested URL was not found.’
410 Gone Error	410 Gone is an HTTP status code returned by a web server when the client requests a source that is no longer available at the requested address. It is a client-side error, meaning the error is on the client, not the server. 410 code indicates that the resource was in use but is no longer available and will not be at the requested address. For website visitors, a 410 error means the web page was deleted and is no different from a 404 error. The key difference between 404 Not Found and 401 Error is the server doesn’t know if the resource may be available again in the future.
2xx Status Code	2xx status code means that the request was successful, and the browser has received the expected information. This simply means the request was a success and has been received, understood, and accepted. A website owner should make sure all pages and resources like images, videos, etc., all return a 2xx status code. This means browsers can reach it successfully and your website visitors can see and use your website.
3xx Status Code	3xx redirection status code shows that you have been diverted and additional steps are required to complete the request. You shouldn’t be afraid to use the 3xx status code because redirects are a normal aspect of the internet. An effective redirect means the request was received, but the resource was located somewhere else.
4xx Error Code	4xx error is an HTTP status code that occurs when a page doesn’t exist or has limited access or rights. This type of error often happens due to misspelled URLs. As a result, the page cannot be found, or the site cannot be reached. If a page is not valid, the message cannot be exchanged between a web page and web server, and therefore, a 4xx error is shown.
5xx Server Error	5xx error is an HTML status code that shows on internet browsers when the server has failed to fulfill a request. It also tells a server that it has encountered an error or is not able to complete the request. The server response usually contains an explanation of the error situation and if it is temporary or permanent.

SEO Glossary

SEO

SMO

SMM

SEM

Search Volume

Structured Data

Scraped Content

Sitelinks

SSL Certificate

Social Signal

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

Secondary Keywords

Semantic Search

Schema.org

Search Console

Search Engine Penalty

SEO Copywriting

Site Architecture

Social Bookmarking

Split Testing

SEO Audit

Spamdexing

Search Engine

Search History

Social Media

Sneaky Redirects

Static Page / Static URL

Subheading

Splash Page

Supplementary Content

Supplementary Results

Structured Data Markup

Subdomain

Stop Word

Search History

Search Operators

Search Terms Report

Spider

Status Code

Shared Hosting

Sitemap

P

PPC

PageRank

Page Authority

Page Speed

Page Title

Pagination

Panda Algorithm

Penguin Algorithm

Pigeon Algorithm

Paid Links

Paid Search Results

Primary Keywords

Private Blog Network (PBN)

People Also Ask

Personalization

Pageview

Penalty

Pogo-Sticking

Press Release

Proximity (Local Search)

Persona

W

White Hat

Website Development

Website Design

Website Navigation

WordPress

Word Count

Web Page

Website

Webspam

Web Application

Web Analytics

Wireframe

A

Above the Fold

Algorithm