| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| .gov Links | Backlinks from government institutions’ websites (.gov). They are often seen as high-value links. |
| .htaccess File | A configuration file used by Apache-based web servers that controls the directory that it “lives” in—as well as all the subdirectories underneath that directory. |
| (not provided) | A term used in Google Analytics to describe keywords for which search data is not provided. |
| 2xx status codes | These are HTTP status codes that indicate that the client’s request was successfully received, understood, and accepted. |
| 4xx status codes | These are HTTP status codes that indicate an error that was likely caused by the client’s request. |
| 5xx status codes | These are HTTP status codes that indicate server errors. |
| Advanced search operators | These are special commands that extend the capabilities of regular text searches. They are used in SEO for a variety of reasons like diagnosing site issues, finding content opportunities, and more. |
| AJAX | Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a set of web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications. |
| Algorithm Change | Modifications to the computations and rules used by search engines to rank web pages in search engine results. |
| Algorithms | In the context of SEO, algorithms refer to the complex systems search engines use to retrieve data from their index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. |
| Alt Attribute OR Alt text | Also known as alt tags and alt descriptions, it’s the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. |
| Ambiguous intent | A user search query that has more than one possible intention. |
| AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) | An open-source HTML framework developed by Google that is used for creating fast-loading mobile web pages. |
| Amplification | In terms of SEO and marketing, amplification is the process of promoting content through a variety of channels in order to increase reach and visibility, and ideally, to drive more traffic and engagement. |
| Analytics | Data collected about the behavior of website visitors, which is then used to improve and optimize the website’s performance. |
| Anchor text | The visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In terms of SEO, anchor text can affect how a page ranks in search. |
| API (Application Programming Interface) | It is a set of rules and protocols for building and interacting with software applications. APIs can be used to access the functionality of other software components, such as library or service. |
| Artificial Intelligence (AI) | The simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Used in search engine algorithms to better understand content and user intent. |
| Async | Short for “asynchronous,” it refers to a type of JavaScript execution. An async script executes the script while the rest of the HTML document continues to load, helping to speed up content rendering. |
| Author Authority | A measurement of a specific author’s credibility and influence within a certain industry or topic. |
| Authority | A qualitative measure of a website’s credibility and relevance, often used by search engines to determine page ranking. |
| Auto-generated content | Content that’s been generated programmatically. Often, this can mean content that’s been produced using automation instead of human effort. |
| B2B | Stands for Business-to-Business. Refers to businesses that sell to other businesses. |
| B2C | Stands for Business-to-Consumer. Refers to businesses that sell directly to consumers. |
| Backlinks | These are links from one website to a page on another website. They are important for SEO because they signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. |
| Baidu | The leading search engine in China, which operates similarly to Google. |
| Bing | Microsoft’s search engine, it is the second most used search engine after Google. |
| Black Box | In SEO, this often refers to the algorithms search engines use to rank websites. They are considered a “black box” because the exact calculations and methodologies are not disclosed to the public. |
| Black hat | Black hat refers to aggressive SEO strategies that violate the search engine’s terms of service. These strategies aim to manipulate search engine algorithms to improve website ranking. |
| Blog | A regularly updated website or web page, often run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style. |
| Bots | Also known as crawlers or spiders, bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet. Search engine bots crawl webpages to index them and rank them on the search engine. |
| Bounce rate | The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. |
| Branded Keyword | A keyword or search term that includes a brand’s name or variations of it. |
| Breadcrumb | A small text path, often located at the top of a page, that indicates the user’s location on a website. |
| Broken Link | A link that doesn’t work, often resulting in an error page. |
| Browser | A software application used to locate, retrieve, and display content on the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images, videos, and other files. |
| Bundling | In web development, bundling refers to the process of joining multiple files into a single file. This helps to reduce the number of HTTP requests that are needed to load a webpage, thereby improving site speed. |
| Cache | Stored data that allows websites to load faster upon subsequent visits. |
| Cached Page | A version of a web page that search engines save and store. When the actual web page is not available, the cached page may be presented. |
| Caching | Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, so that they can be accessed more quickly. |
| Caffeine | An update to Google’s search algorithm that improved how Google indexed websites. |
| ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain) | Internet top-level domains that are used to indicate the country or dependent territory. Examples include “.us” for the United States, “.uk” for the United Kingdom. |
| Channel | A medium through which a message is transmitted to its intended audience, such as print media, broadcast media, or digital media. In digital marketing, a channel could be social media, a mobile app, a website, etc. |
| Citations | In local SEO, a citation is any place your business’ NAPW (Name, Address, Phone number, Website URL) information appears together online, typically in an online directory or business listings website. |
| Click Bait | A provocative or sensationalistic headline designed to attract clicks. |
| Click Depth | A measure of how many clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page of the website. |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. |
| Client-side & server-side rendering | Client-side rendering means that the browser downloads the HTML file and other assets to render the site. Server-side rendering generates the full HTML for a page on the server in response to navigation. Both methods have pros and cons for SEO and site performance. |
| Cloaking | A black hat SEO technique where the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. |
| CMS | Content Management System. Software that helps users create, manage, and modify content on a website without the need for specialized technical knowledge. |
| Co-Citation | When one website or brand is mentioned (not linked) by two different sources. |
| Code To Text Ratio | The percentage of a web page’s content that is actual text as opposed to HTML code. It is used by search engines to calculate the relevancy of a webpage. |
| Comment Spam | Unwanted comments posted on blogs, forums, or any webpage where users can submit comments. Typically, these are promotional or irrelevant and detract from the conversation. |
| Commercial investigation queries | Search queries where the user is looking for information that may eventually lead to a transaction. |
| Competition | In SEO, competition refers to other businesses or websites ranking for the same keywords or phrases. |
| Content | Any text, images, video, audio, or other media that provide information and can be consumed by the user. |
| Conversion rate | The percentage of users who take a desired action. The archetypical example of conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who buy something on the site. |
| Crawl budget | The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your website on any given day. |
| Crawler directives | These are ways of instructing search engine crawlers on how you’d like them to crawl or index parts of a website. |
| Crawling | This is the process by which search engines like Google browse the web to index and rank webpages. |
| Critical rendering path | The sequence of steps the browser goes through to convert the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into pixels on the screen. Optimizing the critical render path improves render speed. |
| CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) | A style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in HTML. |
| DA (Domain Authority) | A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). |
| De-indexed | When a website or webpage is removed from a search engine index. This can occur due to violations of the search engine’s guidelines or as a result of technical mistakes. |
| Deindexed | When a URL or a whole domain is removed from a search engine’s index. This can happen because of penalties, or if the site’s owner used methods to prevent the search engine from crawling it. |
| Directory links | Links from online directories. In terms of SEO, some directories carry more weight than others, and high-quality directory links can help improve your site’s visibility in search results. |
| Distance | In local SEO, distance refers to how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. |
| DNS (Domain Name System) | The Internet’s system for converting alphabetic names into numeric IP addresses. |
| DOM (Document Object Model) | A programming interface for HTML and XML documents. It represents the structure of a document and allows programs to access and manipulate the document’s content, structure, and styles. |
| Domain name registrar | A company that manages the reservation of internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. |
| Duplicate content | Content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it’s difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. |
| Editorial links | Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of worthy material and the ability to create awareness about it. |
| Engagement | Measures how users interact with a website. High engagement means that users spend a lot of time reading and interacting with a website. |
| Faceted navigation | A technique for accessing information organized according to a faceted classification system, allowing users to explore by filtering available information. It can be complex for SEO as it may produce a lot of URLs with duplicate content. |
| Featured snippets | These are selected search results that appear on top of Google’s search results page. They aim to answer the user’s question directly. |
| Fetch and Render tool | A part of Google Search Console, this tool allows you to see how Google’s bots see and render your page. |
| File compression | The process of reducing the file size of a digital file. Compressing files can help improve the speed of file transfers, such as loading web pages. |
| Follow | A type of link that passes SEO value from one page to another. Also known as a “dofollow” link. |
| Geographic modifiers | Words or phrases that include a geographic location to specify the area of operation in a search query. |
| Google Analytics | A free Web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. |
| Google Analytics goals | A feature in Google Analytics that allows you to track a specific user interaction, like form submissions, button clicks, or downloads. |
| Google Dance | Refers to the period of time during which Google used to rebuild its rankings, resulting in fluctuating search result rankings. |
| Google Hummingbird | A major update to the Google search algorithm released in 2013, designed to better understand the context and intent of user search queries. |
| Google My Business listing | A free tool that allows businesses to manage how their business information appears across Google, including Search and Maps. |
| Google Panda Algorithm | An update to Google’s search ranking algorithm released in 2011, aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites” and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. |
| Google Penguin Algorithm | An update to Google’s search ranking algorithm released in 2012, aimed to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques. |
| Google Pigeon Update | An update to Google’s search algorithm released in 2014, aimed to increase the ranking of local listings in a search. |
| Google RankBrain | A machine learning-based component of Google’s search algorithm, used to help process its search results. |
| Google Sandbox | A theory that Google isolates new websites over a certain period to a temporary ranking penalty. |
| Google Search Console | A free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. |
| Google search operators | Special characters and commands that extend the capabilities of regular text searches. They can be used to find specific information and can help with SEO audits. |
| Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines | A document provided by Google to help human search quality raters understand how to rate the search results they are testing. |
| Google Tag Manager | A tag management system created by Google to manage JavaScript and HTML tags used for tracking and analytics on websites. |
| Google Trends | A web service by Google that shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world. |
| Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google Search Essentials | Guidelines provided by Google to website owners, describing how to prepare their websites in a way that Google’s algorithm can understand and index their content. |
| Googlebot / Bingbot | The search bots used by Google and Bing, respectively, to index new pages and updates to pages on the web. |
| Gray Hat | SEO practices that are riskier than white hat SEO techniques but aren’t as clearly defined by Google’s guidelines as being unacceptable. |
| Guest blogging | The practice of contributing a post to another person’s blog in order to build relationships, exposure, authority, and links. |
| Head Term | A popular, broad keyword that has high search volume but is typically very competitive and harder to rank for. |
| Header tags | HTML elements (H1-H6) used to identify headings and subheadings within your content from other types of text (e.g., paragraph text). |
| Heading | Text on a webpage that is placed inside a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2. It is often displayed in a larger and/or bolder font than the regular page text. |
| Headline | The title or heading of a webpage. It is typically the first line of text that search engine spiders and human visitors see on a page. |
| Hidden Text | Text that is visible to the search engines but hidden to a user. It is often considered a black-hat SEO practice. |
| Hilltop Algorithm | An algorithm used by Google to provide more relevant search results based on a webpage’s inbound and outbound links. |
| HITS Algorithm | An algorithm that rates web pages, developed by Jon Kleinberg. It stands for Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search. |
| Homepage | The introductory or main page of a website. |
| Hreflang | An HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. It helps search engines understand the language you are using on your website and who you want to target. |
| HTML | Stands for HyperText Markup Language. It’s the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s the protocol used for transferring data over the internet. |
| HTTPS | Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is the secure version of HTTP, which is used for secure communication over a computer network, with especially wide deployment on the Internet. |
| Hub Page | A page that is a central or main page for a particular topic. It links out to other important, related content. |
| Image carousels | A SERP feature where Google shows a set of images related to the search query. |
| Image compression | The process of reducing the file size of an image without degrading the quality of the image below an acceptable level. This is important for improving page load speed. |
| Image sitemap | A sitemap dedicated to listing the images on a website, helping Google discover images it might not otherwise find. |
| Inbound Link | A link coming from another site to your own website. |
| Index | The collection of information that a search engine has that can be queried. It’s essentially the search engine’s database. |
| Index Coverage report | A tool in Google Search Console that provides information on how many of your site pages are in Google’s index, and any problems it found while visiting and indexing those pages. |
| Indexability | How easy it is for a search engine to index a page. If a page is not indexable, it will not be crawled or added to the search engine’s index. |
| Indexed Page | Pages of your website that search engines have visited, analyzed, and added to their database of web pages. |
| Indexing | The process of adding webpages into Google search. The bots crawl and understand the content of the pages, and then include them in the index. |
| Information Architecture | The structure, organization, and labeling of content in websites or apps to support usability and findability. |
| Information Retrieval | The process by which a system collects and returns relevant information based on a specific query. |
| Informational queries | Search queries where the user is looking to find information, as opposed to making a purchase or finding a particular website. |
| Intent | This refers to the goal a user has when typing a search into Google. |
| Internal links | These are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. |
| IP address | A unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each device using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network. |
| JavaScript | A programming language that allows you to implement complex features on web pages. Search engines can crawl and index JavaScript-generated content. |
| JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) | A method of encoding Linked Data using JSON. It is a way of providing structured data to Google and other search engines that is easy to read and understand. |
| Kanban | A method for managing work, with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. This approach presents all participants with a full view of the process, from task definition to delivery to a customer. In SEO, it can be used to manage tasks like link building, content creation, and technical SEO updates. |
| Keyword | A word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine. Websites will often optimize their content around keywords to try to appear in search results for those terms. |
| Keyword Cannibalization | The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to understand which page is relevant for the keyword. |
| Keyword Density | The percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page. |
| Keyword Difficulty | An estimate of how hard it would be to rank on the first page of search results for a particular keyword. |
| Keyword Explorer | A tool for keyword research that provides keyword suggestions, SERP analysis, and detailed performance metrics. |
| Keyword Prominence | Refers to how prominently keywords are used in a webpage. The more prominent, the more weight those keywords carry with search engines. |
| Keyword Research | The process of finding and analyzing actual search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. |
| Keyword Stemming | The process of using a popular keyword and modifying it in order to generate more hits from search engines. |
| Keyword stuffing | The practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. This practice is considered a violation of Google’s guidelines. |
| Knowledge Graph | A knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine’s search results with information gathered from a variety of sources. |
| Knowledge Panel | An information box that appears on Google when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph. It provides a quick snapshot of information on a topic based on Google’s understanding of available content. |
| KPI | Stands for Key Performance Indicator. It’s a type of performance measurement that evaluates the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages. |
| Landing Page | The webpage where a visitor first lands when they have clicked on a link or ad leading them to your site. This page is optimized to make a specific impression or trigger a particular action. |
| Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) | A method that search engines use to study and understand the content of webpages and the relationships between concepts in that content. |
| Lazy loading | A design pattern commonly used with web content, where you defer initializing part of a page until it is needed. This can improve page load speed by reducing the initial load time. |
| Lead | A potential customer in your sales funnel who has communicated with your company and has a high chance of purchasing. |
| Link | An HTML object that allows users to jump to a new location when they click or tap on the link. |
| Link accessibility | The ability for all links on a website to be easily accessed by users and search engine crawlers. This includes considerations for both website design and site architecture. |
| Link Bait | A piece of content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine. |
| Link building | The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. |
| Link equity | A search engine ranking factor based on the idea that certain links pass value and authority from one page to another. This value is dependent on several factors. |
| Link exchange | The process of exchanging links with other websites to increase your own site’s backlinks and quality backlinks. |
| Link Explorer | A tool developed by Moz for search engine optimization. It allows marketers to discover new link building opportunities, track their link profile over time, and compare to competitors for intelligent, targeted link building. |
| Link Farm | A group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the link popularity of all the sites in the farm. |
| Link Juice | SEO slang term that refers to the value or equity passed from one page or site to another through links. |
| Link profile | The overall makeup of the links pointing to a website, including the total number of links, the diversity of linking domains, and the types of websites that link to you. |
| Link Stability | The consistency and longevity of a link on a website. More stable links are those that have existed for a longer time and are expected to remain in place. |
| Link Velocity | The rate at which others are linking to your site. |
| Link volume | The total number of links, both internal and external, that a website has. This can impact a site’s SEO performance. |
| Linked unstructured citations | Mentions of your business name, address, phone number, or website across the web, even when not in a structured business directory. These are particularly valuable because search engines use them when evaluating the online authority of your business. |
| Local business schema | A type of structured data markup code that you put on your website to tell Google what kind of business you are, where you are located, what services or products you offer, your prices, and more. |
| Local pack | A set of three local businesses that Google displays for local intent searches. |
| Local queries | Search queries that include a specific geographic area or are clearly looking for a business or service within a specific area. |
| Log File | A file automatically created by a server to record its activities. |
| Log File Analysis | The process of examining log files in order to understand a system’s performance, security, data integrity, and other operational data. |
| Login forms | These are forms used by websites to secure sections of content, which may not be indexed by search engines as they can’t fill out forms. |
| Long-tail keywords | Longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search. |
| Machine Learning | A type of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to learn from and make decisions and predictions based on data. |
| Manual Action | A penalty from Google indicating that a human reviewer has identified that pages on a site are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. |
| Manual penalty | A manual action taken by Google’s webspam team on a site that has been found to violate Google’s guidelines. |
| Matomo | An open-source web analytics platform formerly known as Piwik. |
| Meta Description | A brief summary of the content on a webpage that is often displayed in search results to describe what the page is about. |
| Meta descriptions | HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. These often appear under the blue clickable links in a search engine results page. |
| Meta Keywords | A type of meta tag that appeared in the HTML of a webpage and told search engines what the topic of the page was. |
| Meta robots tag | A tag that tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It’s used for pages that you do not want to appear in search. |
| Meta Tags | Snippets of text that describe a page’s content. They do not appear on the page itself but in the page’s code. |
| Metric | A standard of measurement that businesses use to track performance in various areas. |
| Minification | The process of removing unnecessary characters (like spaces and comments) from source code without changing its functionality. This helps reduce the size of the code and improves page load times. |
| Mobile-first indexing | Google’s practice of using the mobile version of a web page for indexing and ranking, to better help primarily mobile users find what they’re looking for. |
| MozBar | A free browser extension that provides on-page access to Moz’s link metrics and site analysis tools. It can be used to aid with SEO analysis. |
| Natural Link | Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. |
| Navigation | How users move around a website. Effective navigation helps users quickly find the information they need. |
| Navigational queries | Search queries where the user is trying to get to a particular website. |
| Negative SEO | The practice of deliberately harming another website’s search engine ranking, often through the creation of spammy links to the website. |
| Niche | A specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. |
| Noarchive Tag | A value in a robots meta tag that tells search engines not to cache a specific webpage. |
| NoFollow | An attribute value used to instruct search engines bots that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. |
| Nofollow Attribute | An HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines bots that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. |
| NoIndex tag | A directive for search engine bots to not include a certain page in their index. |
| Nosnippet Tag | An HTML value that is added to the Meta tags of a webpage to prevent a text snippet or video preview from appearing in the search results. |
| Off-Page SEO | Optimization activities that happen outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings, such as backlinks, social signals, and shares. |
| On-Page SEO | Optimization activities that are done on the website itself to improve its search engine rankings, such as improving page load speed, meta tags, and keyword usage in the content. |
| Organic | Refers to search results that appear due to their relevance to the search terms, not advertisements. |
| Organic Search | Search results in a search engine that are not paid advertisements. The position of a site in organic search results is largely based on site’s SEO. |
| Orphan Page | A webpage that is not linked to by any other page on the same website. |
| Outbound Link | A link on your website that points to a different site. |
| PA (Page Authority) | A score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). |
| Page speed | A measurement of how fast the content on your page loads. This is now a factor for ranking in mobile search results. |
| PageRank | Google’s algorithm for measuring the importance of webpage. It works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to estimate how important the page is. |
| Pages per session | In web analytics, pages per session (also known as average page depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session. More pages per session often indicate more in-depth engagement. |
| Pageview | A metric defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the analytics tracking code. |
| Pagination | The process of dividing web pages into discrete pages, allowing users to navigate through content more easily. |
| Paid Search | A form of digital marketing where search engines allow advertisers to show ads on their search engine results pages (SERPs). |
| Panda | A Google algorithm update aimed at downranking sites that provide poor user experience. |
| PBN | Private Blog Network. A network of websites used to build links to a single website for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. |
| Portable Document Format. A file format used to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. | |
| Penalty | A negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms or manual review. |
| People Also Ask (PAA) boxes | These are a Google SERP feature that offers answers to related queries for a given search term. |
| Persona | A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. |
| Personalization | The practice of creating customized experiences for individual users. In SEO, personalization can refer to the altering of search results based on user behavior. |
| PHP | A popular scripting language that’s especially suited to web development. |
| Piracy | The unauthorized use or reproduction of another’s work. |
| Pogo-sticking | When a user performs a search, clicks on a result, very quickly comes back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result. |
| Position | The place where a website is ranked in search engine results for a specific keyword. |
| PPC (Pay Per Click) | An online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. |
| Programming language | A formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output. In the context of SEO, common languages include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python. |
| Prominence | In local SEO, prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and Google tries to reflect this in local ranking. |
| Protocol | The specific set of rules for organizing and transmitting data over the internet. This can refer to HTTP or HTTPS for websites. |
| Pruning | In SEO, pruning involves removing or improving low-quality or underperforming pages from a website to improve the site’s overall quality and performance. |
| Purchased links | Links bought from another website with the intention to improve PageRank rather than providing additional content. This practice is against Google’s webmaster guidelines. |
| QDF | Query Deserves Freshness. A Google algorithmic factor that brings recent and relevant content to certain search queries. |
| Qualified lead | A prospective customer who has been researched and vetted — first by an organization’s marketing department and then by its sales team – and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process. |
| Qualified traffic | Visitors who are more likely to become customers or take another desired action upon visiting a website. These individuals have been pre-qualified as potential customers due to their interest in your product, service, or information. |
| Quality Content | Content that is original, purposeful, and accurately represents your business to the audience. |
| Quality Link | A backlink that comes from a high-quality, trusted website. |
| Query | A search term that a user enters into a search engine. |
| Rank | The position that your website occupies in the search engines’ index for a particular keyword. |
| RankBrain | An AI component of Google’s search algorithm that uses machine learning to filter search results. |
| Ranking | The position that your website occupies in the search engine results page. |
| Ranking Factor | Any characteristic of a webpage that a search engine algorithm might consider to calculate its rankings. |
| Reciprocal Links | When two websites link to each other. Also known as “link exchange”. |
| Redirect | A way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. |
| Redirection | The process of forwarding one URL to a different URL. There are three main kinds of redirects |
| Referral Traffic | Google Analytics term that denotes visitors to your site that came from direct links on other websites rather than directly or from searches. |
| Referrer | The URL of the webpage that directs users to another page after they click a link. |
| Regional keywords | Keywords that are specifically related to a region or geographic area. |
| Reinclusion | The process of getting a website included again in search engine indices after it has been removed due to unethical SEO practices. |
| Rel=canonical | A way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. It helps to prevent problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. |
| Relevance | In SEO, relevance refers to how closely a webpage matches the searcher’s query. |
| Remarketing | A way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites. |
| Render-blocking scripts | These are JavaScript and CSS that prevent a page from loading quickly. By optimizing these scripts, you can help improve your website’s performance. |
| Rendering | The process of a browser converting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a web page that users can interact with. |
| Reputation Management | The practice of attempting to shape public perception of a person or organization by influencing information about that entity. |
| Resource pages | Web pages that link out to awesome content on a given topic. Because they link out to others, you can usually get a link from them in return for a great piece of content. |
| Responsive Design | A design strategy that enables a website to adjust to the screen size and device used to view the site. |
| Rich snippet | Search results that offer more details than standard results. These additional details can include star ratings, product information, business hours, and more. |
| Robot.txt | A text file webmasters create to instruct web robots how to crawl pages on their website. |
| Robots.txt | A file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site. |
| Schema Markup | A form of microdata that creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results. |
| Schema.org | A collaborative, community activity that aims to promote schemas for structured data on the Internet. By adding Schema markup to your HTML, your site can appear more prominently in search results. |
| Scraped content | Content taken from another website, often without permission. This is generally frowned upon by search engines. |
| Scroll depth | A measure of how far users are scrolling down your web pages. It can be used to gauge user engagement with your content. |
| Scrum board | A visual representation of work to be done in agile software development and similar project management processes. In SEO, this can be used to manage and visualize progress on tasks like technical SEO updates or content creation. |
| Search Console | A free service provided by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. |
| Search Engine | A software system that’s designed to carry out web searches, which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. |
| Search forms | Forms on a website that allow users to search the site for specific content. Search engines may not be able to index content accessible only through a search form. |
| Search History | The history of a user’s searches that is stored by a search engine. |
| Search Quality Rater Guidelines | A document provided by Google which gives insights into what they consider to be high-quality webpages. |
| Search Query | The actual word or string of words that a user types into the search box of a search engine. |
| Search traffic | The portion of traffic to your site that arrives through search engine results. It is divided into organic and paid search traffic. |
| Search Volume | The number of searches that are expected for a keyword over a certain period. |
| Seasonal trends | Variations in keyword search volume and user behavior at different times of the year. |
| Seed keywords | The basic keywords that are used to help generate longer, more complex keyword phrases during keyword research. |
| SEM (Search Engine Marketing) | A form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages primarily through paid advertising. |
| Sentiment | The emotion behind a social media mention. It’s often grouped into “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”. It’s used in monitoring tools to gauge what people think about your brand or topic being monitored. |
| SEO (Search Engine Optimization) | The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. |
| SERP (Search Engine Results Page) | The page displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a searcher. |
| SERP features | Specialized results displayed by Google on the search results page, such as featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. |
| Sitemap | A list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. |
| Snippet | A description or excerpt from the website that follows the title and precede the URL on a search engine result page. |
| Social Media | Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. |
| Spam | Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc. |
| Spam Score | Represents the percentage of sites with similar features we’ve found to be penalized or banned by Google. It is developed by Moz to help identify your website’s risk of being penalized or banned by Google. |
| Spammy tactics | Techniques that try to trick search engines into ranking a webpage higher than it should. These tactics often violate search engine guidelines. |
| Spider | A program that visits websites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. |
| SRCSET | An HTML attribute used in |
| SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) | A standard security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communication. |
| SSL certificate | A digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection. It’s an industry standard and is used by millions of websites to protect their online transactions with their customers. |
| Structured Data | Data that has been organized into a formatted repository, typically a database, so that its elements can be made addressable for more effective processing and analysis. In SEO, structured data can help search engines understand the content of your pages and provide rich search results. |
| Subdomain | A domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, in “blog.example.com”, “blog” is a subdomain of the domain “example.com”. |
| Thin content | Content that has little or no value to the user. Google considers this to be a violation of its guidelines and may take manual action against it. |
| Thumbnails | Reduced-size versions of images or videos, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the context of SEO, it can influence the click-through rates from the search engine results page. |
| Time on page | The amount of time a visitor spends on a particular page before navigating away from it. It can be an indicator of the page’s quality or relevance to the visitor. |
| Title tag | An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result. |
| Traffic | Refers to the visitors that visit a website. |
| Transactional queries | Search queries where the user’s intent is to complete a transaction, such as making a purchase. |
| Unnatural links | Links that may be the result of schemes that violate search engines’ guidelines for webmasters. These can be either outgoing or incoming links. |
| URL (Uniform Resource Locator) | A specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that references a web resource (such as a webpage) and specifies its location on a computer network. |
| URL folders | Part of a URL path that can be used to categorize and organize content. They can also have an impact on SEO. |
| URL parameters | These are the parts of the URL that appear after a question mark (?) and are used to send additional data. |
| User Experience (UX) | Encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. Good UX design will make a website easy to navigate and interact with, which in turn is good for SEO. |
| UTM code | A simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This enables Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from as well as what campaign directed them to you. |
| Vertical Search | Specialized search engines that focus on a specific segment of online content. They are also called topical search engines. |
| Voice Search | A speech recognition technology that allows users to search by saying terms aloud rather than typing them into a search field. The proliferation of smart phones and other small, Web-enabled mobile devices has spurred interest in voice search. |
| Web 2.0 | The second stage of development of the Internet, characterized especially by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated content and the growth of social media. |
| Web Directory | A directory on the World Wide Web which specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. |
| Webmaster | A person responsible for maintaining a website. |
| Website Architecture | The structure of a website, which includes its user interface, the coding languages used, the systems of navigation, and the visual aspects of the site. |
| Website Navigation | The process of navigating a network of information resources in the World Wide Web, which is organized as hypertext or hypermedia. Good website navigation is critical for good UX and SEO. |
| White hat | This refers to the usage of SEO strategies that align with the terms and conditions of the search engines. It’s the opposite of Black Hat SEO. |
| White Hat SEO | Search engine optimization practices that are in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google. |
| Wireframe | A visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. Wireframes are created for the purpose of arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose. |
| X-robots-tag | An element defined within the HTTP header response for a given URL to instruct search engine crawlers not to index or follow links. |
| XML Sitemap | A document that helps Google and other major search engines better understand your website while crawling it. It provides a list of all the pages on a website that are available for crawling. |
| Zero-Click Searches | A search query that is answered directly on the SERP itself, meaning the user doesn’t have to click any further to get the answer they need. |
| Zombie Pages | Pages that don’t bring in any traffic from Google. These can harm a website’s SEO if they’re not dealt with correctly. |