Essential SEO Jargon You Need to Know

Many people who are not familiar with the dynamics of search engine optimization feel uncomfortable with SEO jargons. So here’s a list of some of the most useful SEO terminologies that you need to understand, especially if you have an online business.

301: This is a response code you often see when the web address of a site has been permanently moved to a new location.

Adwords: Google allows webmasters to generate profits via pay per click system. Adwords allows you to advertise products and services.

Adwords Sites: These sites are designed to accommodate adverts specifically for Google Adwords.

Affiliate: This term is common among websites that feature specific products and services. If a consumer clicks the link and purchases something, the affiliate website earns a certain percentage of income.

Algorithm: Basically, algorithm is a mathematical calculation that is applied in data processing. Search engines like Google make use of algorithms to locate or suggest relevant websites whenever a keyword or key phrase is entered.

Alt Text: This text is usually related to a specific photo. The term is often used in HTML coding. It is an essential aspect in SEO because it facilitates accessibility to a website.

Analytics: This is a program that allows you to monitor your return of investment by tracking activities in your site like social media, videos, demographics and content.

Anchor Text: This term refers to the words that usually appear when you click a hyperlink. It is also useful in determining the page ranking of your website.

Astroturfing: This is a form of campaign that is intended to hide the identity of the people behind it. The purpose is to create the impression that the advertisement stems from a disinterested party.

Authority: This concept is essentially about the amount of trust being given to a website for its highly relevant content and the number of sites that provide backlinks.

Authority Site: Authority sites are those websites that usually appear in the top page results when you search for a keyword in Google. At the same time, it also refers to a site that is known for its highly valuable content and the high volume of users who visit it regularly.

B2B: Also known as business to business, this acronym refers to transactions that take place between two commercial entities.

B2C: Business to consumer refers to the nature of the transaction between a particular business and its prospective customer.
Backlink: Backlink, also known as inbound link, refers to the number of links that go to a particular website.

Black Hat: This concept refers to the unethical practices and techniques that are used by webmasters in order to reach a higher page ranking in search engines.

Blog: A blog contains a series of posts arranged in a chronological order.

Bot: This refers to an autonomous program that performs repetitive tasks. Major search engines employ bots to add relevant lists of websites to its index.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is a terms used to indicate the number of website visitors who leave the site without going to another website.

Bread Crumbs: These are the visible links you can find above a title post. The purpose of bread crumbs is to help users navigate your site much more easily and to help search engines recognize the overall organization and structure of your site.

Canonical Issues: Basically, this refers to the redundant URLS of various websites. Addresses issues with duplicate content on various pages.

Click Fraud: Webmasters commit click fraud, often intentionally, when they repeatedly click their own affiliate links or assign a group of people to click on them for the sole purpose of profit generation.

Cloak: This refers to the act of submitting various contents that are intended for search engine spider. Usually, these content are invisible to humans. It is a punishable form of black hat SEO practice.

CMS: WordPress is an example of Content Management System. Basically, it is a program that simplifies the task of a content publisher by separating the complicated tasks of coding from content creation and publishing. CMS allows you to publish contents without acquiring coding skills.

Comment Spam: The main purpose of comment spamming is to increase visibility and traffic by inserting link in the comment section of several blogs

Content: Content, also commonly called as copy or text, refers to specific area in a website that is intended to provide value to the audience. Ideally, content should be useful, interesting, and relevant in order to generate high traffic. Conversely, all forms of navigation, video, audio, advertising, boilerplate, and branding are not considered as content.

Contextual Advertisement: The principle of contextual advertisement involves creating content and adverts that are mutually relevant.

Conversion: Conversion refers to a set of quantifiable goals in website development wherein clicks, sign ups, and sales are measured to determine whether the site is doing well.

CPC: Cost Per Click or CPC refers to the rate that is generated for pay per click advertisements.

CPM: This is a metric used to measure the value of all types of pay per click ads. The letter M in the acronym stands for the number 1,000.

Crawler: Websites employ spiders and bots, also known as crawlers, for the sole purpose of data gathering via links.

Directory: Any website, such as Yahoo Directory, that is intended to display all information related to directory pages.

Directory Page: This is a webpage that contains various links of numerous websites or businesses.

Doorway: This is a special part of a website that is designed to generate traffic. If the site redirects you to another webpage, it is called cloaking.

Duplicate Content: Search engines can penalize websites that contain the same contents. However, if your site has duplicate content, it is more likely that you will not be getting any positive response from people. In other words, you will not gain their trust.

E-Commerce Sites: These websites are exclusively designed for retailers.

Feeds: Feeds are basically contents that are delivered by aggregator programs, such as news aggregators.

FFA: FFA stands for Free For ALL sites. These types of websites do not contain useful or valuable contents. They only have numerous outgoing links that are intended to generate traffic. This is often called as link farms, which are severely penalized by major search engines.

Frames: A frame refers to a design where multiple documents can be viewed simultaneously. In SEO, this is not always considered as a good practice. Spiders cannot decipher these pages accurately.

Gateway Page: Also called as doorway page, it is slightly different from cloaking because it involves redirecting search engines spiders and users to several websites from a single page.

Google Bomb: Webmasters often join forces to create search results intended to elicit a certain response from the people, which is often funny and ridiculous.

Google Bowling: Some malicious entities often send links to a website for the sole purpose of decreasing its page ranking. Many believe that this is just a myth.

Google Dance: This phenomenon happens when Google undergoes major database and algorithm update. Webmasters are usually wary about this type of phenomenon because it severely affects their SERP.

Google Juice: Google juice is also commonly known as trust, authority, and page rank. It starts from outgoing links in a website to other webpages.

Googlebot: This is the spider program of Google.

GYM: The three big giants of search engines – Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Hits: Webmasters used to place high premium on hits as a basis for website traffic. Today, hits are no longer given the same value. For webmasters these days, they already rely on impressions, which can contain numerous hits in one instance.

Hub: This is webpage that contains valuable content. Because of its high authority, it usually links to other related websites.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language is a term that refers for adding functionalities and formatting. Search engines rely on HTML for their functionality.

Impression: Impressions, or page views, are the instances when a person visits and views a website or ad.

Inbound Links: These links, commonly known as inbound or incoming links, are considered as the ultimate source of online trust and authority.

Index (noun): This is a database that contains numerous webpages.

Index (verb): Indexing refers to the act of adding a webpage to a search engine index.

Indexed Pages: These are the pages added during the indexing.

Inlink: These are the inbound links from relevant websites. These links are considered as the major indicator of trust and page rankings.

Keyword/Key Phrase: This is a single or multiple words that a person enters in a search engine.

Keyword Cannibalization: This refers to the repeated or redundant use of identical keywords within a webpage. Doing this is harmful for search engine optimization because the spiders may not be able to identify the value of the website.

Keyword Density: This pertains to the keyword percentage in a single page. There is a minimum and maximum level of keyword density that must be strictly followed all the time.

Keyword Research: This is a tedious process because it involves a thorough research about a specific set of keywords related to a niche.

Keyword Spam/Keyword Stuffing: Also known as keyword stuffing, this happens when there is a large number of keyword in a single post or webpage so that it seems unnatural.

Landing Page: This is the exact page where the user lands on during his or her search of a certain keyword or phrases. Landing pages can be used in many ways and should be.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): LSI happens when a search engine, like Google, indexes all relevant groups of words and phrases in one document. In SEO practices, these groups of keywords are called Long Tail Searches. Most of the time, the searches contain two or three series of words.

Link: This is a single element in a webpage that is clickable. Once it is clicked, the page will go to another section of the website.

Link Bait: This is a single webpage that is intended to generate incoming links, which is done mostly through social media sites.

Link Building: This pertains to the regular activities of adding incoming links.

Link Exchange: This refers to the mutual exchange of relevant links between two websites. Some poor quality links are often allowed. Link builders are the ones who manage the quality of links.

Link Farms: These are groups of websites that house numerous unrelated links for the sake of generating traffic.

Link Juice: Also known as authority, page ranking, and trust.

Link Love: This refers to the outgoing link of a website that indicates a certain level of trust.

Link Partner: This refers to a website that exchanges relevant links to another site for mutual benefits. Search engines do not place high value on these exchanges because of the reciprocal value.

Link Popularity: This measures the value of a website for its quality and number of links to other sites.

Link Spam: Usually, these are links that are posted in blogs for the sole purpose of generating traffic. Also known as spam comment.

Link Text: This refers to the visible text when a major search engine generates a link. This is an important aspect of search engine because it reflects relevant contents and keywords.

Long Tail: These are search queries that are longer but less specific. For instance, a user might use the term “widgets” which is very broad. Ideally, the string of keywords like “red widgets with reverse threads” is more specific. Most of these long tails searches are used in search engine optimization.

META Tags: These words appear at the header of an HTML page. It provides details about the entire site. Meta details do not appear in a page but only in SERP. For search engine optimization purposes, it is important to create unique meta tags. That is because search engines heavily depend on the information found in meta tags to find matches for a particular query.

Metric: Analytic programs rely on metrics for their standard measurements.

MFA: MFA stands for Made for Advertisements. These websites are designed for the sole purpose of marketing and advertising.

Mirror Site: This is a website that contains the same name but with different addresses.

Monetize: This refers to the income generated from a website.

Natural Search Results: Results generated by a search engine that are not sponsored or paid.

Nofollow: This works like a link condom because it informs robots not to follow links in a given website. This is done by putting a command in the header of webpage or inserted in a link code.

Noindex: This is a command intended for instructing robots not to index a site. This command is usually placed in the headers or in a link code of a website.

Nonreciprocal Link: The site that does not provide a reciprocal link exchange to another site is called a nonreciprocal link. These days, search engines consider nonreciprocal links as more valuable than reciprocal links. The idea is that these links are not a result of an agreement between two websites.

Organic Link: These are published links because of their inherent value to the users.

Outlink: Also known as outgoing link

PageRank (PR): This is the value, usually between o and 10, that is assigned to a website by Google algorithm to indicate a site’s overall popularity and ranking.

Pay for Inclusion (PFI): This refers to the payment when a website is added in a search engine directory.

Portal: A portal is a webpage that contains several enticing features in order to persuade users to use the service as their home page. Examples of these portals are MSN and iGoogle.

PPA: Pay Per Action refers to the payment that is generated when a link is clicked and it becomes a conversion.

PPC: Pay Per Click is the payment generated from a contextual advertisement. PPC is an initiative by commercial entities to pay Google once their links are clicked.

Proprietary Method: SEO companies often use this term to refer to their ability to increase a website’s ranking.

Reciprocal Links: These links are a product of a mutual agreement between two websites. Again, this type of link is not given high value by a search engine like Google.

Redirect: This is a method employed when a site’s address is modified. This happens when the website has changed its domain name.

Regional Long Tail (RLT): This is a combination of a keyword and a region or city name. Many services industries prefer to use this in their SEO campaigns.

Robot.txt: These files are designed to manipulate the behavior of search engine spiders.

ROI: Return of Investment or ROI is a term commonly used in analytic software. It refers to the quantity of returns for a specific investment.

Sandbox: It is believed that Google has a found a way to place all new websites in a so called sandbox for an indefinite period of time. Thus, these sites cannot reach high rankings. SEO experts believe that this is just a hoax.

Scrape: The act of copying certain content from a website. This is usually done by an automated bot in a site.

Search Engine (SE): This program performs complex search processes in order to provide relevant matches for a specific keyword or phrase.

Search Engine Spam: These are pages that are designed to provide irrelevant results.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing is a practice done by SEO experts to help websites gain higher rankings in search engine results. These experts perform research about products and services, submission of files and documents, and positioning the sites to achieve maximum online visibility.

SEO: It is the process of helping a website increases its page ranking in search engine results. The principle behind this is that every website that appears in the first page results tend to have more visitors than those in the second or third pages. SEO is deemed as an essential aspect of online businesses.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

Site Map: It is a webpage that connects to all accessible sections of the entire site. The end purpose is to enhance the site’s usability by improving the data structure of the website. The XML sitemap is designed to be placed in a root directory for this purpose.

SMM: Social Media Marketing is the process of promoting a brand or an online site using the venue of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Sock Puppet: This is the act of concealing or creating a different name to hide the real identity.

Social Bookmark: This is also another type of social media. In this type of media, bookmarks are grouped together to be delivered via aggregators.

Social Media: These websites are designed to help users share information and opinions among themselves in wide platform.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): Promoting a certain brand or website with the help of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Spam Ad Page: These are contents scraped online for the sole purpose of generating visibility. Most of these contents do not provide real value to the users.

Spammer: A person whose sole intention is to use spam contents for selfish reasons.

Spider: Also called as bots or crawlers, the spiders are used to find relevant matches in search engine results.

Spider Trap: Spider traps are usually employed in order to protect a site from scraping and email harvesting programs. It involves links generated to capture a spider

Splash Page: These graphic contents are designed to attract users. Search engines do not place high value to these pages because they all look like dead links. Splash pages are also considered as bad SEO practice.

Static Page: Static pages are considered as SEO-friendly mainly because they contain ID of the URL without dynamic contents.

Stickiness: It is also related to bounce rates. Essentially, stickiness relates to the possibility of staying in a website for a specific duration after some changes take effect.

Supplemental Index: These are webpages that do not have high rankings. Although they are relevant to search queries, they still have a certain value to users and search engines.

Text Links: This is a simple HTML link. It does not have any graphic elements.

Time on Page: This is used to measure a site’s relevance and quality. It pertains to the amount of time a person stays on a website.

Toolbar PageRank (PR): This is the value assigned to a website by a major search engine like Google. It indicates a website’s overall relevance and ranking. It is only performed annually. SEO professionals consider this as an unreliable indicator for a site’s overall standing.

Trust Rank: This refers to the practice of filtering quality pages by using link relationships with the help of human evaluated seed webpages.

URL: URL stands for uniform resource locator. Also widely known as web address.

User Generated Content: Social Media and Wikis depend largely on UGC for its value and ranking.

Walled Garden: These are pages grouped together and establish mutual links with each other. These sites do not have external links to other sites. Although is also indexed by Google, it does not contain a high page ranking.

Web 2.0: These are websites that allow user interactions.

White Hat: This is an SEO technique or techniques that are considered to be of high standard. White hat does not use manipulative strategies to deceive SERPs.

Widget: These are small programs or applications installed in websites in order to provide more functionality. These include social media feeds and hit counters.