SEO Glossary: Definition of SEO and 40 Terms Related to it

Do you want to improve the SEO of your website (blog) but some big SEO terms you see online won’t just let you learn in peace?

Worry less because those terms will be simplified to their simplest form here.

If bloggers get rich by the number of emails they get to write on a particular topic then I should have been close to being a multimillionaire now.

We want to help beginners get started with SEO by giving the basic definitions of some terms relating to SEO.

The definition of SEO itself, in this post is a bit lengthy. You should not just read so that you won’t get bored, make yourself comfortable by getting a seat, a drink, and some crunches.

This page contains an A-Z SEO glossary of terms so you don’t necessarily need to be a blogger before you can read this. If you own a website or you are a Digital marketer it will also be of help.

Please note that this list is in alphabetical order, we apologize for any inconvenience It may cause to some readers.

“Meaning of SEO: Definition of 50 terms related to SEO, SEO terminologies, SEO terms explained”

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Search Engine Optimization is usually regarded as all the legal processes adopted in getting “unpaid” or “organic” backlinks to your website from search engines.

1. Alt Text

Also known as an alternate attribute, It is an HTML code that tells search engine robots that can’t read images what the images they crawl depict.

Bots find it very difficult to read images so this alt text will help them get the information you pass across.

Also, In a situation where the image doesn’t load, this alt text also gives a hint about the image. It is always in this form (remove the stars)

<*img src=”techorganism.png” alt=”TechOrganism image” /*>

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text is like a text that depicts what exactly we should expect from a link we want to click, it is a text that shows what exactly the link is all about.

3. Algorithm

Algorithms are the measures taken by search engines to rank web pages for display when searches are made. These algorithms change from time to time.

4. Backlinks

They are also known as inbound links, they are external links pointing to a page and a domain name in general.

These links show that the websites linking to a page are passing a vote of trust or confidence to the page they are linking to.

This increases the SEO ranking of such a blog and boosts page traffic. When a page is made no-follow then the only link juice that will be passed here is traffic and popularity.

Search engine bots won’t be able to follow the link and pass the proper link juice. The higher the backlinks the higher the Page Authority (PA), Domain (DA), and Pagerank.

5. Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to the tactics employed by webmasters to increase their website rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ code of conduct.

These unscrupulous tactics don’t focus on readers’ experience but on search engine robots.

Such websites will be penalized by search engines when caught. In most cases, it may lead to the removal of its pages on search engines.

Examples of black hat SEO techniques are keyword stuffing, page swapping after getting an index, etc.

6. Bot, spider, Crawler, or Robot

A bot is a spider (not those spiders you see in your house) used by search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, etc.

That visits Web-pages to read their content hence, uses several SEO strategies to rank the crawled pages and include them in search queries.

By now you should know that those search queries you see on search engines are not processed by man, man only provides the algorithm.

7. Broken Links

Broken links are links linking to a non-existing webpage usually regarded as a 404 page on a website that is linked to a non-existing website.

Two reasons may cause broken links to occur: Probably the page got deleted or never existed before

8. Do-Follow links

These are links that search engine robots are allowed to crawl on a webpage, when a link is made do-follow then search engine robots are allowed to crawl and follow the link through the web page.

Do-follow links increase the Page authority and Domain authority of the linked website

9. Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score.

The highest determinant of domain authority is backlinks i.e. the higher your backlinks the higher your domain authority and page authority.

10. Domain Name

A domain name is an address where online users can access a website on the internet. Examples of domain names are Google.com, radpointer.com.

11. Dwell Time

Dwell time is the amount of time you spend on a page when you click a search result on search engines before leaving for another webpage.

12 Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service by Google for website owners. It allows you to check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your website on Google.

This tool offers several services such as sitemap adding, checking how your pages are faring on Google, checking your robots.txt, broken link checker, crawl error reporter, etc.

13. Google Webmaster

Rebranded as the Google search console in 2015. See Google search console

14. Heading tags

Heading tags (H1-H6) help in structuring your article by adding headers. Since search engine bots find it very difficult to interpret a page’s readability, these tags tell search engines that your pages are well-structured and self-explanatory.

H1 shows the title of a post so they are not meant to be used anyhow in your post, there are six heading tags and they are h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. those tags are dependent on one another i.e. you can’t have h2 without h1 etc.

15. Indexed Pages

These are the number of pages indexed on each search engine with the addition of images, videos, and other files.

You can check your no of indexed pages on Google by simply typing site:your blog URL in the text area on Google e.g. site:radpointer.com

16. Internal Linking

This is the act of interlinking to your existing content on your website, they can be done in several ways.

If you blog with WordPress then automatically they must have done 70% of this for you if you configure the settings very well.

Other ways to do this is by adding them manually to your posts and pages — adding related post plugins — signatures, etc.

17. Keywords

Keywords are often phrases but in rare cases sentences that define what your content is all about.

SEO wise they are the sentences and phrases searchers search for on search engines.

Keywords are usually in the form of questions, when searchers search for them they hope to get answers.

Millions search for keywords per day on search engines

18. Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a “focused keyword” appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

If you write an article of 10000 words and the keywords appeared 100 times then the keyword density is 10%.

Recommended keyword density by experts is 5-10% Anything above 20 is keyword stuffing.

“Focused keyword is the most relevant keyword in a content and it must appear at some killer areas like page title, heading tags and permalinks”

19. Keyword Stuffing

“Keyword stuffing” is a “black hat SEO technique” of shoving your content with relevant and irrelevant keywords.

In an attempt to manipulate the content ranking on Search engine results. If search engines discover such web pages, they remove the entire web pages from their index.

20. Link Juice

“Link Juice is not a stipulated SEO term, just a mere slang among SEO analysts used in referring to how powerful a certain link passed to one site from another site could be.

The idea of this slang is that a link from a website with a high Pagerank like youtube.com, google.com, or yahoo.com that is trusted by search engines will pass more “juice” than one on a website with a Pagerank of 0.

21. Long Tail keywords

A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase or sentence that contains a minimum of three words.

Some do say two-word keyword phrases are long-tail keywords but I wonder If “Google Chrome” will be a long-tail keyword.

An example of a long-tail keyword is “richest musician in the world”. They are more specific and often less competitive.

22. Meta Description

A meta description is an HTML code that describes and summarizes the contents of a page for the benefit of users and most importantly search engines.

Many do say this thing doesn’t work unlike before but am afraid it still does! With meta description, you can target keywords instead of search engines having to hand-pick these keywords themself.

I was hell-bent on removing this meta description on my blog because the meta description I chose for my entire website search engines picks keywords from it for all my pages.

But I later realized it is good and if they discover the keyword is not in the meta description then they will look for the matching keyword inside the page.

To add a meta description for an individual page, just install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. For your homepage, I would prefer that you do it manually by adding the description between the <*head> <*/head> section of your source code.

You may not get it now but I will be writing a post on Meta tags next week and I will make sure I link it here

23. Meta Keywords

These keywords are invisible to readers but visible to search engines. They tell search engines the keyword expected of a particular website like a blog on food should have recipes, local meals, etc.

To be candid I don’t add this to my blog because I believe It is an old SEO technique but It won’t be bad if you give this. a try since there is no side-effect to it.

24 No-follow link

This is the opposite of “Do follow the link”, they tell search engine robots to stay off a particular link which means no link juice will be passed to the link except for the traffic.

25. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO or Off-site SEO are regarded as the actions taken outside of your website (blog) to impact your rankings on search engines.

Many believe link building is the only off-page SEO technique but it is not. Other examples of off-site SEO techniques are guest posting, social media sharing, content marketing, etc.

26. On-page SEO

These are the special SEO techniques taken on one’s website to ensure the contents are well optimized for SEO.

These measures are taken directly within your website in order to improve its position in the SERP. Examples of these measures include meta description, keywords, interlinking, image optimization, Page load time, etc.

27. Page Authority (PA)

28. PageRank

Usually called Google PageRank named after Google co-founder Larry Page. It is an algorithm used to determine.

PageRank (PR) and is calculated using the quality and quantity of links to a webpage to determine a relative score of that page’s importance and authority on a scale of 0-10. 30% of blogs have a Pagerank of 0.

29. Panda

You must have heard of the panda up and down but you thought it was an animal, yes it is! but in SEO it is not.

It is an algorithm first released by Google in 2011, its major work is to filter duplicate content from search engines.

This change is aimed at lowering the rank of “low-quality websites” or “thin websites”, in particular, “content farms”, and return top-quality websites that produce quality content near the top of the search results according to Wikipedia.

This panda usually filters pages in 1-3 months.

30. Permalink

This is the additional URL of a web page that links to different web pages on a website. An example of a permalink is /-start-a-blog.

This is attached to my root domain bloggingscope.com to make it look like a URL.

Permalinks are very important in SEO as Search Engines stipulate that they must not be lengthy and must contain your focused keywords.

31. Ping Submission

Pinging in SEO is the process of submitting your website or blog to different search engines or web directories by the use of a pinging tool.

If you are the type that posts frequently on your blog and hunts for backlinks frequently then you need to submit your links to ping submission sites.

This will make search engines index your website (blog) pages faster

32. Readability

Readability is the ability of a reader to understand a written text with ease.

In blogging, the readability of your posts depends on the content (the complex (such as typographic aspects like font size, line height, and line length

33. Robots.txt

According to Google, a robots.txt is a file usually a page that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site.

You can use robots.txt to block resource files and webpages you don’t want search engines to crawl such as yourblog.com/wp-admin.

If you think these web pages are restricted and search engines should not view them then they should be included in yourblog.com/robots.txt.

To do this then this is where you will need your Google Search Console.

34. Search Engine

If you don’t know this as of now then I must say what I have been saying since will just be rubbish to you (don’t lie you did not get what this post is actually saying).

Now read this definition am about to give you on search engines and go through the post from the beginning.

A search engine is an online service that allows online users to search for queries in the form of content via the World Wide Web.

Search engines crawl millions of web pages on the World Wide Web so when online users search for queries, they display matching contents from these crawled webpages to them.

We can say search engines are the middlemen between online users and Webmasters.

35. SEO plugins

SEO plugins are plugins that can boost your SEO ranking by giving you some basic tips at the back end of your blog on how to improve your SEO.

Examples of these plugins are Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Google XML sitemap, etc.

36. SERP

An acronym for Search Engine Result Page. Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query or question asked by an online searcher. These SERPs are crawled from millions of websites.

37. Short Tail keywords

They are the opposite of long-tail keywords, they are search phrases with one to two words.

They are very hard to rank for because they are competitive, to me Pagerank and domain age are the ultimate determinants for getting ranked for short-tail keywords.

Examples of short-tail keywords are “Domain name” “Egg” “Blog” etc.

38. URL

Firstly what are the differences between a URL and a domain name?

Many do get confused when we use URL and domain name interchangeably they are different although they serve almost the same purpose.

A URL is the address of a World Wide Web page while a domain name is a personal name given to a particular website.

They are usually joined as suffixes to the URL.

Still confused? Url is http:// when joined with a domain name it will be http://www.domainname.com so when joined with domain and permalink it will be http://www.domainname.com/permalink.

All these are URLs but the domain name is the name you bought from your registrar

39. White hat SEO

White hat SEO (the opposite of black hat SEO) refers to any legal practice that improves your search rankings on a SERP staying within the search engines’ code of conduct. They are keyword research, original and lengthy posts, etc.

40. XML sitemap

According to techopedia.com simple definition, A sitemap is a model of a website’s content designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site.

These pages are filled with hyperlinks to all pages on your website, when you update your content this sitemap will display the link of newly updated contents and the time you update them.

A sitemap makes it easier for crawlers to easily navigate around your pages to search for pages to index.

Waiting for the last ten? We will keep adding and adding till this list reaches 1000 you can also take part in this by telling us the SEO words you don’t know of but you’ve seen somewhere, we will surely list them here

Finally, if you have SEO terms we did not include and you know the meaning, please do well by including them in the comment section.

If you also have SEO terms we did not include and you don’t know them please do well by also posting them in the comment section, we will surely find meaning in them.

Also note that we will keep updating this list for “SEO Glossary: Definition of SEO and 50 terms related to it” every month so keep refreshing this page every month to get new terms.

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