SEO Glossary

1-9

301 Redirect

A permanent redirect from one URL to another.

302 Redirect

A temporary redirect from one URL to another.

404 Error

A message that indicates a webpage cannot be found.

A

Above the Fold

The part of a webpage that is visible without scrolling.

B

Black Hat SEO

Unethical SEO practices that violate search engine guidelines.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page.

Broken Link

A link that no longer lives because the destination webpage has been moved or deleted, the page has a 404 not found response code.

C

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the preferred version of a webpage that search engines should index and consider as the authoritative source when multiple URLs have identical or similar content. It helps resolve issues related to duplicate content by specifying a single URL as the “canonical” version.

Cannibalization

Cannibalization is the competition of multiple pages on a website with each other on the same keywords. 

Cloaking

Cloaking is a manipulation technique to show different content to the user on the search engine and drive traffic to the page and this is spammy.

CMS

CMS (Content Management System) is a software platform that allows users to create, edit, and publish digital content.

Core Web Vitals

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine, like Google, is willing to crawl on a website within a given time frame.

Crawl Demand

Crawl demand is a component of a website’s crawl budget that represents how often search engines like Google desire to crawl a site’s pages based on their importance and freshness.

Crawl Health

Crawl Health is a quick response to a crawl request, efficiency, and effectiveness of how search engines crawl.

Crawl Limit

Crawl Rate

CTR

CTR (Click-Through Rate) represents the percentage of users who click on link compared to the total number of users who view the link (impressions).

D

Duplicate Content

E

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) is a concept to evaluate the webpages’ quality, especially such as health, finance, and news content.

Evergreen Content

The content type will never lose its importance or popularity. Evergreen content remains relevant and valuable over a long period.

External Link

External link is a hyperlink on a webpage that points to a different website.

F

Featured Snippet

The featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user’s query at the top of Google’s search results. Such as if you ask Google “London time” you will see the current time in London.

G

Guest Posting

Writing content for another website to gain backlinks and promote your brand.

H

I

Inbound Link

Links from external websites to your website.

Internal Link

A link that points to another page on the same website.

J

K

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the analysis of the related words about content that make up the texts to be used on a web page.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an excessive number of keywords or phrases in content to manipulate its ranking in search engine results. This practice is unnatural or difficult to read, and spammy.

L

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a technique for late loading of the images, video, or iframe resources used on the pages, out of the visible screen, to increase the performance of web pages.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time it takes for the largest visual or text area to appear in the visible area during page load.

M

Migration

SEO Migration refers to the process of managing changes to a website in a way that preserves or improves its search engine optimization (SEO) performance. This involves making sure that the site maintains its search engine rankings, traffic, and visibility during significant changes such as a domain switch, redesign, or platform migration.

O

OGP (Open Graph Protocol)

Open graph tags are meta tags that help reflect data such as titles, descriptions, and images when sharing web pages on social media. It was created for the first time by Facebook.

Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are web pages that aren’t linked to other pages on a website, making them difficult for users and search engines to find.

Outbound Link

The links you give to other websites on your website are called outbound links.

P

PageRank

Penalty

A penalty is a manual action punishment by a human reviewer at Google for violating their guidelines.

Pogo-Sticking

When users enter the web page through the SERP and then immediately exit and click on other results, it is called pogo-sticking.

R

RankBrain

RankBrain is Google’s first deep-learning system. It is an artificial intelligence algorithm created to make sense of the concepts that the queries users search for are related to.

Redirect Chain

A redirect chain refers to multiple redirects that occur when one URL forwards to another URL, which then forwards to another, and so on, before finally reaching the destination page. Each redirect in the chain adds to the time it takes for the user’s browser and search engine crawlers to reach the final destination.

Rich Snippet

S

Schema Markup

Code added to a website to help search engines return more informative results.

Search Intent / User Intent

The purpose behind a user’s query. It describes what the user is hoping to accomplish or find when they enter a particular query into a search engine.

Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO is an approach to search engine optimization that focuses on understanding and optimizing for the meaning and context behind search queries, rather than just targeting specific keywords.

SERP

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) refers to Google’s listing of resource pages for a user’s search.

Sitelinks

Additional links that appear under the main URL in search engine results.

SGE (Search Generative Experience)

SGE (Search Generative Experience) is the release of AI-powered SERP results. 

Soft 404

A Soft 404 occurs when a webpage returns what appears to be a valid response, usually a 200 HTTP status code (indicating success), it serves content indicating that the page is not found or empty pages.

T

Thin Content

Low-quality content with little or no value to the user.

U

User Agent

V

Volatility

SERP volatility refers to the fluctuations and changes in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a particular set of keywords over a short period. It indicates how stable or unstable the rankings are for specific search queries. High SERP volatility means significant and frequent changes in the rankings, while low volatility indicates more stable and consistent rankings.

X

X-Path

Y

Z