SEO Glossary 2021 – 60 Essential Terms for Beginners

SEO Glossary 2021 for beginners

This blog post deals with the 60 most essential SEO glossary terms for beginners.

That will make search engine optimization a much easier task for them.

That being said, there are hundreds of more terms that can be a part of the SEO glossary

But these 60 terms are enough for you to get going in the field of digital marketing.

SEO is a vast field in itself, which has a lot of new terms originating every day.

But a few of them are constant and the most important ones.

For now, let’s have a look at them.

The Sixty Important SEO Glossary Terms

 

Terms 1 – 5

 

    • Alt Text (Alternative Text): It refers to the words that describe the purpose of an image for search engine crawlers. As Google crawlers can process text only, thus it is vital to write a description that defines the image at its best. The other name of Alt Text are Alt description, Alt tag, and Alt attribute.
    • Anchor text: It is one of the important SEO glossary terms. It refers to a colored, clickable text on a webpage that leads you to another webpage upon clicking. An anchor text can be your primary keyword or it can also be words that are relevant to the content of the linked page.
    • Algorithm: It is one of the most important SEO glossary terms. That refers to the set of ranking factors based on which Google allots ranking to different webpages on SERPs. The more ranking factors the webpage signals to Google, the better ranking it can achieve.
    • Backlink: Backlinks are also known as inbound or incoming links. They are the clickable links that lead Google crawlers as well as users to a whole new website. For example: If someone sets up a link to your site on their site, it means you will be receiving a backlink for them.
    • Bounce Rate: It refers to the percentage of people who moved on to another site right after seeing a single page on your site. A higher bounce rate is always bad, keep it below 40%.

SEO Glossary Terms 6 – 10

 

  • Broken Link (Dead Link): Links on a site that are clickable yet do not open or work are broken links. Such links lead you to Error 404 page. It happens because either the URL is incorrect or the webpage it is linking to does not exist anymore.
  • Black Hat SEO (Spamdexing): It is a kind of SEO, that is illegal. In black hat SEO, you try to dodge and manipulate search engines so that you can achieve higher rankings in SERPs.
  • Branded Keyword: A keyword that contains the name of a company or brand in it is a branded keyword.
  • B2B and B2C: Two very known SEO glossary terms which are acronyms for “business-to-business” and “business-to-consumer.” B2B is a type of business that sells products or services to other businesses only and not the consumers. Whereas, businesses that deal with consumers directly are known as B2C.
  • CSS (Cascading Style Sheet): It is a kind of programming language that is extensively used in web page development. CSS describes the look and style of a webpage. Such as color, size, fonts, etc.

Terms 11 – 15

 

  • CTA (Call to Action): It can be a word or phrase, that urges people to buy the product or service right away.
  • Canonical Tag: A tag that helps crawlers to distinguish between original and duplicate content on a site. It saves you from any penalty as well as signals which page should be indexed in results.
  • Click-Through Rate: It measures how many people click on the links you have provided in the anchor text, ads, listing, etc. Hence, it is a ratio of clicks and impressions the links get.
  • Conversion Rate: Conversion refers to the goals people set for their websites. It measures the total number of people who are completing that conversion goal on a site. For example, For an e-commerce site, the goal would be to sell products. And if someone buys your product, it becomes a conversion.
  • Dead-End Page: A page on a site that leads a crawler or user to no other page. It is called dead-end because it has no links on the page for further navigation.

SEO Terms 16 – 20

 

  •  DoFollow: A dofollow link is the one that allows Google crawlers to crawl the hyperlinked website also.
  •  DA:  It is short for “Domain Authority”. DA is a score given to websites by Moz ranging from 0 to 100. It signals the potential of a site to rank in Google. The greater DA the better ranking it achieves.
  • Doorway Pages: Another important SEO glossary term and technique that you must stay away from. It is a part of black hat SEO. According to which there are pages when a person clicks on them, he is redirected to some other site that is not relevant to your query.
  • Dwell Time: It refers to the time spent by individuals on a website. A website that has a higher dwell time will naturally rank higher in SERPs. As the dwell time signals the quality and performance of a website from users’ perspective to search engines.
  • Drip Feed: It is the process of creating 2-3 backlinks daily for a site. It looks natural and it is better than unnatural link building that Google detects as spam or black hat technique.

Terms 21- 25

 

  • Duplicate content: Content that is not unique or original. Duplicate contents are copied content that never ranks in the SERP.
  • Domain name: A domain name is simply the address of a website. You can’t find a website without knowing its domain name. It is always unique thus when you enter it in the search bar it leads to that website only.
  • E-commerce Sites: E-commerce sites are those that involve buying and selling of online services and products.
  • External Link: A link that leads the users to a totally different site or page is an external link.
  • Follow Links: Follow links allow users and specifically Google crawlers to crawl the linked sites utterly.

SEO Glossary Terms 26 – 30

 

  • Featured snippet: It is a feature that shows the most relevant text as a quick answer to your query on top of the SERPs. It is an alternative way of ranking higher in SERPs.
  • Guest posting: It is a strategy in which people post a number of articles and posts on third-party sites to gain traffic.
  • Google Search Console: Another important term in SEO glossary. Old name “Google Webmaster Tool”. It tracks the performance of a website from a search engine perspective.
  • Google Crawlers: A crawler is also known as “bot” and “spider”. That crawls websites through links for indexing.
  • Grey Hat SEO:  It is again an illegal kind of SEO that is bland of both white and black hat SEO.

SEO Terms 31 – 35

 

  • Header Tags (Title Tags): In simple words, these tags are headings that you use in content. It ranges from H1 to H6 that shapes the entire content on a page.
  • HTML: It is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. A programming language that sets up the structure of every website.
  •  Inorganic results: Also known as paid results. These are short-lived results that are visible until someone keeps paying for them. Nonetheless, this is the quickest way to getting a higher rank.
  •  Internal Linking: Linking a page to other pages of the same site for user and crawler navigation is called internal linking.
  • Indexing: When a bot crawls and scans your site, it indexes the site in Google search result pages. This is what we call indexing.

SEO Glossary Terms 36 – 40

 

  • JavaScript: It is the third type of coding language that developers use in every web page development. It works to make a webpage interactive for the users. For example, the zoom in and out features on a webpage.
  • Keyword: It is a phrase of two or more words that people extensively write in the search bar to search for a query.
  • Keyword stuffing (Overstuffing):  It refers to the act of overusing a keyword throughout the content to optimize it for Google.
  • Long-Tail Keyword: Long-tail keywords are more precise and longer in length. Such keywords are easier to rank on and have a good conversion rate.
  • Lead generation:  It is a famous SEO glossary term for online businesses. It is a process of knowing people who seem interested in your product and services and later contacting them for further dealing.

Terms 41 – 45

 

  • Meta description: It is the section of text that you can see right below the title and URL in search results. A description that summarizes the content inside the link for the users.
  • Manual Penalty: A penalty that you receive for going against Google’s terms of services.
  • No Follow: No follow links are clickable links with a tag in coding, saying rel=“nofollow”. It stops the crawler from scanning the linked URL.
  • Organic Search Result: It refers to the listing of a website, based on its relevance to the search query.
  • PPC: Pay-per-click, is a way of attracting more traffic to your site through running online advertisements. In which an advertiser pays for an ad if a consumer clicks on it.

SEO Terms 46 – 50

 

  • Pagination: It refers to the process of dividing a single content over multiple pages. Pagination is common for articles or e-commerce sites.
  • PA:  It is short for Page Authority. That refers to the score given for the performance of an individual page on a site. It must always be high.
  • Robot.txt: A very important term in SEO glossary. It is a file through which you can instruct Google crawler to scan those pages only that you allow it to.
  • Rendering: It is the process that takes place before a user could see the final layout of a webpage.
  • Referral Traffic: Traffic that a site receives from outside the search engine. Referral traffic is usually the result of clicking hyperlinks on third-party websites.

SEO Glossary Terms 51 – 55

 

  • Rich Snippet: These are the additional elements you see other than the title, URL, and meta description. Elements such as reviews, star rating, and an image. Rich snippets add more information for the users.
  • SERP: It is short for the Search Engine Result Page. It is the page you see after you hit enter for a search query. A page that has several organic and paid results on it is SERP.
  • Site Map:  It is the listing of pages of the same site. Developers use it during web development to understand a site structure properly.
  • Spam Score: A spam score of a site depends on the sites you are taking backlinks from. If you are taking backlinking from an unauthorized site that uses duplicate content on it, the SS of your site will automatically increase.
  • The Local Pack (Map Pack): It is the set of three local results that you see in Google. It comes along Google maps- which tells you a physical location to their stores also.

Terms 56 – 60

 

  •  Traffic: In the context of SEO, it refers to the number of people who visit your website.
  •  Time on page: It is a term that Google Analytics uses to describe the time people spend on a specific site or page. It is the same as dwell time.
  • TLD:  It is an acronym for Top-Level Domains. You can find it at the end of a domain name right after the (dot). For example, .com, .org etc
  • URL: Uniform Resource Locator. It is different from the domain name. A domain name is the address of a site, whereas a URL is a unique page address. It can be long and difficult to remember.
  • White Hat SEO: It refers to the legal ways of ranking a site in SERPs.

Conclusion

So the above SEO glossary terms are very important and useful for a beginner coming into this field. This glossary will surely help you understand future projects properly. Thus give them a good read and share your reviews about it. Also, click beginner’s guide to SEO 2021 to read the latest guide.

 

 

 

 

 

Asad Rana

Asad Rana

Digital Marketing Specialist

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