SEO Glossary

Crawling - The process by which search engines discover your web pages.

Featured snippets - Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries.

Google Business Profile listing (GBP) - A free listing available to local businesses

Indexing - The storing and organizing of content found during crawling.

Intent - In the context of SEO, intent refers to what users really want from the words they typed into the search bar.

Local pack - A pack of typically three local business listings that appear for local-intent searches such as “oil change near me.”

Organic - Earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.

People Also Ask boxes - A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.

Query - Words typed into the search bar.

Ranking - Ordering search results by relevance to the query.

Search engine - An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user. Examples - Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

SERP - Stands for “search engine results page” — the page you see after conducting a search.

SERP features - Results displayed in a non-standard format.

Traffic - Visits to a website.

2xx status codes - A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page has succeeded.

4xx status codes - A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page resulted in error.

5xx status codes - A class of status codes that indicate the server’s inability to perform the request.

Algorithms - A process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways.

Backlinks - Or "inbound links" are links from other websites that point to your website.

Bots - Also known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” these are what scour the Internet to find content.

Caching - A saved version of your web page.

Citations - Also known as a “business listing,” a citation is a web-based reference to a local business' name, address, and phone number (NAP).

Engagement - Data that represents how searchers interact with your site from search results.

Google Quality Guidelines - Published guidelines from Google detailing tactics that are forbidden because they are malicious and/or intended to manipulate search results.

Google Search Console - A free program provided by Google that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing in search.

Index - A huge database of all the content search engine crawlers have discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.

Internal links - Links on your own site that point to your other pages on the same site.

Meta robots tag - Pieces of code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.

Navigation - A list of links that help visitors navigate to other pages on your site. Often, these appear in a list at the top of your website (“top navigation”), on the side column of your website (“side navigation”), or at the bottom of your website (“footer navigation”).

NoIndex tag - A meta tag that instructions a search engine not to index the page it’s on.

Robots.txt - Files that suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn't crawl.

Sitemap - A list of URLs on your site that crawlers can use to discover and index your content.

URL parameters - Information following a question mark that is appended to a URL to change the page’s content (active parameter) or track information (passive parameter).

Local queries - A query in which the searcher is looking for something in a specific location, such as “coffee shops near me” or “gyms in Brooklyn.”

Long-tail keywords - Longer queries, typically those containing more than three words. Indicative of their length, they are often more specific than short-tail queries.

Search volume - The number of times a keyword was searched. Many keyword research tools show an estimated monthly search volume.

Alt text - Alternative text is the text in HTML code that describes the images on web pages.

Anchor text - The text with which you link to pages.

Auto-generated content - Content that is created programmatically, not written by humans.

Duplicate content - Content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain.

Geographic modifiers - Terms that describe a physical location or service area. For example, “pizza” is not geo-modified, but “pizza in Seattle” is.

Header tags - An HTML element used to designate headings on your page.

Image compression - The act of speeding up web pages by making image file sizes smaller without degrading the image’s quality.

Image sitemap - A sitemap containing only the image URLs on a website.

Link equity - The value or authority a link can pass to its destination.

Link volume - The quantity of links on a page.

Meta descriptions - HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. Google sometimes uses these as the description line in search result snippets.

Title tag - An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page.

Redirection - When a URL is moved from one location to another. Most often, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).

Browser - A web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, is software that allows you to access information on the web. When you make a request in your browser (ex - “google.com”), you’re instructing your browser to retrieve the resources necessary to render that page on your device.

Rich snippet - A snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines show of URLs on its results page. A “rich” snippet, therefore, is an enhanced version of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by the use of structured data markup, like review markup displaying as rating stars next to those URLs in the search results.

Schema.org - Code that “wraps around” elements of your web page to provide additional information about it to the search engine. Data using schema.org is referred to as “structured” as opposed to “unstructured” — in other words, organized rather than unorganized.

Structured Data - Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.

Directory links - “Directory” in the context of local SEO is an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business’s name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website. “Directory” can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google’s guidelines - “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.”

Editorial links - When links are earned naturally and given out of an author’s own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.

Link building - While “building” sounds like this activity involves creating links to your website yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site’s authority in search engines.

Link exchange - Also known as reciprocal linking, link exchanges involve “you link to me and I’ll link to you” tactics. Excessive link exchanges are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

Link profile - A term used to describe all the inbound links to a select domain, subdomain, or URL.

NoFollow - Links marked up with rel=”nofollow” do not pass PageRank. Google encourages the use of these in some situations, like when a link has been paid for.

Qualified traffic - When traffic is “qualified,” it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page, and therefore the visitor is more likely to find the content useful and convert.

Referral Traffic - Traffic sent to a website from another website. For example, if your website is receiving visits from people clicking on your site from a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as “facebook.com / referral” in the Source/Medium report.

Unnatural links - Google describes unnatural links as “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page.” This is a violation of their guidelines and could warrant a penalty against the offending website.