SEO Terms | Glossary with +75 Definitions

ALT attribute

The ALT attribute is the tag that tells Google information about an image — both for context and to display in case the image fails to load.

Anchor text

The anchor text is the visible text added to a link to give the user information about where it leads.

B

Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are the links pointing to our site from other pages.

SEO Benchmarking

SEO benchmarking — also known as competitive analysis — lets us identify our competitors' strengths and define a strategic plan to beat them in the search results.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO covers the SEO practices that are frowned upon by the community because they aim to manipulate rankings unethically or by exploiting Google's weaknesses.

Branded SEO

Branded SEO — or branded traffic — includes all the web traffic that captures keywords containing the brand name in what the user is searching for.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a navigation tool that helps users by showing all the categories a page belongs to, and they also improve crawlability for search engines.

SEO Briefing

An SEO briefing is an initial questionnaire of questions and insights provided by the client based on a structured list, designed to deepen our understanding of their business so we can deliver better services.

C

Canonical tag

The canonical tag is the snippet of code added to a page to tell Google which URL we want it to index — that is, the main one.

SEO Checklist

An SEO checklist is a list of items to verify, with the goal of running a thorough audit across each strategic area.

Clickbait

Clickbait is a well-known technique — and one users tend to dislike — in which the author crafts a flashy headline that doesn't always reflect the content, with the goal of attracting more clicks and traffic.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a black-hat technique that consists of showing different content to users and to search engines in order to game rankings.

SEO Consultant

An SEO consultant is a professional whose goal is to improve a site's organic ranking — and with it, its traffic, conversions, and ultimately revenue.

Content curation

Content curation is the process of analyzing and improving older content to lift its ranking and results.

Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics created by Google to measure web performance and define best practices for building sites.

Crawl budget

The crawl budget is the time and resources search engines spend on our site to crawl and analyze our content.

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which search engine robots/spiders fetch, analyze, and classify our content so it can later be served in the search results.

CTR

The CTR or Click Through Rate is the percentage of clicks over the number of impressions a page gets in the search results.

D

Deindexing

The term deindexing refers to the process of removing a URL from the search results — either because it was indexed by mistake or for other reasons (thin content, duplication…).

Disavow

The disavow is a file uploaded to Search Console to tell Google which links it should ignore — usually because they're artificial, low-quality, or because we believe they could lead to a penalty.

Domain authority

Domain authority is the relative value assigned to a domain or page to measure its relevance.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content refers to text or resources that are repeated across multiple pages of a site, either intentionally or accidentally due to filters or other issues. It can become a serious problem for the site's SEO performance.

Dwell time

Dwell time is the time between when a user visits a site and returns to the search results. It typically signals user dissatisfaction: if the user has to go back, it means they didn't find all the information they were looking for.

E

eCommerce SEO

eCommerce SEO is the optimization strategy applied to online stores to improve their organic traffic and, with it, the project's revenue.

SEO Emojis

Also known as emoticons, SEO emojis are small icons that express emotions or ideas. Used well in SEO, they can help boost your page's CTR.

404 Error

The 404 error appears when a page can't be found — whether by a user or by a search engine. In both cases, the experience is negative. To fix it, we should always indicate whether it's a page that won't return (410) or, instead, redirect it to another valuable page.

F

FAQ Schema

FAQ Schema is a type of data markup whose goal is to increase CTR and visibility in the search results.

Featured snippets

Featured snippets — also known as position zero — are the results Google rewards with a prominent placement at the top of the search results.

Footprints

Footprints are small search shortcuts that many SEO professionals use to filter the searches they want (information in titles, number of indexed pages…).

G

Google penalties

Google penalties are actions taken by Google's team to punish bad practices, lowering a site's rankings and traffic.

H

Hreflang

Hreflang tags are meta tags whose purpose is to tell Google the different languages a page is available in, so it understands they are translations and not duplicate content.

Htaccess

The .htaccess file is a document that lets us collect the main directives and configurations for the server.

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a new communication protocol that enables faster file transfer between users and servers.

I

Indexing

Indexing is the process search engines run to include the pages of our site in the search results.

Internal linking

Internal linking is the discipline that studies the transfer of authority between pages and how they connect to one another.

K

Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages from the same site appear in the search results for the same keyword. It can be positive — if both results are valuable to the user and the business — or negative if pages we don't want to promote are showing up.

SEO KPIs

SEO KPIs are the metrics that let us closely track our SEO strategy and properly evaluate its performance.

L

Landing page

A landing page is a page on our site whose goal is to maximize signups or leads for our business (calls, registrations, contact-form submissions…).

Lazy loading

Lazy loading is the concept that defines loading elements as the user scrolls into them, rather than loading the page "completely" the moment it lands.

Link juice

Link juice is the concept that defines the transfer of authority — both internal and external — through links.

Log Analysis

Log analysis is the process of analyzing search engine visits to our server to detect potential improvements in the crawling process.

Long tail

Long-tail keywords are those with relatively low search volume that tend to convert better, since they're more specific and have lower competition.

LSI Keywords

LSI keywords stands for "Latent Semantic Indexing" — keywords that help reinforce the context and semantics of an article.

M

Meta description

The meta description is the SEO tag that holds the description shown in the search results, right under the title.

Meta tags

The meta tags are snippets of code that help us provide additional information to search engines — about images, indexing rules, and more.

Mobile First Index

The Mobile First Index is the process by which Googlebot focuses all its priority on crawling websites with its "mobile" agent rather than its "desktop" one.

N

Nofollow

The nofollow link attribute is a hint we give Google about the authority we want to pass through that link. That said, the search engine ultimately decides how to interpret it according to its own criteria.

Noindex

The noindex tag lets us tell search engines that we don't want a given page (or group of pages) to appear in the search results.

O

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO covers all the ranking techniques that don't involve modifying the page itself. Instead, they're external authority campaigns.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO covers all the practices for improving rankings and traffic by working on our own content (titles, links, images, speed…).

Open Graph

The Open Graph protocol is the set of social meta tags that lets pages render with a better design (title, description, image…) on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to all the visits coming from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing…).

Orphan pages

Orphan pages are those that aren't linked to and don't form part of the site's main architecture, so they don't get the SEO treatment they should.

P

Page Experience

Increasingly, Google considers Page Experience when scoring webpages, based on three criteria: load speed, user interactivity, and visual stability.

PageRank (PR)

PageRank is a value Google assigns to each website to reflect its authority. Google stopped publishing this value years ago, but it remains as alive as ever.

SEO Podcasts

SEO podcasts are short audio pieces with exclusive content about the industry. In our post, we suggest some of the most interesting ones.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

Progressive Web Apps are a technology that lets users browse offline and load pages faster thanks to a special caching system.

R

301 Redirect

The 301 redirect — or permanent redirect — is created when we want our systems to send users and search engines to another page when they visit a given URL: a URL change, the old one no longer exists, etc.

302 Redirect

The 302 redirect — or temporary redirect — is used to divert traffic temporarily from a specific URL: content errors, time-bound campaigns, and so on.

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are code fragments used so search engines can better understand our content, helping us land a more visible and prominent placement in the search results (job listings, books, articles…).

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is the system used to tell crawler bots which pages they aren't allowed to visit.

S

Sandbox

The sandbox is a concept SEO professionals use to define the period of time between when a project is created and when it actually starts ranking for its target keywords. It's the time during which Google "verifies" the project's true quality.

Search intent

Search intent is the term used to describe the relationship between what the user is looking for and the results the page provides.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — also known as organic search — is the marketing area that studies the organic traffic coming from search engines and all the factors that influence page rankings.

SEO vs. SEM

The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO aims to improve the page organically by working on its technical aspects, whereas with SEM, simply paying guarantees the page appears in the top results.

SERP

SERPs — Search Engine Results Pages — are the pages search engines return for our queries with all the results: organic (SEO) and paid (SEM).

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the extra links shown under the domain in the search results when Google decides there might be more relevant pages than the homepage for a brand search.

Sitemap

The sitemap is the XML file whose purpose is to tell Google all the pages on our site that we want indexed.

Slug

The slug is the part of the URL that names the page being accessed. Within seocrawl.ai/thin-content, the slug would be "thin-content". It's a term used heavily when we work with friendly URLs.

Structured data

Structured data is a type of code markup added to pages to provide search engines with extra information. The most recommended (including by Google itself) is Schema.

T

Thin content

Thin content refers to low-quality or shallow content that isn't optimized for users and can lead to Google penalties.

SEO Tips

Do SEO tips — understood as shortcuts to rank your site faster while skipping the work of building a solid strategy — really exist? Or is that something that's been left in the past?

SEO Title

The SEO title is the meta tag where we define the title shown in the search results — different from the article's classic title or H1, which can be completely different.

W

Web Architecture

Web architecture is the discipline that studies how pages, articles, and categories are structured to maximize user usability and search engine crawling.

Web Stories

Web Stories are a new type of content created by Google with the aim of building a tool that allows sharing multimedia content with great loading speed and good usability.

WPO

WPO — Website Performance Optimization — is the area that handles a site's speed and performance. Its main goal is to analyze and understand all the elements (images, scripts, CSS, JS…) that make up a page and optimize their layout to minimize the resources needed for the site to load as fast as possible.