20 SEO Glossary Of Terms You Should Know By Now!

These SEO terms are a must to know about. We have hand-picked most commonly used 20 terms for you. So let’s get going with this shorter list – hope this will help you create a lasting impression on your coworkers (or date):

1. 301 Redirect

When you delete pages or change URLs, they don’t just dissipate into the digital universe. So when users try to search for a URL that no longer exists, they receive a 404 error, or ‘Not Found’ page. To avoid confusing users and to pass on any ranking authority from retired pages, it is best practice to use a 301 redirect. 301 redirects will redirect users and search engines from the old URL to another active page that you specify.

2. Adwords

Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common way of basic website advertisement.

3. Affiliate

An affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.

4. Analytics

A program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.

5. Bot (robot, spider, crawler)

A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.

6. Canonical Tag

It’s an HTML link element that lets webmasters to inform search engines about some duplicate content pages they’ve created. The tag is placed in the HEAD section of the HTML structure. Here’s what it looks like:This tag informs that the current page is a copy of the page located under the address set in the canonical tag (href).

The main idea is that when a search engine sees this tag it does not rank that page, but transfers all the rankings to the canonical page. So in essence it’s very similar to the 301 redirect.

7. Deep linking

Deep links are particularly valuable for SEO. Linking to specific pages within your site with a good anchor text improves the rankings of these pages. Essentially, building deep links is where SEO game is won or lost.

8. Impression (page view)

The event where a user views a webpage one time.

9. Indexing

Indexing is the search engines’ process for collecting and storing data across the web. The search engines are constantly scouring the web for updated and new pages to add to their massive databases of information. When the search engines do find new pages, they ‘index’ it, meaning they add a copy of it to their database, so that they can retrieve it during searches.

10. Link Bait

A webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media. It’s like fishing bite only for links. Basically, it’s a piece of highly viral content. Content that is most likely to attract a lot of links, hence – linkbait.

Creating linkbait content is usually very hard even though the principles are simple. There are a couple of ways you can choose: (1) create something really funny, (2) create something of exceptional quality, (3) create something that brings a lot of value for free.

Linkbait content is not only text. Videos, pictures, graphics, and audio work equally well.

11. Nofollow

A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.

12. Noindex

A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.

13. Organic Search

You’re doing organic search when you visit Google, input a phrase and push the search button.

14. PPA (Pay Per Action)

Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.

15. PPC (Pay Per Click)

A contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

16. Redirect

Any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.

17. Robots.txt

A file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.

18. ROI (Return On Investment)

One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.

19. SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. A SERP is what is returned to you after typing in a search query. In essence, it’s a page of results after you search. SERP is a coined SEO term that you’ll hear frequently.

20. User Generated Content (UGC)

Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an advertising venue.

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