SEO Glossary

Algorithms – A process/formula by which information is retrieved and ordered

Anchor Text – Text with which you link pages, to help search engines to understand the destination the page is about

Alt Text/Tags – Alternative Text is text used in HTML code to describe the images on web pages

Backlinks – Links from other websites that point to your website

Black Hat – Black Hat SEO is a search engine optimisation practise that violates Google’s quality guidelines

Bounce Rate – The percentage of total visits that did not result in a secondary action on your website

CTR (Click Through Rate) – The ratio of impressions to clicks on the URL’s

Conversion Rate – The rate of visits to conversions e.g. filling out forms, signing up to newsletters, adding items to online basket

Crawling – The process by which a search engine discovers your web pages and blog posts

Engagement – How searchers/users interact with your site e.g. clicking through, social media likes, comments etc

Google Analytics – A free tool to help website owners to get insight into how people engage with your website

Google My Business Listing – GMB is a free listing available to local businesses, that appears on the right hand side of the search engine results pages

Google Search Console – A free program that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing in search engines

Header Tags – H Tags/Headings – Text on your website that is placed inside a heading tag to help structure content and help crawlers to identify the most important content on a page, seen as H1, H2, H3 etc

Image Compression – The act of speeding up website pages by making image file sizes smaller, whilst keeping image’s quality

Indexing – The storing and organisation of content found during crawling

Internal Links – Links on your own website that point to other pages or blog posts on the same site

Keyword – A word that users enter in search, that can be added to your website to optimise it to draw users in

Keyword Stuffing – Overusing important keywords and their variants in your content and links, that can be seen as spam

Navigation – A list that helps website visitors to navigate to other pages on your website

Meta Description – Meta Description are a brief description of the contents of a page or post, which are used in the description line in search result snippets in Google

Organic – Earned placement in search engine results, as opposed to paid advertisements (such as PPC)

Page Title – Often called a title tag, this specifies the title of the web page, and appears above the meta description in Google results

Query – Search terms typed into the search bar

Ranking – Ordering Search results by relevance to the query

Redirection – When a URL is moved from one location to another – often a 301 redirect

Relevance – How well a local business matches with what the user is searching for

Responsive Design – Google’s preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, allows the website to adapt to git whatever device it is being viewed on

Search Engine – An information retrieval system that searches for items in a database, that match the request or search term inputted by a user. E.g. Google

SERP – Search Engine Results Page is the page a user is sent to after search for a query in a search engine

Search Volume – The number of times a keyword is searched

SSL Certificate – A ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ that encrypts data passed between web server and the browser of the searcher

Sitemap – A list of URLs on your website that crawlers can use to discover and index content

Traffic – Visits to a website

URL – Uniform Resource Locators – locations and addresses for pieces of content on the web