SEO Glossary
SEO Glossary
SEO Glossary
GLOSSARY
450+ SEO TERMS AND PHRASES
WITH EASY TO UNDERSTAND EXPLANATIONS
2018
PREFACE
This glossary provides an extensive list of terms commonly used in Search Engine
Optimization.
It is meant for a wide audience – from SEO experts and marketers to business owners,.
Everyone from SEO experts to those just interested in this marketing discipline can use this
book as a reference base.
Even when the term is not strictly related to the field of SEO, the definitions try and explain
the impact on and possible use in SEO.
-Team Morningscore
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE..........................................................................................3
SEO GLOSSARY...............................................................................5
A........................5 N.......................39
B........................6 O.......................39
C........................9 P........................41
D........................14 Q.......................44
E........................17 R.......................45
F........................19 S.......................47
G.......................19 T........................54
H.......................25 U.......................56
I.........................27 V........................58
K........................30 W......................59
L........................33 X........................60
M.......................37 Y........................61
INDEX...............................................................................................63
SEO GLOSSARY
A
Absolute URL (Absolute link, Absolute path)
A link used for internal linking. It shows the absolute (or full) path to a file, HTML page,
image or anything else you might want to link to within your website.
This link is used as a part of the anchor tag and consists of a protocol, a domain name,
possibly a subdirectory and the name of the file, document, HTML page, image or something
else.
There are two types of paths used in internal linking – one being the absolute and the other
relative. There is, however, no indication that one is more beneficial than the other in terms
of SEO.
There are frequent small updates that go unnoticed, but there are several major updates in
a year that can have a big impact on your rank.
Major updates in the past few years include Panda, Penguin, Pirate, Hummingbird, Pigeon,
Mobile Friendly, RankBrain, Possum and Fred.
Algorithmic penalty
The process of your website being suppressed in the SERPs reducing the search rank of
your keywords. They are hard to notice unless you keep an eye on any significant drops in
your website traffic.
The only way to get rid of them is to try to find any issues that might not follow Google’s
guidelines and fix them.
SEO GLOSSARY 5
Alt tag (Alt attribute)
The alt tag is inserted within the image tag in HTML and used to specify alternate text for an
image. Including a description of the image so screen readers and search engines can get
an idea of what is on it is considered a good practice for accessibility and improving content
relevance.
By using keywords in your image alternate text, you can optimize them for Google’s image
search service.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. In terms of SEO, it is best to use natural
language and avoid exact match, overly spammy and keyword rich text when linking to other
sites.
Authority site
A site trusted by the user, its industry and industry experts. These sites both publish
trustworthy information and link to trustworthy sites, getting a reputation of a high quality,
knowledgeable website.
B
Backlink (Inbound link, Incoming link, Citation, External link)
A backlink is created when some other website is linking to your website. In essence, it is a
“vote of confidence”, a citation that shows that this other website points to you as a valuable
and relevant source.
An effective link has high link authority and high link relevance.
The number of backlinks to a specific website is one of the most important factors when
determining its page rank.
Baidu
The most popular search engine in China with a Chinese market share of 69.54% (the next
in line are Shenma and Sogou) and a market share of 1.37% worldwide. Baidu offers almost
the same services as Google.
SEO GLOSSARY 6
Bait and switch (Code swapping)
A black hat SEO technique where you use certain content on a webpage to rank high in the
SERPs. Then, after you are satisfied with the rank, the content of the webpage is swapped
out with something else (content which usually wouldn’t be able to get a good rank).
Banner blindness
A well-known phenomenon that describes people’s tendency to ignore elements on web
pages that they believe to be advertisements. Ads are considered interruptive and pointless
by the users and they filter it out while skimming the page looking for anything of importance.
Bing
A search engine owned by Microsoft with a market share of 3.18% worldwide. According
to research 85% of Bing users live in the USA, 87% of the users use it because of Internet
Explorer, they are for the most part 35+, less tech-savvy and are more likely to have children.
Also, according to some statistics Bing users spend 25% more than users on other search
engines.
Blog commenting
Blog commenting was a very popular link building tactic where you find a blog article that is
relevant to your niche and leave a comment with a link.
Nowadays this tactic is cause for debate. Since it was over abused and people massively
spammed blog articles leaving links and irrelevant comments everywhere, comment sections
now apply a nofollow to links. Google also put a stop to this practice by penalizing links from
irrelevant websites and by reducing the link equity passed on by pages that contain massive
amounts of links.
As you can see, this tactic can hurt you more than help you. That being said, there are still
cases where this is appropriate. Leaving a valuable comment in a blog article can help you
build relationships in your niche and result in guest posting opportunities. You might not get
link equity, but what you can expect is traffic increase.
SEO GLOSSARY 7
Bounce rate
A metric that shows how many visitors came to your website and then left immediately
after without performing any actions or browsing any of your other pages. A rule of thumb
is the lower bounce rate the better. Having a high bounce rate (over 70%) is a cause for
concern and can be caused by many different issues like slow page load, low-quality content,
unresponsive landing page, using too many ads, your visitors not finding your page relevant
for the keywords they used etc.
You can use Google Alert to track any mention of your brand, service or product.
Example: Home>men>shoes>boots
It is beneficial for both user experience and crawling, as it provides an improved internal link
structure for large sites.
They can also be displayed in the SERPs instead of the usual site URL. This creates links
that are readable and user-friendly. You can set this up with the Yoast plugin if you are using
a WordPress website
SEO GLOSSARY 8
Broad match keyword
A keyword matching option in Google Ads. When using broad match for a keyword, your ad
will appear for searches containing that keyword or a similar one. This includes phrases,
singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms, stemmings, and related searches.
C
Call to action (CTA)
Refers to a website trigger (usually a button) designed to get an immediate response from a
website visitor. These triggers usually use commanding words that are meant to persuade
the visitors to perform a certain act like Buy, Register, Write Now, Call, Sign Up.
Having a clear call to action on your landing page improves SEO as it will help your visitors
determine what their next step is increasing their time spent on the website and reducing
bounce rates.
SEO GLOSSARY 9
Churn and burn SEO (Rank n’ bank)
A Black har SEO strategy where you mass spam a website with unnatural links getting it
to rank high in a very short time. The website will get penalized eventually, after which the
owner deletes it, but until then the website earns revenue.
Clickbait
A link that is meant to entice the user to click on it. These links either use anchor text or
headline tags that are playing on the user’s curiosity. Using words and phrases like incredible,
amazing, ultimate, “must see” and “you won’t believe”, these links have a chance of increasing
their CTR. Using clickbait might increase the traffic to your website but think it through first
to make sure it is appropriate for your particular niche.
Competitor analysis
Evaluating the competitors that rank for the same keywords you do or belong to the same
niche. A competitor analysis will help you find out which tactics work in your niche and
which areas you should prioritize.
• getting ideas for optimizing your search result title and description
Content
Content is all the information available on a website. It includes text, images, videos, and
animations. In terms of SEO, content is a major factor in attracting traffic and influencing
user experience.
SEO GLOSSARY 10
Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS is a dynamic website where multiple users can edit, update and maintain the content.
They are simple to learn and easy to set up. One of the most popular examples of a CMS is
Wordpress.
In the term of SEO, it is a bit of a trade-off – a website can be set up in a matter of minutes
using templates, but you do not have any control over the code. So once the template is in
use, you will not be able to make any changes. On the other hand, this is ideal for people that
do not have a desire to deal with code. There are plenty of SEO plugins you can use to help
with SEO activities.
Content marketing
A marketing method that focuses on the creation and sharing of high quality, valuable online
information (in the form of video, audio or text). The purpose is to draw interest and be
perceived as a credible source, so you gain more visibility and increase brand awareness.
As a disclaimer, writers often spin content in their articles to reduce the similarity ratio, but
if this is done for only a small portion of your content and you are only posting it once, you
have nothing to worry about.
Conversion
An act of getting the user to perform the desired action. As an example, this occurs every
time a website visitor signs up, downloads your e-book, follows a link from your email or
interacts with our CTA.
SEO GLOSSARY 11
Conversion rate
A percentage of users that completed the desired goal (made a conversion) out of all the
users that have seen your ad/website/e-mail/CTA that was intended for the purpose of
visitor conversion.
SEO and CRO go hand in hand and ideally complement each other. SEO is meant to drive
traffic to the website and CRO tactics are meant to convert and ensure that the website
generates revenue. Insights and data from your CRO should be also used to find issues and
do SEO.
Copied content
Copied content is content that has been copy-pasted from another source. Sometimes
they are just chunks of content and other times whole pages have been chopped up and
then pasted together creating something seemingly new. Some words can be replaced with
synonyms, or one word can be replaced with another throughout the text using the “find and
replace” function. This is a riskier version of duplicate content as it can have the purpose of
misleading the search engines and can be a cause of a red flag.
Cornerstone content
The most important, extensive articles on your website. They are high quality, easy to read
and cover everything that is important in a specific topic. They are usually hub articles that
are at the center of your link structure linking and linked to many of your web pages.
If you are using a WordPress website, you can mark a post as cornerstone content with the
Yoast plugin.
Cost per acquisition (CPA, Cost per action, Pay per acquisition, Pay
per action)
An online pricing model where you pay when a certain action is performed by a user. The
example of an acquisition can include a sale, download, sign up, visit your site or something
else.
SEO GLOSSARY 12
Cost per click (CPC, Pay Per Click, PPC)
A payment method used by Google Ads where the advertisement price is based on the
number of clicks the ad gets.
Crawl (Crawling)
The process performed by the search engine crawlers where the complete content/code of
a website is analyzed. In simplified terms, this happens by the crawler following all internal
and external links.
Crawlability
Crawlability refers to the process of enabling the crawlers to easily navigate, understand and
efficiently find content and index your website.
Site crawlability can be improved by creating an XML and image sitemap, avoiding orphan
pages by efficient internal linking, optimizing site speed, images and video and the proper
use of redirects.
Crawl budget
Made up of crawl rate and crawl demand, the crawl budget describes the number of your
website URLs that Google will crawl.
This does not affect small websites. Larger websites should, however, take this into
consideration as pages with stale content that are found somewhere low in your link hierarchy
(and especially if your website is not rather popular or healthy) will possibly be overlooked.
SEO GLOSSARY 13
Crawl depth
Crawl depth is the extent to which the search engine indexes a website. You can check this
by testing your page depth, meaning see how many clicks you need to reach a page starting
from the home page. The deeper the page’s location, the harder it will be for it to rank well
in the SERPs.
You can reduce this problem by using breadcrumb navigation and internal linking.
Crawl demand
Part of the crawl budget, the crawl demand describes how much importance the search
engine places on a specific URL. The deeper the page is in the link structure (more than 4
clicks from the home page for example), the less important it is.
Cross-linking
Linking domains owned by the same company or person. It should not be a problem if the
websites are topically related and there are not many links. Exact match anchor text and
site-wide linking should be avoided to reduce the risk of penalty.
Curated content
Content that we did not create, but we find it very relevant and valuable for our visitors. We
then organize and present it to them. The purpose is to create a knowledge-hub that the
users will visit frequently to get information on their niche, making you an influencer and an
expert.
D
Data
Distinct pieces of information. In SEO terms it usually points to analytical information used
to determine who our visitors are and how they interact with our website
SEO GLOSSARY 14
Dead-end page
If you have a web page without any links it creates a dead-end for your visitors and search
engine bots giving them no other choice than to leave the site.
It’s easily avoided by including navigational links in your header/footer, breadcrumbs or links
suggesting the next step for the visitor.
De-indexing
The process of removing a web page from the search engine index making it unable to
appear in the search engine result pages. This is done by setting the value of the HTML
robots meta tag to “noindex”.
The reason why you might want a page de-indexed could be if you have a page that does
serve a purpose, but it isn’t ranking. Example of these pages include login and thank you
pages.
Deep linking
A method using internal links within the website content. Basically, a deep link is any link
from one web page on a website to another web page on the same website. This is used in
calls to action or within articles, where a link is used to lead the visitor to a page with more
informative content.
It is an important SEO method to spread link equity to your web pages and prolong visitor
dwell time and engagement. Also, you will probably have a different, but topically similar set
of keywords for each page and linking between them increases overall page relevancy.
Direct traffic
The number of visits to your website where the visitor typed in your exact web address (URL)
into the browser.
Disavow links
Not all backlinks are beneficial to your site. Backlinks from unrelated and untrusted sources
are considered bad and can get you penalized or in the least have a negative effect on your
SEO. This is where Google’s Disavow links tool comes in helping you notify Google that you
do not want a certain link from an external site considered when your page is being ranked.
SEO GLOSSARY 15
Dofollow link
All links are by default dofollow links, meaning they pass along what we call “link juice” and
let crawlers follow them helping a page’s placement in the SERPs.
Domain
The location of a website typically displayed as a domain name or an IP address.
Domain name
A domain name is the text that people type in the browser address bar in order to get to a
website (www.domainname.com). It is one of the ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, so
it is a good idea to make it SEO-friendly.
You can improve yours by, for instance, getting more backlinks from reputable websites.
Doorway page (Gateway page, Entry page, Jump page, Bridge page,
Portal page)
Created to manipulate the search engine and rank high for particular phrases and keywords
while actually having low-quality content.
These pages are created for generating revenue from ads and affiliate links.
DuckDuckGo
A search engine that puts an emphasis on user privacy and does not use personalized search
results. This means that the users are not being profiled and all the users get the same SE
results for a specific search term.
DuckDuckGo has 4.7 million daily users, 50% of them are from the USA and 45% are European.
SEO GLOSSARY 16
Duplicate content
Duplicated content is a substantial block of content that appears on more than one web
page (within the same domain or across different ones). The problem with duplicate content
is that when a search engine bot finds it, it will not be able to determine which domain has
more relevance on the subject.
But duplicate content is also a common occurrence within a page. For example, if you have
a separate mobile or a local version of your website. In this case, you should pick a page that
will be the original and add a piece of code (rel=canonical) to all the others, clearly pointing
the search engines to the original version.
Example: www.dynamicurl.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date
E
Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T)
Google’s indicators for page quality that influence ranking.
• making sure you have ample amounts of content which is updated and edited frequently
(kept fresh)
• have good online and website reputation (be used as a resource by relevant websites
SEO GLOSSARY 17
Editorial link (Natural links, Organic links)
The best backlink you could wish for. They are part of a strong link profile and they are
neither paid for or requested.
These are links placed within the body of the content and serve the same purpose as a
citation, meaning the author of the content has named you as a trustworthy knowledge
source on the subject and thinks that their readers will find the link valuable and useful.
Ego-Bait
One of the link building tactics where you use a link to a company/person/ organization in
your content, then contact them in hopes they reciprocate with a backlink.
• a page with a broken link in an article that matches the topic of one of your web page
• websites that are relevant to your niche, with a high DA, low amount of outgoing links and
a possibility for you to be included in the content body as a relevant resource
SEO GLOSSARY 18
Expert document
An unaffiliated web page with links from many topically related hubs.
Expert documents are used by Google’s Hilltop algorithm to determine relevancy. These
expert documents can be informationally rich pdfs, e-books or web pages with guides on a
certain topic.
F
Featured snippet (Rich answer, Direct answer)
When the search term is in the form of a question the first listing in the SERPs might be in
the form of a featured snippet. It is displayed in a box with an answer summary and the
website link underneath.
There is not much we can do to have our website displayed in the featured snippet. Google
determines programmatically which website best answers the question and displays it. The
one thing we can influence is preventing Google from using our website for the featured
snippet by using the nosnippet tag, but it will also block the display of descriptions under
your SERP listing.
Google checks trends and spikes in search volume for a keyword before determining how
relevant freshness is for it.
G
Geotargeting
A method of targeting users based on their geographical location.
This is usually done because you want to display different content or ads to your visitors
depending on where they are.
SEO GLOSSARY 19
Google (Google Search, Google Web search)
World’s most popular search engine with a market share of 90.91% and a plethora of extra
services and tools.
Here are some of the tools and services that are important for SEO:
• Google+
• Google Alerts
• Google Analytics
• Google Maps
• Google My Business
• Google Trends
• YouTube
Google+
Google’s social networking service where users can create profiles, organize in sharing
groups called circles and join communities. Companies, organizations can set up a Google+
page (like in Facebook) to connect to and communicate with their fanbase.
The content you post there gets indexed immediately, so it should be used as an SEO tool in
marketing a person, company or organization.
Google Ads
An advertising service developed by Google where users bid on keywords in order for their
ads to appear in Google and its advertising network.
This is what Morningscore is trying to save you money on by helping you improve your SEO
and showing you its value compared to paid traffic from Google Ads.
SEO GLOSSARY 20
Google Alerts
A content change notification service. You can set it up to follow various keywords and
phrases and get an e-mail when content with those keywords gets indexed.
Some of the keywords you can track are your name, service, your product or company name.
This you can use for reputation management or for link building. You can also monitor your
competition and track changes in their content.
Google Analytics
Google’s web analytics service that gives you precise data on the use of your website.
After you add the tracking code to your website you will receive detailed data on your
website traffic. There are many segmentation options. With it, you are able to track your
users, their geographical location, interests, devices they use to access your website, their
dwell time and bounce rate. You can also get data on the amount of traffic you receive from
referrals, how much is direct and what percentage of it is organic. Lastly, you can see how
your website performs in terms of speed and content.
Google Autocomplete
A search feature that provides suggestions while the user is typing in the query into the
search box. It is an excellent source of long tail keyword ideas as it displays most commonly
searched phrases.
Some Google bomb examples include the query of “completely wrong” returning the
knowledge graph with Mitt Romney and “miserable failure” returning George W. Bush in the
results.
Google bowling
A black hat SEO method where you create backlinks to your competitor on spammy, non-
relevant websites trying to get the competitor penalized, reducing their rank in the SERPs.
SEO GLOSSARY 21
Google Fred (Google’s Fred update)
A major algorithmic update to Google’s search and ranking system. Released in March 2017.
it de-ranks gateway pages and websites created for the sole purpose of filling it up with ads
and affiliate links.
It can be used for free. All you need to do to access it is choose Tools > Keyword Planning
on https://ads.google.com
Google Maps
A web service offering traditional road maps, satellite imagery, 360o panoramic street view,
and route planning.
Having a listing here is very important for your local SEO as it increases your chances of
being displayed in a rich snippet called the map pack.
You can test the mobile-friendliness of all the web pages of your website using
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
It will give you a score and a detailed list of issues (and how to fix them).
SEO GLOSSARY 22
Google’s Mobile Friendly update (Google’s Mobile update,
Mobilegeddon)
A major algorithmic update to Google’s search and ranking system. Released in April 2015.,
this update de-ranks websites that are not optimized for mobile viewing.
Google My Business
With Google My Business you are able to create and update your business listing. The
information you set here will be used in local search results and display your business on
the Google map. It will also be used to display a Business panel to the right of the traditional
search results in the SERPs. This panel will include images, map location, user generated
content (reviews), information on your opening hours, phone address, website and it might
even include a knowledge graph relevant for your business.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Google penalty
A negative impact on your search ranking due to a manual action or algorithmic penalty.
These happen due to an update to the search algorithm or because you did not follow
Google’s guidelines.
SEO GLOSSARY 23
Google Pigeon (Google’s Pigeon update)
A major algorithmic update to Google’s search and ranking system. Released in 2014. it
connected Google Web search and Google Map and started using location as a key factor
in ranking.
Using he search console you can track the performance of your website, submit sitemaps,
see if there are any manual penalties set on your site and check if all your pages have been
indexed.
https://search.google.com/search-console
Google Trends
An online tool that lets you check the popularity of keywords and phrases. It uses graphs to
show the search volume over a period of time.
This can help you when creating a strategy since keyword popularity tends to change during
the year. Then you can create content when the popularity and search volume is peaking.
SEO GLOSSARY 24
Google Webmaster Guidelines
A collection of best practices when doing SEO that will make it easier for the search engine
to crawl, index and understand the content of your website.
The suggestions here can be scraped for long tail keyword inspiration or for discovering
user interests.
One of these practices is link buying/selling. Practically untraceable when bought within
your niche, this practice will not get you penalized, but it is not considered ethical. The same
thing goes for buying likes and shares for your social media pages.
Guestographic
A link building method where you reach out to websites with a similar topic to your infographic
and have them use it to supplement their content in exchange for a backlink to your site.
H
Hit
Each time a file is downloaded from your site is considered a hit. This includes your page’s
HTML files, images, videos, graphics, buttons etc. A website page has on average 15 hits.
SEO GLOSSARY 25
Homepage
The first (main) page of a website that loads when a visitor types in a web address that only
contains the domain name. It is the starting point of the website and the most used page.
Hreflang attribute
Used to mark up pages of a multilingual site. Using this attribute you can make sure that
users have the page displayed in the right language based on the language they use in their
query.
They can be used to help with the duplicate content. Sometimes you have a website that has
the same content for different locations (like UK and USA), with small variations like currency.
In this way you let Google know which location or language this webpage is optimized for.
Keep in mind though that you will still have to work on link building for each webpage to
make sure it has enough authority to be displayed in the desired location.
They are the simplest way of telling both our reader and the spiders what we believe is the
importance hierarchy of the content. Do not use them to define font size, it is better to do
this through CSS. You should always keep to the order of the headings, do not use an H4
unless you have an H2 and an H3 also.
Assigning an H1 to a title means that this is the most important element on your page and
you should only use one.
HTML sitemap
An HTML sitemap is intended for visitors (unlike the XML sitemap made for search engines).
Made in a form of a bulleted list, it displays links to all the pages on the website. It shows its
hierarchy and helps visitors with navigation.
It can be used during the development phase to ensure a good structure that will both spread
link juice efficiently and make sense to the visitor navigating the site.
They do not hold the same weight in SEO as XML sitemaps, but they are not completely
without SEO value.
SEO GLOSSARY 26
HTML source code
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the standard markup language used to create web
pages and applications. The HTML source code is the format readable to humans and
it is the only stage where we can modify the code before the compiler translates it into
what you see in your browser. You can view your source code in any browser (right click +
Inspect in Chrome and right click + View Page Source in Firefox). If you wish to modify it, it
is recommended to use a plain text or code editor. The bulk of technical SEO is done in the
HTML source code.
Hub
A page that contains numerous links to the most relevant and accurate websites in its niche.
Hyperlink (Link)
A link is a clickable (or tapable) text or an image that provides direct access to another page
or section of a page, providing easy navigation through the web.
I
Image filename
An image filename is a unique name used to identify an image in a file system. It consists of
a name we assign to it ourselves and a file format.
The filename is your chance of explaining the image content to the crawlers. It should:
• be as descriptive as possible
• but try and keep it short – don’t use stop words like a, the, it, to etc
• be somewhat unique (using names like shoe1.jpg, shoe2.jpg, shoe3.jpg will not help you
much)
• include keywords
SEO GLOSSARY 27
Image title
The image title is an attribute that you can add to the image tag in HTML. In case the image
cannot be displayed the title will take its place. Currently, it does not affect your ranking, but
it does improve your site’s accessibility.
Image SEO
Refers to optimizing all the images on a website so you can increase content relevance,
search engine visibility, and screen reader accessibility.
• making sure the file is the right size, so it does not slow down the website
Image sitemap
An XML file containing all the images from your website you would like crawled and indexed.
This can be a separate file or added to the existing XML sitemap.
Impression
Each time an ad is displayed on the user’s screen or a website is displayed in the SERPs is
counted as an impression.
Index
The search engine database that contains data about all the websites the crawler could find.
If a website is not included in the index, it will not be displayed in the SERPs. You can easily
check if and to what extent your website is indexed by typing your URL with “site:” before it
in the search bar. The results displayed will be all the pages on your website that have been
indexed.
Indexability
A state of a website where it allows the search engine bots to index its pages for later use in
the SERPs. This can be prevented by using the noindex value in the robots meta tag.
SEO GLOSSARY 28
Indexing
The process of including a website in the search engine database. The easiest way to get
your website indexed is by having others link to you and then waiting for SE bots follow
those links.
• use Google webmaster tools and add and verify your website
• get backlinks from high DA websites as they get crawled more often
• make sure that you are not using a “noindex” value in your HTML robots tag
Internal link
If the destination of your link is found on your website then it’s an internal link.
Internal links connect your website pages and make it easier for the visitor and search bot
to navigate through it. It includes not only the navigational links but also links where you
suggest to the visitor which page to visit next.
Using the right internal link strategy can help your SEO as you can control your website
structure and give certain pages more importance by placing them higher in the hierarchy.
International SEO
International SEO is meant to increase your visibility in other countries and create global
growth. You can set up country and language detection and display appropriate content
automatically.
• optimize for the most used search engine in the country of your choice and use their
keyword planning tools (for example Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China)
• hreflang will specify the content language of your web page and help the search engine
display it to the right target group
SEO GLOSSARY 29
• translate the HTML elements of the web page used for SEO – URL, meta description and
title
• translate the content of the webpage, including the navigation, image names and alt tags
Interstitials
A disruptive, promotional page that is inserted in the normal website content.
For example, a pop-up or lightbox that covers the whole web page, that a visitor came to
see, and that needs to be manually closed to continue browsing. This makes content hard
to access and reduces user experience.
Having an interstitial immediately or shortly after a user clicks on your link in SERPs on your
mobile site can result in a penalty.
K
Key performance indicator (KPI)
It is a metric that you set yourself to measure how effectively your business or team is
performing toward reaching a business objective.
Some examples of KPIs in the SEO industry are monthly organic traffic, keywords in top 3
SERPs, retention rate, the number of backlinks and many, many more.
Keyword
Words or phrases that users write into the search box to find a website with matching
content.
Specifying a keyword and using it in your content is what helps spiders categorize your
website and display it at the right time.
This is valuable information for anyone that is trying to figure out which keywords drive the
most traffic to their websites.
SEO GLOSSARY 30
Fortunately, there are a few methods to get insight on some of these keywords:
• Go to Google’s search console and check out the performance report, if you scroll down
you get a queries list
Keyword analysis
The process of evaluating all the keywords that you are currently using and those that you
discovered during your keyword research. The important metrics for you are search volume,
CPC, competition, and current SERP position. You can add a desired SERP position to the
mix and group the keywords by user intent, meaning are they using these keywords when
they are looking to buy a product, when they are just browsing or something else important
for your website.
Keyword cannibalization
Using the same keyword for multiple web pages. This damages your SEO as you basically
compete for rank positions and traffic with yourself.
Keyword categorization
A process of classifying and grouping keywords based on user intent and context at the time
of the query. Keyword categorization can help with determining the keywords that users
query at different stages of the buying process, so we can use them on specific landing
pages that were meant for the purpose of conversion.
Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of the keyword being used on a page compared to the
total number of words. It is used to determine the relevance of a web page, but there is no
clear information on what the optimal percentage is. In fact, it is easier to overdo it, than it
is to hit the sweet spot.
SEO GLOSSARY 31
Keyword frequency (Term frequency)
Similar to keyword density, but this time we measure the total number the keyword was used
on a web page. The amount of content on the web page is of no importance in this case.
Keyword funnel
Based on customer intent and what stage of the buying process they are currently in, the
customer’s search terms change. We can categorize our keywords by these buying stages
and optimize the specific landing pages to increase conversion.
Keyword prominence
Refers to how important or noticeable the keyword is. Prominent placement is at the start
(or near the start) of the title, headings, meta description, and the opening paragraph.
Keyword proximity
Refers to how close the keywords are on the page. As an example, if the search term contains
multiple words like “SEO tool for bloggers”, then the distance between the 3 relevant words
is checked in the content and the closer they are together the more relevance the web page
gets.
Keyword rank
This is your position in the SERP listings for a specific keyword.
Keyword stemming
In linguistics, a word stem, base or root is the most basic part of the word that holds
meaning. To this root prefixes or suffixes are added creating stemmings. By using keyword
stemmings we can create whole lists of different keyword variations. Example: luck, unlucky,
lucky, luckless, luckiest etc.
SEO GLOSSARY 32
Keyword stuffing (Keyword spam)
A black hat SEO tactic where a certain keyword is repeated over and over again on the
same page in order to deceive the search engine spiders that the content is relevant for this
keyword. What is most characteristic about it is that the keyword is placed into the content
unnaturally creating a spammy text that will not bring value to anyone reading it.
Knowledge graph
Meant to enhance the result of a Google search, a knowledge graph pulls information from
several sources.
The best example of it is the knowledge panel, a box placed to the right of the regular search
results containing images, various detailed information, and suggestions for further search.
L
Landing page
A specific page that appears after the visitor clicks on a link. These pages are optimized for
promotion and conversion and are usually connected to a marketing campaign.
In SEO each landing page can have different keywords and are optimized accordingly.
Linkbait
Valuable content that other websites will naturally link to. It is unique, high in quality and
informative, with a tendency to go viral. Hard to achieve, but exceptionally beneficial for SEO.
SEO GLOSSARY 33
• reach out to bloggers and influencers, write guest posts or submit your website to niche
directories
• leave links in blog and forum comments (use this approach with caution, because
overuse could be penalized)
Link burst
A Link burst is when you gather a big number of backlinks in a short amount of time. It can
be a cause for a red flag for the search engine because it could indicate that you are using a
link farm or SEO services that are creating link spam.
Alternatively, it is ok to have high link velocity on a web page with content that went viral.
Link condom
A very crude way of describing the use of a nofollow attribute value in a link, as it prevents
the passing of link juice (*cringe*).
Link diversity
A link building strategy where you try to collect an array of links from different types of
websites (blogs, news, directories, social media) and different domains (.com, .edu) with
various anchor text, as well as having both “nofollow” and “dofollow” links.
Not all SEO experts agree that this is important, but it does give a signal of a natural link
profile where a certain type of link isn’t being represented more than the other.
Link equity (Link authority, Backlink authority, Link juice, Link value)
Link equity refers to the notion of a link influencing the rank of a website. It is a term describing
the process of one-page passing authority or value to another through the use of hyperlinks.
This practice can get you a hefty manual penalty and is best avoided.
SEO GLOSSARY 34
Link hoarding
A tactic employed by some websites where they try and gather as many inbound links as
possible while having as few outbound links as possible.
This is done to increase traffic and link popularity towards these few websites the outbound
links are pointing to or to keep from passing traffic and link equity to anyone else (by marking
the outgoing links as nofollow).
It is considered a disreputable tactic and it can hurt just as much as having too many
outgoing links.
Link popularity
Refers to the total number of backlinks a website has. Every backlink is counted separately,
even if it comes from the same website.
Link reclamation
The process of getting lost links back. It is a tactic with a high ROI because of the high
likelihood of success.
Link rot
Eventually your web pages become old. Also, the web pages you are linking to get old and
very often they get moved or deleted. The effect this process has on your web page is then
called link rot.
It refers to having many broken links (external or internal) and it happens when you do not
do regular site audits and check your link profile.
SEO GLOSSARY 35
Link spam (Blog spam, Comment spam)
A method where many links are posted in blog comments, forums, guestbooks or other
similar places online, for the sole purpose of increasing your rank and without actually
leaving anything of value in the post itself.
The links posted in this way are mostly nofollow, so there is no actual benefit to your rank
and you do risk a penalty for using this method of link building.
Link velocity
The speed at which a website is creating new backlinks. How fast or slow you grow your
backlink profile matters for your SEO.
The more natural the link velocity seems, the better. Think logically, a new site with next to
no content shouldn’t be getting a huge number of backlinks in a short time (also known as
a link burst).
Local citation
Any mention of the company name, website address, physical address or phone number for
a local business. They can impact local search engine rankings and make it easier for
Local SEO
Local SEO is a process of optimizing customer traffic based on a geographical location.
Local search
A geographically constrained search that displays businesses that meet with their customers
directly (usually physical stores or service providers) based on their and the user’s location.
They are usually used by people close to the point-of-purchase and thus have a much higher
conversion rate than one-word, high search volume keywords.
SEO GLOSSARY 36
Lost link
A backlink that stopped passing link equity to your website. This happens due to removal
by the owner of the other website or moving of the page where the link was or where it was
pointing to.
M
Manual action (Google manual action penalty)
A big Google penalty where a human reviewer concluded that your website did not follow
Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. A site that receives a manual action either gets their
rank greatly reduced or they get removed from the SERPs completely. You should then try to
repair the issues and apply for reconsideration when everything is fixed.
You can check if your site has a manual action (and which pages are affected) here:
https://search.google.com/search-console/manual-actions
Metadata
Metadata is used to give descriptive information on a website. It is set up by use of meta
tags in the website’s code and put to use by the browser and search engine crawler. The
most important tags are the title, meta description, and robots, but they are just a drop in
the meta sea.
Google will also ignore your description if it is too long, so it is a good idea to stay under
757px for the mobile and 940px for the desktop version.
It does not necessarily influence your SEO but taking control of what is displayed in the
search result snippet can greatly improve your click-through rate.
Meta keywords
A metadata element that was used to inform search engine spiders about the relevant
keywords of a webpage. It was widely abused with website’s trying to manipulate the search
engines and naming keywords that were not relevant to the content. This is only one of the
SEO GLOSSARY 37
reasons why the meta keywords are no longer used as a ranking signal.
Nowadays, you should avoid using meta keywords as the effect they have on your SEO is
most likely negative.
Metric
A unit of measurement meant to track the performance of a website. The most important
SEO metrics are organic traffic, bounce rate, keyword rank, backlink count, CTR, page load
speed etc.
Mirror site
A complete replica of a website, placed on a different URL. They are used when the original
website generates too much traffic for the server to support. Mirror sites serve the population
in different locations (different continents) and ensure a good user experience and fast
page load.
Mobile-friendly website
A website optimized for viewing on a mobile device. This can be done in one of two ways,
either by having a mobile version of your website or making the website responsive (the
website scales down or changes its layout based on device screen size).
Mobile optimization
Improving a website so it is well suited for viewing and interaction via a mobile device.
SEO GLOSSARY 38
Optimizing for a mobile device usually means that the layout will need to be readjusted, the
text will need to be readjusted for easy reading, any navigation or CTA buttons enlarged, and
image size optimized.
Monthly clicks from Google to your website x the price you would pay for the clicks in Google Ads = your Morningscore
N
Negative SEO (Negative SEO attack)
Negative SEO refers to using black hat SEO methods to lower the rank of a competitor.
These include hacking the site to change the content and some off-page tactics like building
spammy, unnatural links and creating duplicate content.
Nofollow link
Nofollow is an attribute value of a link. By using it we inform the search engine crawler that
we do not wish to pass link equity to the website it is pointing to.
O
Off-page SEO
Refers to all the actions that improve your websites ranking in the SERPs that were not done
on the webpage itself. Included here is link-building and marketing for the sake of exposure
in the form of guest posting or social media marketing.
SEO GLOSSARY 39
On-page SEO (Onsite SEO)
On-page SEO is optimization of all the individual pages on your website. It is both optimizing
the content and the HTML source code in order to improve visibility and search engine
rankings.
Opt-in
A clear permission by a user/customer that the marketer may send direct messages (usually
emails). Many countries have clear legislation concerning sending direct messages and
sending unsolicited commercial messages can earn you a hefty fine. This is why you should
ask your customers for permission to send them a newsletter, promotional material or any
other email before you add them to a mailing list. You are then allowed to send emails until
the user opts-out.
Opt-out
A clear statement by the user wanting to be removed from a mailing list. Usually done via an
unsubscribe button in the mail itself or adjusting settings in a profile. Most countries have
legislation set in place that obligates the sender to give a clear chance for the user to stop
getting further commercial emails.
Organic rank
Organic rank is the position of a website in the traditional organic SERP listings.
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is the “free traffic” you get when a visitor finds your website through Google
searches. It is the opposite of paid traffic you get through advertising and what you are
trying to influence by SEO.
You can calculate the amount of organic traffic to your website by using this simple equation:
SEO GLOSSARY 40
Orphan page
A page on a website that has no links pointing to it. They cannot be found by a search bot,
so they are useless for SEO.
Outreach marketing
A type of marketing where we find individuals/companies/ organizations that share our
industry niche and could find what we have to offer valuable (this could be products and
services or content).
This type of approach is very targeted and personalized. We need to make a human to human
connection or we risk our email just being classified as spam.
Outreach marketing techniques that are used for the sake of SEO include e-mail or blogger
outreach for link building purposes.
Over-optimization
The practice of optimizing to please (or even trick) the search engine instead of delivering
user-friendly and relevant content to the visitor.
Examples of these practices include writing content to the keyword, where the keyword is
unnaturally repeated in the content or gathering backlinks at a suspiciously fast rate.
Doing this might get your website penalized or downgraded in terms of SERP ranking.
P
Page Authority (PA)
Domain authority measures how well the website will perform in SERPs and how competitive
it is compared to other sites in its niche and page authority does the same but for an individual
page. This is where your internal link strategy comes into play, as a page closer to the top
of the hierarchy with multiple pages linking to it, will be given more importance and a higher
PA than those further down.
SEO GLOSSARY 41
Page cloaking (Website cloaking, IP cloaking)
A black hat SEO technique where the search engine is presented with a version of content
that is different from that which the visitor sees. This is done by delivering content based on
the user’s IP address.
Page speed (Page load speed, Page load time, Page response time)
Page load speed is a measurement of how much time it takes for your entire web page
content to be displayed in the browser window.
The loading speed affects both your rank and user experience. Visitor bounce rate tends to
be higher on slower web pages and it even affects the dwell time and engagement.
PageRank (PR)
Google’s algorithm that measures the relevance and importance of a website in order to rank
them in the SERPs. It assigns a PR number to the website based on all the other websites
that link to it and their PR.
Paid traffic
Any incoming traffic to your website that resulted from a visitor clicking or tapping on an ad
you are paying for. It is a very popular strategy as the results are almost instantaneous. Two
well-known paid traffic platforms are Google Ads and Facebook.
To set it yourself you need to use the title tags in your HTML source code.
If your title is too long, Google’s algorithm will try and find an appropriate one itself. So, it is
a good idea to stay under 487px for the mobile and 568px for the desktop.
SEO GLOSSARY 42
Paid links (Link buying)
The process of purchasing backlinks that pass link equity. This includes any type of payment
like exchanging products or services in exchange for links or giving free products to reviewers
or influencers, not to mention some of the black hat techniques. It is a risky method that
could earn you a penalty.
There is no exact list of poison words, but it is suspected that phrases like “buy PageRank”
or “buy backlink”, terms related to gambling, politically incorrect terms and vulgar language
can get your page buried in the SERPs, especially when used in the web page URL, title and
description.
Precision
Probably the number one reason why Google is the most popular search engine in the world.
Google search engine’s high precision allows it to list accurate and relevant results that
satisfy the query. Search spam and the complexity of the human language negatively impact
this ability.
Pull channel
Channels used to draw the customers towards your product or service. These usually include
search engines and databases like Google, Bing or YouTube.
SEO GLOSSARY 43
Pull marketing
A marketing approach that tries to draw customers in using unobtrusive methods. The
potential customer is in the decision part of the buying process and is actively searching for
a product or service. We just need to make sure that our product is displayed before them
at that time and this we do by optimizing for the same keywords the potential customer is
typing into the search bar when trying to find the wanted product or service.
This strategy has a higher conversion rate than the traditional (push) marketing and often
creates loyal customers or followers.
Push channel
Channels use to display your product in front of the potential customer no matter if he
requested the information or not. These include ads on social media, YouTube and Google
Display Network.
Push marketing
In this marketing approach, you try to push a message by displaying an ad to a potential
customer without them showing interest first. These are ads before the video on YouTube,
banners, and pop-ups on websites or any other unwanted display of your product or service.
It is a very traditional way of marketing and often used because it is cheaper than the pull
alternative. On the other hand, it is considered interruptive so many internet users develop
something called “banner blindness” where they intentionally ignore anything that looks like
an add.
Q
Query Deserves Diversity (QDD)
One of Google’s ranking algorithms. It tries to match user intent by displaying broader match
results. Google monitors user behavior and identifies search patterns where the user did not
find the results relevant (the user either gives up the search, tries a different query without
clicking on the result or bounces from site to site).
SEO GLOSSARY 44
R
Reciprocal linking
An agreement between two websites to provide backlinks to each other. It should be done
with caution, as exchanging backlinks with a company that doesn’t share a topic with you
might hurt your site’s backlink profile and make it harder for the search engine spiders to
classify your site’s topic.
Referral traffic
All traffic coming into your website outside of the search engine. Here we include all the
backlinks you have gathered and links from other platforms like social media.
https://search.google.com/search-console/manual-actions
There are two types of paths used in internal linking – one being the relative and the other
absolute. There is, however, no indication that one is more beneficial than the other in terms
of SEO.
• increase the rank of pages that portrait the brand/person/ organization in a positive light
SEO GLOSSARY 45
• take ownership of branded keywords and make sure the results in the SERPs reinforce
your brand
• pushing down a negative Search engine result (a labor intense and difficult process if we
do not own that website)
The ROI percentage is calculated by dividing the net profit by the total investment and
multiplying by 100.
Rich snippet
By using structured data markup you can make your page easily indexable and allow SE bots
to better understand your content. In turn, Google can take this data and provide the search
engine user with additional small pieces of information right in the SERPs by displaying rich
snippets.
Compared to traditional search engine results, a rich snippet can, among else, contain a
thumbnail image, review ratings, publication date, additional links or location info. They do
not affect your ranking but do increase your CTR.
• nofollow – instruct the SE bot to not follow any links on this page
• nosnippet – a description will not be displayed in the SERP listing (only for Google)
• noimageindex – prevents the images from your page being displayed in the image search
• noarchive – a cached copy of your page will not be stored or displayed in the SERPs
• and more
SEO GLOSSARY 46
Robots.txt (Robots exclusion standard)
A text file used by a website to communicate to web robots (most commonly SE bots) how
to process each page of your website. Here you can set certain pages as off-limits for the
bot and scan only the most useful content.
S
Scraping (Web scraping, Content scraping, Scraped content)
Using an automated program (web scraper) to gather data (usually metadata) from multiple
websites. The data you gather could be all the titles of your competitor’s blog, along with
their meta descriptions.
This technique can be used for black hat SEO where the content is scraped and then posted
in its entirety on a website you will now have to compete with. When used as part of white
hat SEO, the data is used informatively, to discover niche opportunities, for link building
purposes or outreach.
Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Yahoo, Ask.com, Wolframalpha, and AOL.com
are currently the most used search engines.
Depending on the source, sometimes the term SEM refers solely to paid search.
SEO GLOSSARY 47
Search engine optimization (SEO)
A form of marketing focused on improving visibility and rank in the organic SERPs and
gaining organic traffic. It is not about catering to the search engine bots, but rather ensuring
a good experience for the user, as this is what the search engine bots are trying to ascertain
while analyzing your website.
Search visibility
Search visibility is an estimated percentage of clicks you receive based on the organic
ranking of your keywords.
SEO GLOSSARY 48
Search volume
The total number of search queries a certain keyword or phrase gets in a certain period of
time.
Secondary keywords
Secondary keywords are the keywords that play a supporting role to your primary keyword.
Since over optimizing your content with just one (primary) keyword could easily get
interpreted as keyword stuffing and get you penalized, it is a good idea to supplement with
other keywords.
These are usually long tail and LSI keywords that have a very specific niche and a lower
search volume.
Seed keywords
A list of the most relevant keywords to your business. They are usually comprised of only
one word and then used to create LSI or long tail keywords. They make the foundation of
your keyword research.
SEOnaut
That’s you! Our awesome Morningscore user exploring the realms of SEO.
There are two types of audits you could do to gain insight into website SEO issues: technical
SEO audit and content audit. You can do them using scraper programs (like Screaming frog),
many online tools or manually creating detailed excel sheets.
SEO GLOSSARY 49
SEO service (SEO service provider, SEO agency)
A paid service that we utilize to increase online visibility by having our website optimized for
search engines.
SERP feature
Nowadays Google is trying to offer the user an easily skimmable, rich array of relevant
information. This is the reason why they display the search engine results in various ways,
using SERP features which include everything besides the traditional organic results (made
up of a page title and description).
• Rich snippets
• Knowledge graphs
• Universal search
SERP shaker
A black hat technique using a software that creates content and websites with the sole
purpose of ranking for low competition long tail keywords. These sites are then used for
adds, creating backlinks, collecting emails and gathering revenue in other ways.
They appear for branded organic search and in the paid SERPs. You can set up the sitelinks
in the paid SERPs by using Google Ads.
However, in a branded organic search the situation is a bit different. The process is automated,
so you cannot influence if you will have sitelinks, how many, and which pages they will link
to. All you can do is make sure your website optimization is on point providing a good user
experience.
SEO GLOSSARY 50
Site-wide link
A link that shows up on all the pages of your website. These are usually links placed in the
header or footer section which is then used across your website.
SMM does not directly affect ranking in Google, but since social media also counts as a
search engine (and a highly used one), optimizing it will definitely pay off.
Social signal
A term that describes the engagement activities on social media like shares, votes, pins, views
etc. It is not quite clear if they influence ranking, but they for sure increase the likelihood that
a website will be cited increasing the number of backlinks and improving brand authority.
Social syndication
A content syndication method where we distribute the content we made to social media
sites in order to increase audience reach and create a buzz.
Splash page
An introductory page on a website, usually containing a large image or a video, a small
amount of content (like a brand name) and a button to continue further to the real content
(“Enter site”).
It is used as a home page for the website and is meant to showcase and promote the brand.
There are several reasons why they are a bad idea when it comes to SEO:
• quality content is one of the most important ranking factors and splash pages have little
to none
SEO GLOSSARY 51
• the home page is the most used URL for backlinks, so having a low performing home
page will tank your link authority
• full-screen images and videos can be slow to load and negatively affect your page load
speed making visitors bounce
• 3xx – redirection (301 – moved permanently, 302 – temporarily moved, 304 – not
modified, 307 – temporary redirect)
• 4xx – client error (403 – forbidden, 404 – not found, 410 – gone, 429 – too many requests)
• 5xx – server error (500 – internal server error, 501 – not implemented, 503 – service
unavailable, 550 – permission denied)
Crawlers use these to determine the health of a website and discovering and fixing some of
these will have an impact on your rank.
This is the optimal way of redirecting as it passes a very high of link equity to the redirected
page.
SEO GLOSSARY 52
page has been removed and its URL now points to a different page. The visitor will not see
a difference between this status code and the 301, but the search engines will not pass link
equity in for the 302.
Stop words
Refers to the most commonly used words in a given language. In English, these are the, a,
and, but, at, for… Search engines have been programmed to ignore it, so it is recommended
to exclude them in URLs, image names, anchor text and like, as long as it doesn’t hurt your
readability.
In 2011. Schema.org joined together with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex to create a list of
standard structured data that they will support and display in their SERPs.
SEO GLOSSARY 53
Submission
The action of making search engines aware of your new web page by manually submitting
a URL in order to have it indexed faster.
It is a common belief that this is not necessary, as the crawlers are pretty good at discovering
new content and will eventually index your website or web page if they have links pointing to
it. However, sometimes it takes a while before your brand-new website/web page pops up
in the SERPs. A few days is normal, but if it takes a few weeks you might want to consider
submitting it manually to the search engine.
You can manually submit your website to Google by adding your XML sitemap in the Google’s
Search console.
T
Technical SEO
This is the part of SEO that deals with making it as easy as possible for the search engine
bot to crawl and index your website and focuses on improving its rendering phase.
Technical SEO is the foundation of all your other SEO activities and absolutely necessary if
you want to keep your website performing optimally.
It includes:
• site performance
• image optimization
• site structure
• responsiveness
It checks the number of times a keyword (and any LSI keyword) has been used in the content
of one document and cross-references it with all the other documents in the group.
The fold
The portion of your web page that the visitor can see without scrolling. It is the first impression
your visitor gets and can influence the bounce rate and dwell time.
SEO GLOSSARY 54
Some of the best practices when it comes to above the fold placement include:
• landing pages that are used for conversion should have a CTA here
• always show a hint of the content from below the fold so the visitor doesn’t leave by
mistake thinking he/she saw everything there was to see
Thin content
In its essence, thin content is defined as content that offers little to no value to the user. This
could be anything from pages with very small amounts of text, computer-generated content,
duplicate pages, copied pages, low-quality affiliate pages or doorway pages.
The most common strategies when dealing with thin content are:
• remove it
Traffic
A common term describing all the visitors arriving to your website. Types of traffic include:
• direct
• organic
• paid
• referral
Traffic potential
The maximum number of organic visits that you can get on your website if you ranked #1
on Google for your keywords.
SEO GLOSSARY 55
U
Uniform Resource Locator (URL, Web address)
A unique piece of text a user types into the browser to reach your website (www.yourwebsite.
com).
The URL consists of three basic parts: the protocol, the domain name, and the path.
There are two types of URLs – dynamic and static. The search engines prefer the static one
as it is easier to determine its contents.
Unique visit
The first time a user arrives at your website and continues to browse. If a visitor with the
same IP address comes back at a later point it will not be counted into the number of unique
visits.
Unnatural link
Any outbound link that is artificial, deceptive or manipulative. These links are usually paid
for, created by scraping or spamming or a result of a low-quality SEO service and can earn
you a manual action by Google. One way you can combat unnatural links is to have a good
content strategy and only include reputable backlinks while disavowing the ones that you
cannot remove yourself and are not valuable or natural.
SEO GLOSSARY 56
URL parameter (Link parameter)
Values set dynamically in a page’s URL during a query.
Example: www.dynamicurl.com/query/thread.php?threadid=64&sort=date
In the example, everything following the ? is the query string that contains link parameters
containing data about the content.
User engagement
A metric describing how good a website is at holding the visitor’s attention and keep them
browsing your website.
• site structure
• site speed
These factors affect both the human visitors and search engines alike and have an impact
on our SEO.
User-friendly
Easy to use and not difficult to learn or understand.
User-generated content
Any type of content posted by users of a website. This includes comments, reviews, images,
video and posts on social media and more.
User-generated content strengthens SEO since they will often use long tail keywords and
related links in what they post. It also boosts your social signals and gives you inspiration
for new keywords and content.
SEO GLOSSARY 57
User interface (UI)
Everything displayed on your website that the user can interact with.
• clear (use colors, sizes, and layout to create hierarchy and increase scanability)
• intuitive (working the way the user expects it to, basically similar to most other websites).
Making a positive impression on our visitor and giving them a good user experience is the
purpose of UI. Since these are the factors that affect dwell time and user engagement they
are crucial for SEO.
V
Vertical search engine
Search engines that have specialized functions and focus on a specific segment of online
content (usually by topic or media type).
These include a multitude of Google’s vertical search engines like Google Maps, YouTube,
Google News, Google Images and Local search, but also Social search engines like Facebook,
or sites like Momondo.com and Pipl.com.
Video optimization
A process of increasing the search visibility of a video, usually on YouTube.
There are two parts for this process – one being optimizing your channel and the other
optimizing the video itself.
• write a description that will benefit both viewers and the search bots
• don’t forget to use the tags (together with the description they will help determine
relevancy)
• use thumbnails that stand out from the rest of the videos in the search results
SEO GLOSSARY 58
Viral content
A piece of media (article, image, video, tweet) that gets very popular in a short time. This
content spreads fast through the internet getting backlinks and social media likes and
shares.
Visit (Session)
Each time a user arrives at your page and continues browsing and interacting with it. A
visit will be counted no matter if that person has visited your page before unless the time
between visits is less than 30 minutes.
W
Webpage
One HTML document that can connect to the World Wide Web and be read by a browser. A
website can be made up of only one or multiple web pages.
Website (Site)
A collection of web pages and multimedia content all sharing the same domain.
Website quality
A set of features search engine bots are trying to ascertain when ranking a website. When
determining what is the quality of a certain website, these key elements are taken into
consideration:
• content relevance
• content length
• user engagement
• spelling
• social signals
• backlink profile
• readability
SEO GLOSSARY 59
Website structure (Site structure, Website architecture)
Website structure is a term that refers to the form your pages and links create. Imagine
drawing a map of your website on a piece of paper with lines representing links between
them. This link web is your structure and how it is executed matters for the site relevance. It
is also important that it is clear and logical to simplify navigation.
A good site structure makes it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for,
increases conversion and CTR, prolongs dwell time and makes the website easier to crawl.
Since a good structure equals good UX, your website structure has an influence on your rank
in search engines.
• have a clear sense of hierarchy with a home page, 3-5 categories and then subcategories
X
XML sitemap
An XML file containing all the URLs of your website you would like to crawl with additional
information (metadata) on each of the URLs. It improves SEO since it puts you in control of
how your website (and which pages) will be crawled and indexed.
There are several types of sitemaps that can either be separate files or a part of one file:
• image sitemap
• mobile sitemap
• video sitemap
• hreflang sitemap
There are plenty of tools that generate an XML sitemap automatically and all that is left for
you to do is to submit it to the search engine.
SEO GLOSSARY 60
Y
Yahoo
Once a leader in email, online news and search, Yahoo lost its position when Google decided
to focus on providing search results based on site importance.
Today Yahoo’s search engine is powered by Bing and it has a market share of 2.46%.
Yandex
The most popular search engine in Russia with a market share of 53.28% (0.58% worldwide).
The search results in Yandex are divided into geo-independent and geo-dependent. This
makes it very easy to promote local businesses as users from different regions will get
different search results.
YMYL pages
“Your Money or Your Life” is a Google search guideline.
YMYL pages are those that contain tips on, for example, finance, happiness, health, parenting
or nutrition. Advice like this can have a very big impact on a life of an individual and bad
information can have irreparable consequences. This is the reason why Google is very hard
on YMYL pages and judges them harshly, insisting on high quality, reliable information to
protect the user.
Yoast SEO
A must-have SEO plugin for WordPress.
• set the title and description for the search result snippet
• manage the appearance of the title, description and image being used when someone
posts a link with your content on social media
SEO GLOSSARY 61
YouTube
The biggest video sharing service (also the second most used search engine) with more
than 1.5 billion users.
It can also be classified as a social media site and is mostly used by teens for this purpose.
SEO GLOSSARY 62
INDEX
0-9 Bridge page 16 Crawl 13
Comment spam 36 D
B
Competitor analysis 10 DA 16
Backlink 6
Content 10 Data 14
Backlink authority 34
Content Management System 11 Dead-end page 15
Backlink profile 35
Content marketing 11 Dead link 9
Baidu 6
Content scraping 47 Deep linking 15
Bait and switch 7
Content silo 50 De-indexing 15
Banner blindness 7
Content spinning 11 Direct answer 19
Bing 7
Content syndication 11 Direct traffic 15
Black hat SEO 7
Conversion 11 Disavow links 15
Blended search 56
Conversion rate 12 Dofollow link 16
Blog commenting 7
Conversion rate optimization 12 Domain 16
Blogger outreach 18
Copied content 12 Domain Authority 16
Blog spam 36
Cornerstone content 12 Domain name 16
Bot 13
Cost per acquisition 12 Doorway page 16
Bounce rate 8
Cost per action 12 DuckDuckGo 16
Branded keywords 8
Cost per click 13 Duplicate content 17
Brand keyword 8
Cost per mille 13 Dwell time 17
Brand mention link building 8
Cost per thousand impressions 13 Dynamic link 17
Brand term 8
CPA 12 Dynamic URL 17
Breadcrumb navigation 8
CPC 13
Breadcrumb trail 8
CPM 13
E Google Maps 22 Hit 25
Exact match anchor text 18 Google Pigeon 24 HTTP response status code 52
URL parameter 57
User engagement 57
User experience 57
User-friendly 57
User-generated content 57
User interface 58
UX 57
V
Vertical search engine 58
Video optimization 58
Viral content 59
Visit 59
W
Web address 56
Web crawler 13
Webpage 59
Web scraping 47
Website 59
Website architecture 60
Website cloaking 42
Website quality 59
Website structure 60
Web spam 48
X
XML sitemap 60
Y
Yahoo 61
Yandex 61
YMYL pages 61
Yoast SEO 61
YouTube 62