SEO Terms | Glossary Flashcards
301 redirect
Redirection happens when you visit one specific page and immediately after that you’re being automatically redirected to a different page (with a different URL). We use 301 redirects in the case where a page is broken, or if a site is migrating.
Alt Tag
Alt tags have some SEO value. The thing is that Google can’t (at least at the moment) see what the actual image presents, but it can read the alt tag. There’s no better way of informing Google what’s on your images than by using alt tags. This is a snippet of text you add to an image in the CMS/back end of the site.
Anchor text
Every link consists of two main elements. There’s the web address that the link is pointing to (the destination) and there’s the anchor text. The anchor text is the text that works as the link.
Backlinks
Backlink is simply a link placed on someone else’s website that points back to your site. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO. Getting a lot of backlinks with relevant anchor texts is the shortest way of improving your search engine rankings. It’s important for SEO relevance the site pointing to yours is authoritative.
Black hat SEO
Like everything SEO has its dark side too. Black hat SEO is the name for all SEO practices that are known for being manipulative or unethical, and in the long run can hurt your website, or even get it banned from search engines. - OMG Uses White Hat
Canonical tag
A canonical tag is 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.
Domain name (and hosting)
Domain is your unique address on the internet. For example, the domain of this blog is newinternetorder.com. You can get a shiny new domain at GoDaddy for just $6 or so.
Hosting, or a web host, is where your website is kept/stored on the web. You need a web host to be a website owner.
Duplicate content
If you have two separate pages within your website that have the same content on them (or very similar content) then you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is believed to be a bad thing for SEO. Google doesn’t like sites that use the same piece of content over and over again, and they often penalize them for it.
If you think that you are safe then think again. Let me give you an example. If your site runs on WordPress, and if you’re using similar categories and tags (like for example a tag “business” and a category “business”) then the listing pages for your tags and categories will probably be very similar if not exactly the same. That is a prime example of duplicate content.
Keywords
There are many definitions of keywords. Keywords are single words or whole phrases of a particular SEO importance for a given page or website.
For example, if I’m writing an article about choosing the best gardening equipment, my main keyword could be “gardening equipment“. It is the keyword I want to rank for because I want people to find this article when they input “gardening equipment” into Google.
Link building
This is one of the biggest SEO terms. Link building is simply a process of getting backlinks to your page. For example, if you’re publishing articles on news.com.au with a link to your site then you’re doing some link building.
One more thing. Link building is considered to be the most important element of every SEO strategy. If you want to have a well ranked page you have to get backlinks to it.
Meta description
It’s a short description of a blog/page/post used mostly by search engines. This description is not displayed anywhere on the blog.
Here’s how Google uses it. Whenever someone googles a specific keyphrase Google makes a decision which websites should be displayed and in what order. For each website Google displays a title and a short description. Google has two ways of putting this description together:
If the meta description of the website contains the keyphrase used by the user then Google displays the meta description.
If the meta description doesn’t contain the keyphrase then Google displays a fragment of the website’s content that does contain it.
Off-page SEO
The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. Off-page practices are everything you do outside your page to improve its rankings.
Basically, the main element of off-page SEO is link building.
On-page SEO
The are two main elements of SEO: “on-page” and “off-page”. On-page practices are everything you do on your page to improve its rankings.
This includes things like: tuning the HTML structure, improving title tags and descriptions, making your site load faster, checking the keyword usage and density, improving the internal linking structure (the way your pages are linked to each other), etc.
Organic search
You’re doing organic search when you visit Google, input a phrase and push the search button.
Robots.txt
This is a file. One that’s particularly important for SEO. It notifies the search engines which areas of your blog are restricted for them. Restricting search engines from accessing some of your pages might not sound that tempting at first but in fact it’s a valuable thing. First of all, you can exclude all your admin pages from indexing (for example, pages in the wp-admin section of your WordPress blog). You can also use it to prevent search engines from seeing duplicate content on your site.
SEM
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. In other words it means “marketing via search engines”. Marketing or promoting your products or services via search engines can be done in two main ways. You either optimize your site so it appears at a high spot in organic search results, or pay for the clicks directly, in which case your site is listed under the “sponsored listings” section.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a practice of improving site’s rankings in the search engines for given keywords. When doing SEO you need to take care of both on-page and off-page SEO. The actual tasks that need to be done are changing almost every day. What was working perfectly yesterday may not be working at all tomorrow. That’s just the reality of SEO. It’s why SEO is never a one-time task but an ongoing work.
SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page (SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages). This is a page that gets displayed when you search for a keyword on Google or other search engine.
Spider (crawler, bot, robot)
Search engine spider is a special piece of software that browses the web, looks for new sites, checks what’s going on on them and sends the data back to Google (or other search engine) so they can index and rank these sites.
Title tag
Every page has a title tag. From a user’s standpoint the title tag is visible only in one place – your browser’s title bar. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content.
White hat SEO
As opposed to the black hat SEO, white hat SEO is a set of all SEO practices that search engines encourage you to use. Not building bad/spammy links.
