Why would we create an SEO Glossary of Terms?  Well, because it’s great for SEO and it will help you learn about SEO and define some words you might have searched online! Maybe you said, “Hey, Siri, what’s keyword density?” We hope we can help Siri find the right answer for you! 

Algorithms: Algorithms in regard to SEO mean the algorithms that Google uses to decide which sites should be ranked at the top. Google changes its algorithms from time to time and when they do, the whole SEO game changes.

Alt Text: A description of a graphic, usually not displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another.

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

Anchor Text: The text of a link that’s visible to a site visitor. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page.

Authority Site: A website that has many incoming links from other related important sites. An authority site usually has high trust, page rank, and search results ranking. Wikipedia is a good example of an authority site.

Black Hat/White Hat: Blackhat SEO basically means using sneaky and unfair methods to attempt to raise a site’s profile and fight off competition. Blackhat SEO is considered immoral and you risk getting caught and having your site punished as a result. White hat SEO is acceptable and approved SEO that allows higher site rankings by providing good quality sites and working with Google according to their rules.

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate refers to the amount of time visitors spend on your site when they visit. A high bounce rate means that the greater proportion of your visitors comes to your site, looks at just one page, and then leaves. A low bounce rate means that the majority of users follow at least one internal link and spend more time on your site.

Duplicate Content: Content which is identical or similar to what’s found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content, but it will receive little if any trust from the search engines compared to content that they consider to be original.

Frames: a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them.

Image Optimization: Using images on a page to increase search engine activity.

Image Title Attribute: The description on an image that shows up if a viewer “mouses over” the image.

Index: As a noun, it means a database of web pages and their content used by the search engines. As a verb, it means to add a web page to a search engine index.

Indexed Pages: The pages on a site that have been indexed.

Keyword or Keyword Phrase: The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine when looking for information. 

Keyword Density: The percentage of a particular keyword on a webpage. If this percentage is unnaturally high, the page may be penalized.

Keyword Research:  The task of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting. There are numerous free and paid tools available to make it easier.

(This is the halfway mark of our SEO Glossary of Terms!)

Keyword Spam or Stuffing: Inappropriately high keyword density.

Link Building: Link building means getting as many links as possible to point toward your site and individual pages. The most important links are the ones from authority sites. Google uses these links to rank and index your page.

Meta Description: the description on a website and on web pages that shows up in the search engine results that should be less than 160 characters.

Meta Title: The title of a website or page used on search engine results pages.

Meta Tags: Statements within the header section of an HTML page which provides information about the page. Meta information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate Meta title and description tags, because that may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about.

Negative SEO: Negative SEO means that someone has targeted a website, trying to damage their ranking. To do this, they will aggressively do link building for that website by placing their links on irrelevant and low-quality sites. Google then mistakenly believes the owner of the site to be spamming and punishes that site accordingly.

No Follow: A command for the search engines found in either the header section of a web page or within an individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow a specific link or any links on the page.

Page Rank: PR a value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which ranks link popularity and trust among other factors, generally not known outside of Google.

Page Speed: The time it takes for a website to load and for a visitor to be able to view and navigate the website. The average visitors won’t wait more than 2-3 seconds for a page to load before moving on.

Penguin/Panda: Penguin and Panda are the names of two big algorithm changes that caused real chaos in the world of SEO.

Responsive: The flexibility of a website design to be easily read on any device including a desktop computer, a tablet, or mobile phone.

SERP: This acronym stands for Search Engine Results Page and is any page with results for a particular search term. You want to be at the top of the SERPs.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The ability to build a website or page to have more relevance to specific keywords as seen by the search engines. 

Search Engine: Websites dedicated to offering search options to Internet users including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, ask.com, dogpile.com.

Site Map: A page that links to every accessible page on a website. This improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is usually kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.

Spiders: Spiders are the pieces of code that Google sends out across the web to read all the different sites and to look for content that’s relevant to particular searches and keywords. You want to make your site “spider-friendly” if you want to get high rankings. Spiders are also referred to as robots.

Voice Search: One of the newest terms in the SEO glossary, this is the technology used to allow device users to begin searches by speaking into their device and asking questions.

We hope our SEO Glossary was helpful. Please reach out if you have any questions about any words that are in our SEO Glossary or if we need to add any words. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter to stay connected and keep learning! Come back and visit our SEO glossary often. We add words to it as they become relevant to SEO!