SEO Terms For Webmasters, Web Managers and Internet Bosses

Terms and Definitions for both people new to Internet SEO and more experienced professionals

Profiles

SEO Search Engines Digital Internet Media

Pop Culture Pop Art Art Television Movies Gaming

Australia Wrestling Bitcoin Business Entertainment Sports

Advertising Promotions Contact Us

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to capture as much organic website traffic as possible via search engines and convert that traffic into measurable business outcomes.

SEO is the process of trying to direct people to your website anytime they type in a search query into a search engine.

For example, if you type into Google [what is content marketing], there are about a million websites that have purposefully optimized a piece of content for that keyword phrase so that you click on their website.

Once you click on that website, you will browse around, familiarize yourself with their brand, and sign yourself up for their newsletter.

SEO also involves a lot of jargon and nuanced strategies that can be difficult to understand at first. To make things easier, I decided to define a few terms that I may throw around in this tutorial.

SEO Terms

Keywords: Keywords are the words that users plug into a search engine whenever they seek out information over the web.

Organic traffic: Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site over a search engine search, excluding those who click on PPC links.

SERP: Search engine results page.

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising is an advertising strategy to rank products or landing pages above the normal Google SERP results. These links will say “ad” next to them.

User intent: The intent of the keyword search (e.g., is the user asking a question or looking to buy a product).

Meta tags: Snippets of text designed to describe a webpage to a search engine. For example, the title of the page is contained in an HTML title tag attribute.

Ranking factors: Any algorithmic factor designed to influence a page’s ranking in a search engine for a particular keyword search.

Crawling: The ability of search engines to find web pages on your site.

Indexation: The ability of search engines to include your web pages in its web index.

Technical SEO: The backend details of a website, including a web page’s speed and mobile rendering, which impacts its search rankings.

On-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including meta tags and header tags, designed to help a page rank higher in search results.

Off-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including link building and acquisition, designed to improve your website’s visibility and authority.

Link building: The manual process of building backlinks or hyperlinks to a website, which is a vital ranking factor for most search engines.

Algorithm updates: Any update to Google’s core algorithm (e.g., Penguin, Panda) that influences a broad range of search rankings.

Core Web Vitals: Technical SEO factors that Google finds important in determining a page’s potential user experience.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, Trust. A set of guidelines Google suggests to marketers to evaluate whether their content meets these criteria.

UX: User experience.