SEO Glossary: The Most Important Terms You Should Know

If you own a digital business, whether as a Producer or Affiliate, you probably already know about the importance of content production to attract organic traffic to your business, right?

And so that your content can actually reach your audience, you need to know and apply SEO techniques.

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of strategies with the purpose of making search engines identify your content as relevant, and display it when someone searches for anything related to your business.

SEO can be applied to websites, blogs, YouTube, and other social media.

To perform a good SEO, you need to know all the terms related to this strategy. Therefore, we’ve created this complete SEO glossary to help you, check it out below!

And consult it whenever you need it!

0-9

100

The 100 code shows that a request has been received.

200

The 200 code represents a successful request, as for example, a page successfully loaded.

301

The 301 code indicates page redirection. This code is widely used in SEO to redirect broken links when you need to change a page’s URL, or when there’s a domain change.

302 

The 302 code indicates that the redirection is temporary.

400

The 400 code shows that the request is incorrect.

404

This indicates that the request wasn’t found. A 404 code on your website is bad for indexation. What you should do in this case, is use a 301 redirection.

410

The 410 code shows that a feature is no longer available.

500

This code indicates an internal server error.

A – D

AdSense

AdSense is Google’s advertising tool, which allows Google users, who have a blog, a YouTube channel, or an Android app, to be paid in exchange for displaying ads on these channels.

Ads

This is the abbreviated name for the Google Ads program, formerly known as AdWords, which is an online ad tool.

This tool allows advertisers to pay to promote text, image, or video ads on partner channels registered on AdSense, in search results, on YouTube, and in apps.

Algorithm

An algorithm is a sequence of instructions to perform an action. In SEO, it’s the system used by search engines to perform scanning, cataloging, indexing, and displaying pages.

Algorithms automatically and independently calculate and interpret the content, in order to decide – among millions of internet pages – what’s relevant and what isn’t.

The platforms frequently them and they’re getting smarter, thanks to machine learning.

Anchor Text

This term refers to text with a hyperlink and is one of the most relevant ranking factors. 

A good anchor text should be short, specific, and relevant, according to the content of the landing page linked to it.

Analytics

Analytics is a Google tool for analyzing the metrics of a website.

Just install a pixel provided by Google Analytics in the website’s source code and it will collect data, such as the number of hits, times, user profiles, and other information that is essential for an SEO and digital marketing strategy.

Alt Text

Alt Text can be added to an image to help search engines to understand its information.

Since the algorithms can’t read images, inserting alt text will really help your page obtain a better ranking, in addition to making your content more accessible to the visually challenged.

Backlink

Backlinks are strategic links that help build authority for your website. When other relevant websites direct links to your pages, the algorithms look at this favorably. It’s as if someone were recommending your content. 

Similarly, when you include hyperlinks to websites with high authority, your website also scores SEO points.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat is a form of practicing SEO, which disregards Google’s best practices.

The sole purpose of this practice is to try to bypass the rules and reach the top positions, disregarding the public’s needs.

CTR

An acronym for Click Through Rate, CTR is a click indicator, or rather, the click rate, which is the percentage resulting from the number of clicks divided by the number of views.

In SEO, CTR is very important to measure the quality of the title and of the meta description. A higher click rate means that more people who see the result are actually clicking it, which is an indication of success.

Cloaking

This is a Black Hat technique, which consists of disguising content. A page that displays content to users and other content to the search engines is using cloaking.

Those who use this technique are violating Google guidelines and the website might be penalized.

CMS (Content Management System)

Content management system, is a type of automation system that allows the creation, organization, publication and maintenance of content on a website.

WordPress is an example of CMS widely used by several companies.

Conversion

Conversion is usually a strategy’s ultimate goal. For example, in a blog post, conversion is when the reader clicks on the last call to action to read other content on the blog.

Another example would be a sales page, where the conversion is the act of making a purchase.

And often, the conversion is turning a visitor into a lead and/or, a lead into a customer.

Disavow

A Google tool that allows you to reject unwanted links that point to your website.

Poor quality links that can harm your SEO. If this happens to you, just go to the link rejection tool (Disavow), select your website and upload the list of unwanted links.

Domain

A domain is your website’s address on the internet, also known as electronic address or URL.

DNS

The Domain Name System translates IP addresses into the domain names we know and use.

In order to go to a website, it allows us to simply enter its URL in Google, instead of typing a long sequence of numbers.

External link

The links that direct to pages outside of your website.

G – K

Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a Google Ads tool for searching keywords. It’s very useful when planning your content and deciding which keywords or keyphrases are the most relevant to use.

The tool displays the average monthly search volume of keywords, suggests keywords for your business, and other useful information for creating ads.

Google Search Console

This is another essential Google tool for SEO. The Search Console analyzes your website pages and presents reports that are relevant to your SEO strategy.

You can check the performance of your pages relative to their position in search results, CTR, HTML improvements, among other features.

Google Trends

This is another Google tool that every entrepreneur and marketing professional should use. Google Trends shows the trends around the world according to search data.

It displays charts of the evolution of interest for a given keyword, and allows you to apply location filters, time periods, and even keyword comparisons.

Gray Hat SEO

Do you remember Black Hat, which we’ve talked about earlier? The SEO Grey Hat is between it and White Hat, which we’ll see later.

Grey Hatting uses a few Black Hatting techniques to achieve a fast Google position, but it isn’t as bad.

You can follow Google guidelines with Grey Hatting, and subtly apply malicious techniques, thus avoiding penalties.

Heading tags

Heading tags are title formats that structure your content to make it more scannable and organized. It’s very important that you break down the text with several titles in order to optimize it.

And using heading tags is a safe way of showing the search engine that your content is organized and well structured.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

HTML is a web programming language that allows you to create your own content structure for the web.

Head Tail

The name given to a type of broad keyword that usually has a large volume of searches.

For example, for the Hotmart niche, “Digital products” would be a long-tail keyword, because it’s more generic, concise, and popular.

Indexing

When we say that a page has been indexed by Google, we mean that it’s in the search engine’s database and can be displayed to users.

Google robots index new pages and edited pages all the time. They scan the entire web searching and indexing them. But, if you want, you can help it in this step by requesting its indexing through the Google Search Console.

Internal link

The links that direct to other pages within your website.

Keyword

Keywords are terms that summarize your content. They don’t necessarily have to be a word. Actually, they often consist of 1 to 4 words. The keyword is the first thing to think about before you create optimized content.

You can use tools, such as SEMrush to discover which words are searched the most within your niche, and based on them, you can decide which topics to write about.

Keyword density 

Refers to the number of keywords or keyphrases used in the content.

No one knows what the ideal number of repetitions of the main keyword is, but it’s important to use it and use synonyms to optimize the content.

But be careful not to overuse it, because it’ll be considered black hatting.

Keyword Stuffing

This is a Black Hatting practice, which was very common in the old days. It consists of the excessive – and inconsistent – repetition of the keyword in the content.

Nowadays, this practice no longer makes sense and can generate negative results for your pages.

With smarter algorithms, Google is able to identify whether the content is relevant or not, by its semantics.

L – O

Link

Links or hyperlinks are connections that direct to other webpages. These connections are necessary in SEO, in order to build authority.

A page must contain both links that direct to internal pages of the website, as well as to pages on other domains.

In addition, it’s important that other relevant domains have links directing to your website, which are called backlinks, a term that we’ve defined earlier!

Link bait

Link bait is a great form of backlink, because it’s when other websites link to your content without you having asked.

In order to achieve this, you need to produce quality, informative, or news content that really attracts attention and encourages sharing.

Link Building

Link building is the strategy that gathers all of the link-related concepts in this glossary.

This strategy consists of building relevant links for the optimization of online content.

Link Farm

Link Farming is a Black Hat action that consists of the creation of several pages that link to the same website, with the intention of manipulating search engines.

However, Link Farming can generate penalties and the website may end up being affected and not be able to achieve its goal, which is to improve its Google ranking.

Long tail

This concept is the opposite of a head-tail, which was explained earlier. It deals with keywords that are more specific and less popular.

In an SEO strategy, it’s critical that you produce content with long-tail keywords, because they are more niche-oriented and therefore, are more efficient, especially for conversions.

Meta Description

The short description of the content that will appear on the results page.

A meta description is used especially for SEO and must be concise, direct, and persuasive in order to attract clicks. In addition, it’s important that it contains the keyword.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are tags that make it easier for search engines to understand a page’s content better.

A meta description is a meta tag, for example, it sends the information to Google’s robot that the excerpt marked with this tag must be displayed in the description of the search result.

NoIndex

This meta tag is used to tell search engines that the page shouldn’t be indexed.

NoFollow

This is also a meta tag, which is used to instruct the search engines not to follow the content of a page, when there’s a link.

If you want to insert a link to a page external to your content, for example, and want this page not to be counted as a backlink to your website, because you consider it irrelevant or for any other reason, classify the link as nofollow.

Off-Page SEO

SEO actions that take place beyond the page, i.e., the entire process of building authority, such as the backlink strategy and SEO integration with other marketing strategies.

On-Page SEO

On the other hand, on-page SEO involves the entire set of actions, from the structuring of the website to the content. 

This includes website usability factors, design, URL, content structuring and organization, keywords, link building, content quality and consistency, and relevance.

P – W

Pagerank

Pagerank is the webpage evaluation and classification system used by Google. 

From the ranking factors, the algorithms calculate a page’s rank, between 0 and 10. The higher it is, the better positioned the page will be displayed in the search results.

Page title

Page title is literally the title of the webpage.

Query

A query is the request for certain information from a database.

Rankbrain

Rankbrain is Google’s artificial intelligence system, which uses machine learning to deliver results that are more accurate and relevant to users who have made the search.

Redirect

Also known as Redirect 301, this term refers to URL redirection.

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are more detailed than ordinary snippets. Snippets are the summaries of each page that appears in the SERP. 

Rich snippets appeared in 2009, and in addition to the title, description and URL, can also show – in the result fragment – information, such as evaluations, location, site links, logo, among others.

Robots.txt

This is a .txt file that gives orders to search engine robots.

You can save the file in your website’s root directory with the purpose of controlling or blocking access to certain pages and features, if you don’t want them to be accessed.

Search engine

A search engine is a software capable of receiving web user searches, finding the information on the web, and displaying the results relevant to the search made.

Therefore, Google is a search engine, or rather; it’s the best-known search engine in the world. But there are also others that are widely used, such as Mozilla, Yahoo, and Safari.

Search engine penalties

Search engines, such as Google, have best practice guidelines. Therefore, when their guidelines are violated, these search engines penalize the websites.

Search engine penalties can vary from alerts to non-indexing of pages.

SEM

Acronym for Search Engine Marketing, SEM is the marketing for search engines, i.e., it’s a marketing strategy so that your content can be well ranked by the search engines.

SERP

This is the acronym for Search Engine Result Page.

Tag

Tags are used to organize and categorize the content.

For example, in a blog, tags can be used to organize similar content within the same category.

Title Tag

Title tag is the HTML tag to categorize the page title.

Website Map

The Website Map guides search robots to understand the website’s structure and organization.

White Hat SEO 

Unlike Black Hat, White Hat SEO consists of SEO actions that take Google guidelines into account.

This strategy focuses on delivering relevant and quality content to users.

Conclusion

We hope that this glossary will help you learn more about the digital marketing universe and create increasingly efficient SEO strategies.

Knowing all the terms, and always keeping up to date, is an essential part of constant optimization work, and will certainly generate positive results for your business.

Now that you’re familiar with this, learn what your SEO routine should look like in order to conquer the SERP!