SEO Glossary
This is an ongoing project to create an SEO glossary. The primary purpose is to be a tool for Supsrstar SEO Academy members to assist in their SEO training but it can also be a valuable resource and reminder for anyone doing SEO to help understand or remind themselves what a term means.
I will be adding to this over time as well as improving the visual appearance of it and adding those sweet sweet affiliate links 😀
If you would like to contribute Send Me An Email and tell me what you would like to add, or what I got wrong.
Let's Dive in!
A Working SEO Glossary Of Terms
301
A way to permanently redirect one URL to another.
Affiliate SEO
Affiliate SEO means a website or other property such as a video that is designed to get traffic from search engines and make money by selling someone else's product or service and giving the seller a commission.
Affiliate network
An affiliate network is a site that brings together other sites that offer affiliate programs. Examples include Clickbank, Maxbounty, and Commission Junciton.
Alt Text
The text that displays on a web page when an image is unable to be displayed. This text is also how Google understands what your image is about.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text that displays on a web page that is linking to another webpage
For example Superstar SEO Academy
“Superstar SEO Academy” is the anchors text that links to: https://www.superstarseoacademy.com/store/o6Lkyaqv
Anchor Text Distribution
The number or percentage of times specific anchor text linking to your site occurs. This can be found using a wide variety of different SEO analysis tools.
Authority Site
An authority site is a large website that has earned a lot of trust and authority for consistently producing valuable content related to its niche. For example: https://www.webmd.com/ in the health niche.
Backlink
A backlink is a link from another property somewhere on the internet back to your website.
Blog Comment
A blog comment is where you leave a comment on someone else's blog post. For SEO purposes it is assumed this is done to get a quality link back to your site.
Bookmarks
A bookmark is a site that allows you to save a link to read later. There is also a small amount of SEO value to these links. Example is http://diigo.com
Bot Blocking
This is a way of hiding your PBNs from your competitors so tools like Majestic and AHrefs can't find them.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors to your site that clicked on it then left without doing anything.
Branded Keywords
A branded keyword is a keyword that is a brand or business name.
For Example:
- Superstar SEO
- Superstar SEO Academy
- Chris M. Walker
Broken Link
A link that goes to a page that does not exist or has been removed.
Churn and Burn
A way to rank a site quickly using aggressive linking and other techniques. These can make you money quickly but are not sustainable in the long term.
Citation
A citation is a site on the internet that mentions the Name, Address, Phone Number, and URL of your website.
Cloudflare
Is a software as a service that improves the security of your website.
Copywriting
Writing content that is designed to persuade the reader, listener, or viewer into taking an action. Copy differs form content in that it is designed to make a sale, where content is simply informative.
Cost Per Action (CPA)
This is similar to affiliate marketing except the offers can be something other than a sale such as filling out a form.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of people that saw your website in search results, and decided to click on it. So if 100 people saw your website and 20 of them clicked on it your CTR would be 20%
Directory
A directory is a website that lists other websites. These can often be niche or location specific. https://theknot.com is an example.
Domain Name Servers (DNS)
This is a technical terms for computers that tell the rest of the internet where your website is.
Domain Age
Domain age is how old your domain is. Meaning how long it has been since it was initially registered.
Domain Authority
There are 2 definitions of domain authority.
The first means how much power your website as from the quality of content, quality on links, and domain age.
The other is a metric created by Moz to help SEOs determine the quality of a website.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Domain Authority Stacking (DAS)
A link building technique where you use high authority properties, linked together in such a way as to increase the authority of your website, and in turn its ranking.
Drip Feeding
The process of slowly doing an action such as link building over time rather than all at once.
Duplicate Content
Content that is not original and exists elsewhere on the internet. Some believe that this can lead to decreased Google ranking, but the evidence supporting that is inconclusive at best.
Embeds
Using a type of HTML called an iFrame embeds place a “window” to a video or map (or other property) on the internet on your site.
Exact Match Domain (EMD)
A domain where the entire keyword you are trying to rank for is entirely in the domain name.
Example: http://myrtlebeachseo.com
(Do)Follow Link
A link that Google is able to follow to its destination, to understand the purpose of the link.
Geo tag
Adding map coordinates to the settings of an image or video to show where the image was taken.
Google My Business (GMB)
A Google service used to create a business listing in Google to show in Google Maps and the “3 Pack”
GSA
A mass link building software tool.
H1 H2 H3 H4 (etc..) tags
H tags are an HTML element that stands for heading. They range from H1 to H6 the lower the number the bigger the heading.
Host/Hosting
A host is the computer that is connected to the internet. It is where websites and all content on the internet reside.
IFTTT
Stands for If This Then That it is a software where you create ‘applets’ to automate processes both for SEO and other things such as home automation.
Inbound link (IBL)
An inbound link is a link from somewhere else on the internet to your website.
Indexing
Indexing refers to getting a URL to be added to Google's index. Meaning that it is eligible to be shown in Google search results. A link that is not indexed in Google does not mean Google is not aware of the link, it just means it has determined that the content on the URL is not worthy of being displayed as a search result.
Internal Link
A link from one page of your site to another page on your site. For example https://superstarseo.com/myrtle-beach-social-media-management links to https://superstarseo.com and now the page you are reading right now links to both of them.
Keyword
A keyword is the term you enter into a search engine when you want to find something. For example “Weight Loss” or “Myrtle Beach Plumber”
Keyword Density
How often your keyword is used on your page compared to the total number of words.
The process of determining the value of a keyword including the intent of the searcher, how many people search for the term on average, and how difficult it will be to rank for the term.
Keyword Stuffing
Heavily adding a keyword to the text of your website or other property in an attempt to force Google to rank the page for that term.
Link Building
Building links to a website or other property. In most cases this is done to either pass traffic to a website directly, or to increase your websites ranking in Google.
Link Juice
Link juice is how a link passes on authority from one page to another.
Link Velocity
The rate at which you build links to your website.
Local SEO
Local SEO means to rank a website for a term that is specific to a location. For example “Myrtle Beach Painters”. This also often refer to ranking in Google Maps.
Longtail
Longtail is is a term that means means a keyword with additional terms added to it to make it longer. For example: “Weight Loss” would be a keyword and “Best Weight Loss Pills” would be a long tail version of it.
Manual Review
If your website gets a penalty, and Google decides to have a person review it visually, they are manually reviewing it. Meaning a human being is actually looking at it rather than a computer.
Meta description
A meta description is the description of your website that show up in the search results.
Meta Tags
This is an HTML element that tells search engines what your site is about. These do not carry the same weight they used to for SEO but they still have SOME value.
Meta Title
A meta title is the title of your website that show up in the search results.
Like this:
Money Robot
A software for building large amounts of links.
Money Site
A money site is a website you wish to make money from by driving traffic to it with SEO. This can be a business site, and ecommerce site, an affiliate site, or any toher type of website you are trying to rank and monetize.
Niche
The industry or topic your website is about. So “Weight Loss” or “Plumbing” are examples.
(No)Follow Backlink
No follow links are links that do not pass much, if any link juice on to your website to increase its ranking. Sites like Facebook, YouTube and others tend to have no follow links.
Outbound Links (OBL)
An outbound link is a link on your website out to another website or property on the internet.
On-page SEO
The SEO that is done on your website to make it optimized for Google ranking. Things like H tags, keyword density, and meta titles and descriptions are among the various factors.
Organic Traffic
Traffic to your website from people searching in search engines and clicking on your site.
Page Authority (PA)
Similar to domain authority but refers to a specific page instead of an entire domain.
Page Speed
How fast your website loads.
You can check this with tools such as: https://gtmetrix.com/
Panda
This is the name of a Google penalty that deals mostly with the quality of the content and structure of your site.
Parasite SEO
Parasite is where you build a website on someone else's platform such as Facebook, Weebly, Tumblr or something else and leverage the inherent power of that website in order to rank quickly with a minimal amount of SEO involved.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
A type of online advertising where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad.
Pay Per Lead (PPL)
A form of online monetization where you generate business leads and sell them to local businesses.
Private Blog Network (PBN)
A network of websites that for whatever reason used to exist and no longer do. They are then rebuilt to and used to link to other properties to increase ranking.
Penalty
A penalty is when you have done something against Google's webmaster guidelines. They place a penalty on your website that decreases or removes your search ranking.
Penguin
This is the name of a Google penalty that deals mostly with the quality of the links pointing to your site.
Partial Match Domain (PMD)
A PMD is a domain that contains a portion of a keyword but not the entire thing.
For example https://sorcererdigital.com is a partial match for the term “Digital Marketer” but not an exact match https://digitalmarketer.com is.
Press Release (PR)
A press release is when you release new about your business to the press. This can be used to build links by distributing it to multiple news sites.
Quality Content
Well written, high value content.
Referring domains (RD)
These are domains that are linking to your site,
Registrar
The place where you purchase your domain name from suchg as GoDaddy or Namecheap.
Sandbox
Google sandbox is a term that refers to an effect noted by some SEOs where a website does not initially rank even though it has all of the right SEO factors in place. The existence of this is controversial but if it does exist it is done to prevent spam based SEO form being as effective.
SAPE
A Russian company that has a large database of powerful websites that they have hacked that you can place links on.
Scraping
A technique where you use software in order to scrape databases of expired domains in order to purchase them for PBNs or money sites.
SEOAutoPilot
A software for building large amounts of links.
SEO Hosting
This is a type of hosting designed to host PBNs in order to prevent Google from detecting them. Examples include Easy Blog Networks, and IPNetworx.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
The page that shows up in Google when you search for a term.
SILO Structure
The way you structure the content on your site. Ideally it will have a natural flow. A silo consists of pages or posts link in a logical order. So if you have a site about health one Silo could be Diet and have pages about vegan diets, paleo diets and so on. Another could be Exercise which includes stuff like P90X, Crossfit and so on.
Social Syndication
This is when you post content to a website, or a video to a channel and it syndicates copies of the content on various social media sites with links back to the original.
Spinning
Using software to take text change the words, and create a new article that is not plagiarized.
Tier 1
These are links pointed directly at a money site.
Tier 2
These are links that point at your Tier 1 links and so on, Tier 3 links are links that point at your Tier 2 links.
Topical Relevance
The relevance of the links pointing to your website that are relevant to the content on your website.
Traffic
Is the amount of visitors, unique or repeat, to your website. The whole goal of SEO is to get traffic from search engines to your sites.
Trust Flow
Is a metric used by Majestic that is similar to Domain Authority from Moz.
Unique Content
Original content that has not been copied from existing content.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
The address of a page on the internet such as https://sorcererdigital.com/myrtle-beach-seo
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
A network of computers located elsewhere on the internet that can be used to anonymously and securely perform a variety of tasks.
Wayback Machine
A website that can be used to view what a website looked like at various points throughout its history. Located at https://archive.org
Web 2.0
Web 2.0s are platforms that allow you to build a website on their domain, usually for free, such as Tumblr or WordPress.com.
WHOIS
A way to find out information about a domain name such as who owns it, who the registrar is, the name servers and more. You can find it in a variety of places. I like: https://whois.icann.org/
WordPress
The most common website content management system on the internet.
