SEO Glossary

301 Redirect

a way to take a web page and redirect it to another one. When you change the web address of a page, just apply a 301 redirect to make the old page point to the new one.

404 Error

when the server can’t find the page you are requesting.

500 Error

typically means that the website has crashed.

Alt Text

a description of an image in a site’s HTML. This helps describe to a search engine what the image is about.

Anchor Text

the text on a web page that is usually in a different color and is linked to another web page. Anchor text helps search engines recognize what the destination page is about; it describes what you’ll see if you click on the link.

Authority

an arbitrary score assigned by search engines to measure the relevance, power, and credibility of a website. Factors that help calculate a pages authority include inbound links, age of the site, and unique, quality content.

Back link

this is a link to your website from another site. The quality and quantity of back links have a big impact on search engine rankings.

Black Hat SEO

spammy and manipulative link building tactics that aim to improve placement in the search engine rankings.

CSS

stands for cascading style sheets and is a style sheet language used for describing the feel and the look of a document written in a markup language.

CMS

stands for content management system and is a web application used to manage web sites and web content.

Canonical URL

the canonical URL helps search engines understand which address for a specific piece of content is the best one to index.

Domain

the main address of a website. Search engines are trying to preference for a branded domain, compared to a domain name that is stuffed with keywords.

Duplicate Content

refers to a blocks of content within or across domains that completely match or which are fairly similar. A site with duplicate content could be penalized by the search engines.

Headings

text that is placed within head tags (H1, H2, H3, H4) that clearly define to visitor what the page is about. A search engine will use the text within the tags to categorize the page.

HTML

hyper text markup language: the code of a website that search engines read.

Indexed Pages

the websites that have been stored by a search engine. A website that doesn’t have any indexed pages with not appear in the results of the search engine.

Internal link

a link on a website that sends a user to another page within the same website.

Keyword

a word or phrase that a user enters in a search engine query.

Link bait

content created on a website with the intent of encouraging other websites to link to that content.

Link Building

the process of getting more inbound links to your website for more improved search engine rankings.

Meta Data

words on a webpage stored in the HTML and not visible to users, but are noticed by search engine crawlers.

Meta description

brief description of fewer than 160 characters that summarize a webpage. This description is intended for users and search engines and should include specific keywords to help your site rank.

Meta Title

the title of the website page which appears in search engine results and displays in the top of a user’s browser window when they visit that page.

No follow

a way to link to a website without passing SEO value to it.

PageRank

a number 0-10 assigned to a webpage by a search engine in order to rate the authority of that page.

Query

a keyword or search term entered in a search engine

Rebots.txt

a file that is placed in the root of the domain that is used to inform search crawlers the structure of the website.

SEM

stands for search engine marketing and is a form of internet marketing that promotes website visibility in the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization

the process of positively effecting the way a website will appear organically in the search engine result pages (SERPS). The intent is to rank on the first page of the search engines in order to draw more website traffic.

Search Engine Results Page

a webpage presented to a user with the results of a specific search query.

Sitemap

a list of several pages on a website accessible to search engine crawlers and users alike.

Spider

also known as a web crawler or a bot. The spider crawls various websites across the Internet in order to gather information.

URL

stands for universal resource locator and is the web address of a page on your site.

XML Sitemap

a file that can be submitted to search engines and other crawlers to notify them of the URLs to crawl on a particular domain.