Basic SEO Dictionary for Newbies

We all remember our first touch with the SEO world and the first SEO talks with our friends or people who know way more and are already in this business. They have used even a basic SEO dictionary which wasn’t known to us. We noded our heads like we knew everything they talk and afterwards come home and start searching for every word they have told. Funny right?

You can’t have just a good web design or graphics that will look awesome. In most cases having a quality content is crucial to have a perfect all-in-one project. Knowing these SEO terms will give you the picture why is SEO important too.

Well based on that true story we wanted to help our friends newbies readers with a SEO dictionary completely made for them. You will learn about the meaning of those SEO terms. When you finish reading this content you will be a true brainer and ready to talk the SEOish language.

Basic SEO dictionary terms:

Anchor Text

The clickable word or words of a link. This text is intended to provide contextual information to people and search engines about what the webpage or website being linked to is about. 

For example: “When you are trying to link to this word to learn more things about.” – “this word” is the Anchor text 

It has a lot of variations like: branded anchor text, exact keyword anchor text, just natural anchor text etc. Make sure to get back to this part when you are done with reading the whole article.

Authority

The combination of signals search engines use to assess websites and webpages for the purposes of ranking. It sometimes speaks about the power of some website.

Analytics 

The science of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to take future action based on what has (or hasn’t) worked historically on your website. Google Analytics is the tool we all use for getting that data. 

Backlinks 

All the links that are pointing to your homepage or any other related article on your domain are called backlinks. It’s proved that more related niche backlinks pointing to one website brings more quality organic traffic and a boost from our favorite search engine – Google. 

Black Hat

This is something that will bring penalty to your website. Risky tactics that go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines will surely get caught and penalized with resulting your removal from the search results. We definitely don’t recommend using this kind of technique.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of website visitors who leave without visiting another page on that website. Although bounce rate can indicate potential content or website issues, it is not a direct ranking factor, according to Google. Nevermind, we all want a small bounce rate on our site.

Branded Keyword

When you are linking to anchor text that has the name of the brand in it, you are using branded keyword. For example if we are trying to build more branded keywords we will use “Fox Media House” as one. 

Cache

A technology that temporarily stores web content, such as images, to reduce future page loading times.

Cached Page 

A snapshot (‘photo’) of a webpage as it appeared when a search engine last crawled (checked) it.

Canonical URL

An HTML code element that specifies a preferred website URL, when multiple URLs have the same or similar content, to reduce duplicate content. Meaning that when you have sites like https://yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com you add Canonical Tag to tell search engines to use and that https://yoursite.com is your main URL.

“Content is King”

A phrase often used by speakers at conferences and writers on popular SEO (and digital marketing) publications. In this context, “content is king” usually means that content is the most important factor for you to have any SEO, digital marketing, or business success.

De-index

When Google removes a website or webpage, either temporarily or permanently, from search results, specifically its search index. Google provides a Remove URLs tool in the Search Console for voluntary cases; however, a website may also be de-indexed as punishment for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, in the form of a manual action.

Disavow

If your link profile includes a high number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality inbound links that may be harming your rankings – and don’t have the ability to get them removed for a legitimate reason (e.g., the link exists on a site you have no control over) – you can use Google’s Disavow Tool tool to tell Google to ignore those links.

Do-follow link

A link that doesn’t use the “nofollow” attribute. In other words, a link. Also, when you’re doing link building activities it is preferable to get more websites link to your site with a do-follow link.

Domain Authority (DA)

The overall “strength” of a website (patented by Moz), built up over time, which can help a new page rank well quickly, even before that content has earned links or engagement. A score, between 0-100, SEO software company Moz uses to predict the ability of a website to rank in search results.

Domain Rating (DR) 

The metrics Ahrefs uses to rate the backlink profile of a website.  DR is a measure of the quantity and quality of the backlinks going to an entire domain, while UR rates the backlinks going to a specific page.  While these metrics are useful, it is important to remember that websites do not rank solely because of their backlinks, and sometimes even a high ranking will not turn into traffic.

Editorial Link

A link that is given by one website to another without the recipient asking or paying for it. Also known as: Natural Link.

Featured Snippet

For certain queries, usually questions (i.e., who/what/where/when/why/how), Google sometimes shows a special block above the organic search results. This box contains a summary (in the form of paragraph, list, table, or video), as well as the publication date, page title, link to the webpage from which the answer originated, and URL. It is usualy the box that shows as a result the highest and with description to your query. Also known as: Position Zero.

Google Analytics

A free web analytics program that can be used to track audience behavior, traffic acquisition sources, content performance, and much more.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. You can find all the informations on what readers searched on Google and how they have come to your website. Until May 20, 2015 the service was called Google Webmaster Tools.

Googlebot

The web crawling system Google uses to find and add new websites and webpages to its index.

Gray Hat

A supposed “gray” area between techniques that adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but then add an element that bends the rules a little.

Guest Blogging

A popular link building tactic that involves developing content for other websites in exchange for a backlink pointing at your own pages. Also known as: Guest Posting.

Heading

Heading tags (H1-H6) separate content into sections, based on importance, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important. Headline tags should be used naturally and should incorporate your target keywords where relevant, as doing so may provide a small SEO benefit.

Inbound Link

A link to a webpage that originates from an external website. For example, if we were to link to Google, that would count as an inbound link on Google’s side; if Google were to link to us, that would be an inbound link on FMH’s side.

Keyword

The word, words, or phrase that an SEO professional or marketer targets for the purpose of matching and ranking for what users are searching for. The words used on webpages can help search engines determine which pages are the most relevant to show in organic results when a searcher enters a query. Keywords usually represent topics, ideas, or questions.

Keyword Research

The process of discovering any relevant topics, subjects, and terms searchers enter into search engines, as well as the volume and competition level of those terms. This practice is made possible by a variety of free and paid tools. Check this tutorial from Sam Oh from Ahrefs, we’re 100% sure that you will gain a lot of knowledge out of it:

Lead

A person who may or may not be interested in your product(s) and/or service(s). A lead willingly shares their email address (and usually other personal or contact information) in exchange for something they deem of value from the website.

Link

A connection between two websites built using HTML code. A link enables users to navigate to websites, social networks, and apps. Links play a critical role in how search engines evaluate and rank websites.

Link Building

A process designed to get other trusted and relevant websites to link to your website to help improve your organic search rank and visibility. It is one of the most important factors in the SEO world. From my experience, when done properly, it helps websites gain the popularity/traffic/customers more easily than just relying on on-page SEO activities.

Long-Tail Keyword

Highly specific multiple-word terms that often demonstrate higher purchase intent. Less popular keywords that have low search volume that are usually easier to rank for.

Meta Description

A tag that can be added to the “head section of an HTML document. It acts as a description of a webpage’s content. This content isn’t used in ranking algorithms, but is often displayed as the “snippet that appears in the search results. Accurate and engaging descriptions can increase organic click-through rate.

Metric

A way to measure activity and performance in order to assess the success (or lack thereof) of an SEO initiative.

Negative SEO

A rare but malicious practice where webspam techniques are used to harm the search rankings of another website, usually a competitor. We can say that is rarely used in the basic SEO dictionary as well.

Nofollow Attribute

A meta tag that tells search engines not to follow one specific outbound link. This is done in cases when a website doesn’t want to pass authority to another webpage or because it’s a paid link. With all the latest Google algorithm updates nofollow links also show and give some authority to the site but not as much as do-follow link.

Off-Page SEO

Demand generation and brand awareness activities that take place outside of a website. In addition to link building, promotion tactics can include social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and even offline marketing channels (e.g., TV, radio, billboards).

On-Page SEO

These activities all take place within a website. In addition to publishing relevant, high-quality content, on-page SEO includes optimizing HTML code (e.g., title tags, meta tags), information architecture, website navigation, and URL structure.

Organic Search

The natural, or unpaid, listings that appear on a SERP. Organic search results, which are analyzed and ranked by algorithms, are designed to give users the most relevant result based on their query.

PBN

Stands for Private Blog Network. It’s a myth that getting links from PBN sites can harm your website rankings but most SEO experts say that if it’s done properly the PBN backlinks can bring you quality ranking boost too.

Reciprocal Links

When two websites agree to exchange links to one another. It is sometimes used by link builders but you have to be very cautious when doing reciprocal link building as Google could penalize that action. 

Rich Snippet

Structured data can be added to the HTML of a website to provide contextual information to the search engines during crawling. This information can then be displayed in the SERPs, resulting in an enhanced listing, known as a rich snippet.

Interesting fact: After the recent Google Update you can ONLY rank on the first page as rich snippet or other position, but not both as it was case before. That means that your website will show only once on the first page on Google.

Robots.txt

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (or Standard) is a text file, accessible at the root of a website, that tells search engine crawlers which areas of a website should be ignored.

Return on Investment (ROI)

A way to measure the performance of SEO activities. This is calculated by dividing how much revenue you earned via organic search by the cost of the total investment, then multiplying by 100.

Schema

A form of microdata which, once added to a webpage, creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.

Title Tag

An HTML meta tag that acts as the title of a webpage. Typically, the title tag is the title search engines use when displaying search listings, so it should include strategic and relevant keywords for that specific page. The title tag should also be written so it makes sense to people and attracts the most clicks. Typically, title tags should be less than 65 characters.

Traffic

The people (and sometimes bots) who visit your website. My opinion is that one of the final products of all SEO is getting traffic. Quality organic traffic coming from the search engines. This term definitely is going into the basic SEO dictionary bucket.

User Experience (UX)

The overall feeling users are left with after interacting with a brand, its online presence, and its product/services. Check out our free guide to Adobe XD and start learning UX design while we at here.

White Hat

Tactics that comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Always, i say always keep your growth in the lines of the white hat techniques. That way you will make sure that you always have the cleanest and freshest material and you will be rewarded from the search engines with higher rankings and quality organic traffic boost.

Word Count

The total number of words that appear within the copy of content. Too little (or thin) content can be a signal of low-quality to search engines. Always make sure to write content related to the topic and make sure that word count goes more than 600 words, at least.

WordPress

A popular blogging and content management system (CRM). It’s widely and mostly used by many bloggers, businesses etc. We at Fox Media House use it for our purposes too.

XML Sitemap

A list of all the pages on a website that search engines need to know. 

Conclusion

This basic SEO dictionary is not made only for newbies. We all learn, all the time. It’s interesting to mention the The Dunning–Kruger effect hat is much related to this. We start by thinking that we know everything in the SEO. You have started with this basic SEO dictionary terms and the line boosted to 100%. From our experience this effect shows the best how your SEO knowledge will go throughout time. We definitely encourage you to learn and implement more SEO on your website or business in order to gain the right amount of organic traffic reading your quality content. Start from this basic SEO dictionary and sky is the limit. We wish you luck in this journey!