Definitions of SEO Terms

Search engine optimization is a vast and detailed topic, and the terms used to describe things can get very confusing. I am ALWAYS asked – “But what do all the terms mean?!”

Understand these SEO definitions and learn about SEO:

SEO is critically important if you want your website to rank on search engines like Google. However, the hundreds of definitions and explanations is overwhelming, and can be very difficult to remember.

We hope these definitions of SEO terms help you to understand what everyone is talking about when they discuss SEO.

If anything here is unclear, or if you have any questions, we’d love to answer them for you. Please contact us and we’ll help you out!

Let’s start with some basics, and then we’ll get into the more detailed terminology.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is the process of going through your site both manually, and by using specialised software, to determine where your site might have SEO problems or issues that need to be fixed. These issues could be affecting your search ranking and include things like poor quality content, slow page load speeds, badly formatted title tags, and many more.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO is all the optimization that takes place on a page on your website (eg: a blog post) that you are using to target a specific keyword. It includes optimising things like the page title, the H1 tag, the URL, the layout of the text, adding images or videos correctly and more.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of checking and fixing any technical issues on your site that could be negatively impacting your search rankings. These include things like slow page load speed, incorrect website structure (i.e. content that is difficult to find, or a poor menu structure), poor mobile responsive design (if any), and more.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO include all the things that you might do OFF your website, to drive more traffic to your site. These things could include an email marketing campaign, a social media campaign, guest posting on other sites in exchange for backlinks, and more.

Now we’ve covered the major terms, let’s delve more into the meanings of terms in each category.

General SEO Definitions

10x Content
Content that is at least ten times better than the current top-ranking result for the target keyword.

Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that take no further action after landing on a website, like clicking to a different page, commenting, or adding an item to their cart. In other words – they land on the website and then bounce off. A high bounce rate is bad for SEO because it shows Google that your visitors were not interested in the content you displayed, and they left your website.

Content Relevance
Content relevance is the extent to which your website content is relevant to the search intent, needs, interests, or preferences of your reader. It’s very important to generate relevant, useful content to rank on Google. Google always wants to give the searcher the best possible answer to whatever they searched for.

Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is the collection of pages on your website that you most want to rank for in search engine results. You would likely also use internal linking to point many other pages to these pages, further demonstrating their importance to users and to Google.

Crawler
A crawler is software designed to browse the internet systematically. Crawlers allow search engines to discover and process website pages so that they can be indexed and shown in search results.

Customer Journey
The customer journey is the path a user takes from when they first become aware of your brand, right through to the eventual purchase of your product or service, and even their experiences beyond the point of purchase. It’s very important to both map out what journey you would like your user to take, as well as check the journeys they actually take. If you have this information, you can see where they might be deviating from your plan and adjust your site and/or strategy accordingly.

Duplicate Content
This is content that appears on the web in more than one place. There are tools you can use to scan your site for duplicate content. You want to always stay below 15% duplicate content.

Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is website content that doesn’t go out of date and is continually relevant to readers over an extended period – often years. It addresses common problems or questions many people have. It also doesn’t need frequent updates to remain relevant. Example: You could write a blog post about “how to write a book”. The information doesn’t change and it’s a topic people will be interested in long term.

Gated Content
This is content that visitors can only access after providing their contact information. Example: They need to submit a contact form with their name, email address and phone number, before being able to download a specialised eBook.

Google Algorithm
This is a set of rules that’s used by Google to rank matching results to a user’s search query. Google updates their algorithm often so that websites can’t cheat the system to rank higher in search results.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google’s free website tracking tool. It’s used to track website visitors and analyze how they interact with your website. It’s extremely important to have this setup on your website so that you can track your traffic.

Google Business Profile (Google My Business Profile)
This is a free business listing from Google that shows up in maps and web search results. Most often, you need a physical address for your workspace to qualify for a Google Business Profile. These are great for SEO because you can update your profile with a lot of relevant information. More importantly, people can leave you Google Reviews, which demonstrate to users (and to Google) the quality of service customers might receive from you.

Google Search Console
This is another free (and very important) tool from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s search results. You can track search impressions, click through rates, search queries, popular pages, and much more.

Holistic SEO
This is the practice of improving ALL aspects of your website to rank higher in search engines.

Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is when a single website targets the same keyword across multiple posts or pages. This is not good for SEO as it means your website is competing with itself for the top spot in the search rankings, which reduces the strength each of the pages with the same keyword. You should be targeting one keyword per page or post on your site.

Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking is the organic ranking position in the search results for a particular keyword. This means that if a page on your website is in position 3 of page 1 of Google’s search results for ‘dog collars’, then your keyword ranking for the term ‘dog collars’ is 3.

Landing Page
A landing page is a website page where a visitor “lands” after clicking on a link in a specific marketing campaign or from somewhere else (like search results). Landing pages can be intentional (a button from an email newsletter link to a specific page). They can also be unintentional (Google might rank a random page on your website that you had not intended to rank).

Local SEO
Local SEO is when you optimize your online presence to rank higher in relevant LOCAL searches. This is especially important when optimizing for a geographical business. Example: A local bakery that can only efficiently serve customers within a particular distance from their premises.

Long-Tail Keyword
This is a phrase that’s a low-volume search query on a specific topic, example: ‘men’s black winter jacket to buy in New York’. These keywords are often easier to rank for and you should start with more of these when you begin your SEO campaign. As you rank for these, you can move on to trying to rank for more general keywords.

Organic Search Results
Organic results are search results that you have not paid a search engine to rank for you, they are not part of a paid search ad campaign (i.e. pay per click), and they can’t be influenced by advertisers. Organic SEO aims to boost your organic search results, so you naturally rise to the top of search engine results because your website offers useful and relevant content to searchers.

Organic Traffic
This is the website traffic that results from your website’s ORGANIC search results. People are much more likely to click on organic results, rather than paid ads, so it’s really important to improve your organic results as much as possible.

Primary Keyword
A primary keyword is the single, main keyword around which a web page is created and optimized. Think of it as the most important keyword on your website and all other keywords are either directly or indirectly related to your primary keyword.

Search Intent
Search intent is the reason the searcher searchers for their particular query in a search engine. Different search intents can indicate different things, like potential click through rates or potential sales. Example: A user who searches ‘buy black boots South Africa’ is much more likely to buy something, while someone who searches ‘boots or shoes’ is more likely to be researching something. It’s also very important to conder the user’s search intent when creating content for a keyword. Think carefully about what the search intent of your keyword is and create content that answers the search intent. This will give your content the best chance of ranking.

Search Term
A search term (or search query) is a word or set of words that a person enters on a search engine like Google to generate specific results. Usually, you would try to match your targeted keywords to the search terms you think your target market will use.

Search Volume
Search volume is the number of times, on average, users look for a particular search query each month. Example: if your targeted keyword is ‘red hats’ and the search volume in your selected area is 10 000, then approximately 10 000 searches were made for the term ‘red hats’ on average across the preceding 12 months.

Short-Tail Keywords
This is the opposite of a long-tail keyword. It’s a much shorter phrase, or sometimes a single word, which means it’s a far more general term. Therefore, it has higher search volumes and much more competition. This makes it a more difficult term to rank for.

Thin Content
This is page content that has little or no value for the user. Not all pages need to rank on search engines but if you have a page that you want to rank, you must ensure the content on the page is not thin.

Transactional Query
This is a search query where someone is looking to purchase something but hasn’t yet decided where to buy it from. It shows a very clear search intent – the user intends to buy, and you should be optimising sales pages (like product pages on a shop) for these types of search queries.

On-Page SEO Definitions

Alt Text
Alt text (alternative text) is the text description of an image on a web page. It’s very important for SEO because it’s used by screen readers and search engines.

Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink. Example: Here is my sentence and this is my anchor text (that links to this page for reference). Anchor text should always match the page it is linking to because Google uses anchor text to understand the content of the linked page.

Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation are internal links that give users and search engines a clear trail to follow around your site. Breadcrumbs are great for SEO because they enhance user experience and help Google to make sense of your website.

Canonical URL
A canonical URL is a URL that Google sees as the “master” version of a set of duplicate or near-duplicate pages.

External Link
This is a link on your website that points to another website. (Also called an Outbound Link.)

H1 Tag
This is a coding method used to demonstrate to Google which part of the text on your page is the heading, and therefore the most important. You need a H1 tag on every page, and there are guidelines you should follow to best optimize this tag for search engines.

Header Tags
These are tags like the H1 tag, but they can range from H1 to H6. They are used to highlight headings and subheadings on your web page, usually in descending order of importance from H1 to H6. It’s important to structure your page content with the correct header tags in descending order. This tells users and search engines which content is important, and how important it is on the page.

Inbound Link
This is a link from another site that links to your website – i.e. the link is inbound to your site.

Internal Link
This is a link from one page of your website to another page, also on your website.

Keyword Density
The keyword density tells us how frequently a keyword is used within a piece of content, in relation to the overall word count of that same content. If you use too many keywords in one piece of content, this is called ‘keyword stuffing’, and it is bad for your SEO.

Keyword Stuffing
As referenced above, keyword stuffing is repeating the same keywords (or similar phrases) in your content to try to manipulate search rankings. This is very bad for your SEO and should be avoided!

Meta Description
This is the short description that a search engine displays under your link that tells users what your link is about. This meta tag is no longer as important as it used to be to get your page to rank. However, it’s very important to optimize this carefully to entice searchers to click on your link.

Orphan Page
This is a page that has no links TO it from other pages on your website. (i.e. This means that no internal links on your website point to this page.)

Technical SEO Definitions

Redirects
A URL redirect is a way to send users and search engines to a different URL than the one they requested. (i.e. they click the link www.yourdomain.com/page and your site redirects them automatically to www.yourdomain.com/interestingpage instead. Redirects are used to move a webpage to a new address and ensure that visitors and search engines are automatically taken to the correct page. There are many types, and they are used in many different scenarios. (If you’re not a web developer, you probably don’t need to know what types there are.)

404 Error
The 404 Not Found HTTP status code means the website couldn’t find the requested page or resource. This means the page link is broken or has been deleted, or just can’t be found. 404 errors are bad for SEO as they create a bad user experience because the page they want to visit doesn’t exist. Google doesn’t like them for the same reason.

Broken Link
A broken link is a link on a web page that points to a non-existent (or “dead”) page or resource. Broken links can internal (a link to another page on your site) or external (a link to another website). These are bad for SEO and should be fixed.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)
This is a globally distributed server network that makes it quicker for users to access your website (eg: Cloudflare). These services are one of the ways to speed up your website and decrease your page load time. They are excellent for SEO If they’re implemented correctly.

Core Web Vitals
These are metrics that form part of Google’s Page Experience signals and they are used to measure user experience. (This is quite a technical element of SEO and best handled and checked by a professional.) You need good results here for your pages to rank highly.

HTTPS
HTTPS is the encrypted version of HTTP. It protects the communications between your browser and server from being intercepted and tampered with by attackers. In order to activate this on your website, your web host will need to install a SSL certificate for you to prove that your website is secure. Once it is installed and activated correctly, you should see the change in the browser address bar. (This used to show a small lock icon, but the icon has changed over time.)

Page Speed
This is the amount of time it takes for your web page to load. It’s critically important to make your website load as fast as possible to ensure the best user experience for your visitors. No one wants a slow website. If your web page is too slow, users will click off it and search engines will interpret that as your page is not useful and will likely decrease its search ranking.

Website Structure
This refers to how a website is organized and how its web pages are interlinked. Website structure is very important to SEO. Websites should have a hierarchical structure – their most important keywords should be at the top of the metaphorical pyramid, and the less important keywords should branch down from there.

Off-Page SEO Definitions

Ad Impression
An ad impression is a metric used in online advertising to count the number of times an advertisement is displayed (i.e. seen by a user), regardless of whether it was clicked or not. Example: Google displayed your Adwords Campaign ad in the search results, but no one clicked it – therefore eyes could have seen it and made but no one clicked it.

Backlinks
Backlinks are links from a page on one website (Website A) to another website (Website B). Backlinks are like a vote from Website B to say that Website A has good content, so Website B is telling its users to go there. Search engines analyze the quality of backlinks to estimate how important the page it’s linking to is. Lots of backlinks are great, but you don’t want to collect spammy links. It’s definitely ‘quality over quantity’ for backlinks!

Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is when you write a piece of content that is published on another website’s blog. This is often done in exchange for a follow backlink, which can really boost your SEO.

Link Building
This is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. These links are called Backlinks. It can be tricky to get it right and often takes a lot of energy and patience, but excellent backlinks are worth their weight in gold!

Link Juice
Link juice is the value that one page or website can pass to another page or website through a link. Example: If a major website like The New York Times links to your website, that link will have a LOT of link juice, which will tell search engines that this very large, busy site (The New York Times) thinks your website is important. That’s a very strong vote from The NYT and counts for a LOT!

Paid Link
This is a backlink that you pay another website for. Sadly, it’s most common now to have to pay for backlinks, especially good quality ones. High-traffic, high authority websites have realised that backlinks from them are a valuable commodity and can be very profitable for them.

If there are any SEO terms that you still don’t understand, please ask us and we’ll answer all your questions!