Here’s our Part 2 of our SEO Glossary Terms. You can visit our SEO Glossary Terms Part 1 in case you missed it.
Meta Description
An HTML element, a meta description, is a snippet, typically of around 160 characters, that summarizes the content of a page for users and search engines. Search engines show this description on their search results page, making them a highly influencing factor to improve user click-through rates.
Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords help search engines determine the keywords you want the page to be ranked for. These keywords are only visible to the search engines, which has led to people abusing them to include terms merely to rank for those keywords even if their content does not relate to them. This has significantly reduced their value. However, they haven’t become obsolete yet.
Meta Title
Meant to be a crisp and accurate description of the page’s content, meta titles (or page titles) are the clickable headlines for a given result and are also visible on your browser tab. Since they are visible to both the search engines and the user, it is important that they are written to cater to both. Good SEO practices demand that you add your primary keyword in the meta title.
Meta Tag
Meta Tags are coding statements in HTML that describe the content of the web page for the search engine. Meta descriptions, meta keywords, and meta titles are among the most important meta tags.
Navigation
The system of hyperlinks (or navigation) on your website helps users easily move from one page to another and find things of relevance. Search engines also use navigation to understand the relationship between pages and index them properly.
Nofollow
Nofollow tags are placed on links that you don’t want search engines (mainly Google) to consider as ones that you’re endorsing. Even though the users will see these links like any other backlinks, Google will not consider them as your site’s inbound links.
Organic Search
Organic search (or natural search) refers to unpaid search results based on relevance and domain authority rather than any kind of advertising or black hat tactic.
Orphan Page
A website page that isn’t linked to by any other page is referred to as an orphan page. Since search engine crawlers follow links from other pages to index new pages, orphan pages create serious SEO issues because they are often left unindexed and do not show up in any search results.
Outbound Links
Outbound Links direct your users to another website. These links are added to provide quality references to the users. There are two types of outbound links, namely:
- Dofollow - The ones that Google consider for their page rankings.
- Nofollow - The ones that Google doesn’t consider for their page rankings.
A high number of outbound links may affect your rankings in a negative way, and a balance needs to be maintained.
PageRank
A way to measure the importance and popularity of a webpage, PageRank is used to determine the quality and quantity of the links to a webpage on a score from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Receiving backlinks from a page with a high score can increase your domain authority.
Paid Links
As the name suggests, backlinks that you pay for are called paid links. Search engines do not favor paid links at all, and getting caught paying for links can cause your rankings to go very low or can get you banned from indexing.
Poison Words
Words that extremely lower your ranking in the search results if added to your title, description, or URL are known as poison words.
Primary Keyword
The primary keyword (or main/head keyword) aptly describes what the content is about and has a high search volume. It is included in the meta title, meta description, important heading tags, and a lot of other prominent places in the content. The primary keyword, as the name suggests, is the most important keyword of your strategy, and all the other keywords are only there to support it.
Proximity
The distance between the keywords in a search string when used in the actual content is referred to as proximity. The more the string keyword and the proximity of keywords in the content match, the more relevant it is considered.
Reinclusion
Reinclusion refers to requesting search engines to re-index a website that has been flagged for black hate SEO and has been banned. Search engines have proper guidelines websites can follow to be reincluded in indexing.
Robot.txt
Robot.txt instructs search engine crawlers (and other web robots) on how they can search and index your website. These files indicate which parts of the website can and cannot be crawled.
Sandbox
Most new websites have a poor ranking on Google, and the Google Sandbox is a commonly held belief to explain why. It has been contemplated since 2004 that Google indexes new websites but puts them under restriction for a certain amount of time so that they are only visible in the supplementary results (which do not get as much traffic as standard results). This prevention from ranking in searches has not been confirmed by any sources from Google yet.
Search Engine
A search engine is a software application that keeps a database of information on various websites on the internet through spidering and indexing so that it can produce relevant results when users access it for their requirements. Google is the most popular search engine in the world today.
Search Volume
The number of times that a keyword is searched for is referred to as the search volume. The higher the search volume, the more important the keyword becomes. However, because of that, it is also more difficult to rank for a keyword that has a higher search volume since there is a lot of competition already.
Secondary Keywords
Secondary Keywords are terms that are closely related to your primary keyword and help support it. These keywords prevent keyword stuffing by overuse of the primary keyword and increase the readability of your page so that it can be better interpreted by search engines and users.
Seed Keywords
The base or ground keywords that are the most relevant to your business and can work as foundational keywords to create relevant long-tail and secondary keywords are referred to as seed keywords. Seed keywords may be directly associated with the product or service you offer, used heavily by your target audience, or used by your competitors.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of using a set of tools and skills to increase the quality and quantity of the visibility your website or webpage receives on a search engine.
Keyword research and link building are some of the best SEO techniques to organically rank well in search engine results.
SERP
Search engine result pages (SERP) are the pages that make the list of results when a user searches for something on a search engine. Search engines customize SERPs based on the location, browsing history, etc. so that it matches the user’s profile.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file placed on your website that lists the individual pages of your website, providing a proper architecture of the website to search engines so that their crawlers can index your website intelligently. An XML file is created for search engines, and an HTML file is created for users because a sitemap can help them navigate to specific pages easily as well.
Skyscraping
Skyscraping SEO refers to finding popular topics or web pages in your niche, creating better and improved content on them, and then reaching out to websites with high domain authority that have already provided backlinks to those webpages to consider your content over them. Since the demand for the topic is already there, it is easy to rank high on it. However, you will need to ensure that your content is more user-friendly and adds more value to the user than the already popular pieces for the Skyscraping technique to succeed.
Thin Content
Low quality and shallow content that offers little or no value to the user is defined as thin content. It can include duplicate pages, doorway pages, cookie-cutter sites, copied content, keyword stuffing, and computer-generated content. A thin content penalty by a search engine will result in your website being entirely removed from search engine results.
Unnatural Link
An artificial link created with the purpose of manipulating the PageRank or the search engine results is referred to as an unnatural link. If caught, unnatural links can significantly lower your rank in the search results.
Vertical Search
A Vertical Search is dedicated to a particular area of focus. For instance, when you choose a specialized search element such as ‘images’ as an option on Google, which restricts the search results to only that category, you are performing a vertical search. Vertical searches offer more specific and better-targeted results.
Viral Content
A piece of media that becomes an internet sensation and is shared exponentially on the internet is referred to as viral content. Viral content focuses less on organic traffic and more on social shares to increase a website’s visibility.
White Hat
SEO practice that improves your ranking on search engines by focusing on the human audience and maintaining the integrity of your website while following the rules and policies of search engines refers to white hat practice.
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