SEO Glossary: Basic SEO Terms & Definitions You Need to Know

If you are someone new to blogging or someone who already has a strong foothold in this subject, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an unspoken requirement for your website to be in the top of the game. If you are an aspiring blogger looking to just set foot into an ocean called SEO, there are chances that you will still be puzzled with some strange words that you would come across when you discuss content creation.

It would be futile if you were looking up for these SEO terms and SEO definitions in a normal dictionary. Hence, we would like to compile a SEO glossary with simple and easy to understand explanation for each of these terms and concepts used in Search Engine Optimization for your blog.

301 Redirect

Permanently redirecting old URL to new URL is called 301 redirect. By creating a redirect, you can tell visitors and search engines that your site URL or blog post URL has been redirected. So when a visitor clicks on your old URL, it will be automatically redirected to...


Above the Fold

The page area of any website that is first loaded and visible on the screen, without scrolling down is "Above the fold" fold basically means, the upper part of a page is visible and the lower part hidden. Above the fold is a popular term nowadays for SEO and refers to...


Alexa Rank

Alexa rank is a list of websites ordered by some stats and managed by Amazon. They track websites and order them from 1 to more. Sites like Google, Facebook, amazon are one of the tops. They basically check factors like keyword, backlinks, traffic and more.


Alt text

Alternative Text is some kind of text or description of the photos posted in a blogpost. It is important for below reasons: 1. If Keywords are part of the description/alt text, it can help in SEO optimization. 2. If the photo file size is too large, page loading time...


AMP

Everything is good in your site, but despite that it is very important for your site to load fast, because there are many users, in which if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, then they ignore it. Due to the slow loading of the site, users are unable to re...


Article Spinning

Article spinning is a technique used to create multiple versions of a piece of content, such as an article, blog post, or product description, by changing certain words and phrases while keeping the overall meaning of the content intact. This technique is often used to...


Backlink

Backlink is a link that makes a way to go from another website to your website. When the link of one web page is linked with the link of another web page, it is called backlink. With the help of simple language, I will tell you better about backlink. For example, sup...


Black Hat

Black hat means using unethical/illegal ways to rank your blog. Black hat includes all bad practices for making links for SEO from various sources. These include 1. PBN (Private Blog Networks) 2. Traffic Generator tools 3. Links generator tool 4. Generating low qua...


Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors which are landing on your website and leaving before taking any action on your blog or website. The actions can be clicking on the page elements, ads, or signing up. They just visit it and returns back. Bounce rate is on...


Breadcrumb

**Breadcrumbs **are a navigation aid that allows users to see the path they have taken to get to the current page. They are typically displayed as a hierarchy of links at the top of a page, with the current page being the last link in the hierarchy. For example, on an...


Broken Link

When you delete any page on your blog but its link is available anywhere, then it is called Broken link that means a link that shows error or does not exist on your blog, then it is called Broken link. is called. Sometimes you must have seen that after opening the po...


Call to action (CTA)

CTA stand for Call To Action. These are features you add in your blog that encourages a visitor to click on it. It can be a link, a form to fill, a survey, a downloadable file etc. Where a visitor clicks on it. This 'click' action means that your blog is engaging and...


Canonical URL

Canonical URL or Canonical Link is the same thing, which is used in HTML. It is used as SEO, where by using Canonical Tag, if the same page in our website is opened with a single URL, then we tell which URL is the most, so that there is no duplicate content in the searc...


Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR stands for Click-through rate. It is the percentage of people who click on an ad after seeing it ad on your blog. This is an important concept in digital marketing.


Content Syndication

Content syndication in digital marketing is a essentially capability republishing a piece of content material (whether that be an article, infographic or a video) on one or more websites. Through it anyone can promote its own brand’s recognition to a large crew of indiv...


Conversion Rate

The number of conversions divided by the total number of visitor audiences is called the conversion rate. If you had 50 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be 5%, since 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%.


Cost per click (CPC)

CPC stands for Cost per click. It is the amount you earn for each unique click on any of the ads in a blog. Example, digital Advertisements placed through platforms such as Google AdWords, etc. CPC is also an important metric while calculating the earnings through blogs...


Cost Per Thousand (CPM)

CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions. It is a term used in advertising to describe the cost of displaying an ad on a website or other platform 1,000 times. In CPM advertising, advertisers pay a fixed price for every 1,000 impressions their ad receives, regard...


CPA Marketing

CPA (Cost Per Action) marketing is a type of online advertising in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked and a specific action is taken. The action that is required to trigger the payment can vary, but it might include things like making a pu...


Crawling

Crawling is a process of fetching records programmatically. Generally, we visit the blog and get content as an audience, but search engines like Google, Bing, Duck Duck go they do not do this. Instead they have programmed bots, that do the same work programmatically....


Crosslinking

Crosslinking is the practice of linking to related pages within a website from different pages within the same website. This is done to help users navigate the website, to signal the importance of certain pages to search engines, and to distribute page authority and lin...


Direct Traffic

In Google Analytics, direct traffic refers to the visitors that come to your website by typing the URL directly into their browser, or by clicking on a bookmark. Direct traffic can also include traffic from untagged campaigns, or from any source that Google Analytics ca...


Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority has become an important metric to measure the search engine score of your website. It has come about after Google stopped updating the PageRank data. Domain Authority helps you to compare your website with the competitors. Even though Google doesn’t...


Domain Rating (DR)

DR or domain rank is a metrics by Ahrefs which was introduced to index and rank sites by ahrefs. But now SEO specialists use it to mark site quality and filter sites for SEO works. So, a site with DR 60 is good over DR 30 irrelevant of DA of the domain. So, if we have...


Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an analytics tool by google used by various services to get stats for a website's views. For most of the users only tracking views, is what google analytics does. But Google Analytics is more than that1. It helps in providing stats on how much organ...


Google Webmaster

The webmaster tool or search console indexes the URL of that website or the contents of that website only after the permission of its owner about any website, for that the owner of that website has to index his website in that webmaster tools You have to submit the site...


Guest Post

Guest Blogging is the process of writing on someone's blog as a guest author. Guest author means you are a temporary writer one time or multiple on a blog owned by someone else. Guest blogging helps - making backlinks - acquiring audience and traffic - self-promotion...


Hyperlink

A hyperlink, also known as a link, is a clickable element, usually underlined and shown in a different color, that redirects the user to another web page, document, or a specific location within the same page. Hyperlinks are used to navigate between different pages on t...


Internal Linking

Linking one page to another page on the same domain is called internal linking. It links one page to another page on your website. You must have seen many websites linking old posts or valuable posts to new posts. Link building is the most important part of on-page S...


Keyword

A keyword is a word or phrase which shows what content is about. Like for Wordpress plugin article "Wordpress plugin" is a keyword, and "contact form 7 Wordpress plugin" can be other keyword


Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is a measure of how hard it is to rank for a particular keyword in search engines. It is based on a number of factors, including the number and quality of websites that are already ranking for the keyword, as well as the strength of their backlinks an...


Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence or Keyword Placement, when you do an article writing, the place where you add the keyword is called Keyword Prominence. From the point of view of Search Engine Optimization, it is very important to have the Keyword in the right place. If a keyword is...


Keyword Proximity

Keyword proximity refers to the distance between keywords within a piece of content, specifically in relation to each other in the text. It is the measure of how close together two or more keywords appear in a text, it is used to help search engines understand the relev...


Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a technique to rank the page incorrectly and bring it to the first page in Google. In which in a blogger page content and meta tags, the same phrase or which we and you speak the target keyword, it is repeated in the middle of the content of the page...


Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are more precise keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to employ when they're nearing a point of purchase or utilising voice search. They seem counterintuitive at first, but if you know how to utilise them, they may be quite beneficial.


LSI

LSI in easier terms is the keywords related to the main keyword. Let say we are writing about Messaging app, so personal message is main keyword where as voice message, text message, message background, message history. These all are related keywords and link to the sam...


Meta Description

Meta Description is a code snippet, which is written on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). When a user does a keyword search on search engines like Google, Bing etc., the search engine shows the best ranked post or page related to that keyword on the result page. Jus...


Monetization

A website where a person writes regularly about topics that interest them, usually with photographs and links to other websites they find interesting.  To put it simply, monetization means making money from your site. When you earn revenue from the online content on you...


Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is considered to be the most valuable type of traffic for a website, as it is free and comes from people who are actively searching for information related to the website's content. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine the relevance...


Page Authority (PA)

PA is Page authority, another MOZ metricWhat is page authority? Simply put, it is a score that can predict how well a specific page will perform on the search engine result pages (SERPs). The score ranges from 1 to 100, with 100 being perfect.Page authority is scored us...


Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a type of digital advertising where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. In PPC advertising, you create ads an...


PBN

A private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites that are used to build backlinks to a target website with the intention of improving its search engine ranking. PBNs are typically used by people who are trying to manipulate search engine algorithms to improve the r...


Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are links that are exchanged between two websites. Essentially, one website will link to another website, and in return, the second website will link back to the first. These types of links were once a common way for websites to build up their link pr...


Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is the traffic that a website receives from other sites that link to it. When a user clicks on a link to a website from another site, it is referred to as referral traffic. Referral traffic can be an important source of traffic for a website, as it can...


Return on Investment

Let's say your total investment is X. The Amount your investment increases to become is Y. Then, ROI = (Y-X)/X * 100 eg:) If total investment X = Rs. 1000 If this investment increases to Y = Rs. 2000 Then ROI (Y-X)/X = (2000-1000)/1000 * 100 = 100% = Rs. 100...


Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are a way of google giving resources to person searching for a query. It can be a list of answers questions, or a list of options like if we search for websites to chat we may get a list of all chat websites in a space on search page directly is known as a...


Robots.txt

It is a text, MS word or any other text editing file with written instructions for search engine robot / spider to know where to crawl and where not to crawl on your site. It is added into the root directory of your domain. Each file/folder is needed to be entered as...


SERP

A search engine results page (SERP) is the webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a user's query. It lists the websites, videos, images, and other types of content that the search engine considers to be the most relevant to the user's quer...


Sitemap

In Simple Words, Sitemap is basically used for navigation on your website for both crawlers and as well as users. There Are Two Types of Sitemap - 1) XML Sitemap - Is Basically Used For Crawlers. ( Understand the structure of your  Website. ) 2) HTML Sitemap - Is Basica...


Sponsored Post

Sponsored posts are a form of paid advertising on social media or blogs where a brand pays a publisher or influencer to create content that promotes the brand's products or services. This type of content is similar to organic content, but it is clearly marked as sp...


White Hat

White hat seo is a legal and preferred way of doing SEO. Whatever done under this is a safe practice. It includes like 1. Guest posting 2. Mentions 3. Social Signals 4. Link sharing 5. Directories 6. Speed optimisations guest posting is one way of doing SEO, wh...