These days, all businesses and webmasters are talking about SEO. It is just enough to spend an hour with an SEO expert and you will hear dozens of strange words and phrases, many of which you may not understand.
We know that learning all the ins and outs of SEO phrases and its specialized vocabulary can be like learning a second language. That’s why we decided to prepare an SEO glossary for you so that whenever you need one of these terms, you can quickly access it. These terms are divided into different sections. SEO terms, crawling and indexing, terms related to technical website optimization, etc., all of which we have collected separately in this article. Stay tuned.
SEO phrases
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- 10 blue links: Ten organic results from a keyword search that appear on the first page of search engines. Keep in mind that sponsored links (those with Ad written next to them and paid for) are not included in blue links.
- Black hat SEO: Search engines optimization methods that violate Google’s quality guidelines and use illegal methods.
- White hat: Search engine optimization methods that comply with Google’s quality guidelines.
- Crawling: You cannot go to learn SEO terminology and not see this word! Crawling is the method through which search engines discover your web pages.
- De-indexed: One of the most widely used SEO terms and refers to a page or group of pages that are removed from Google’s index.
- Featured snippets: Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of the SERP (Google search results) for specific queries.
- Google My Business listing: A listing through which local businesses can be seen and grow their customer base.
- Image carousels: Images that appear in SERPs that can be scrolled from left to right.
- Indexing: The storage and organization of content found by Google’s robots during crawling.
- Intent: In SEO terminology, this word tells us exactly what users are looking for when searching for a term in a search engine.
- KPI (key performance indicator): A measurable value that shows how well an activity is achieving its goal.
- Local pack: The jobs that are displayed to you after searching for a phrase like “nearest oil change” or “ice cream shop” on Google.
- Query: In the SEO terminology dictionary, the words that are typed into the search bar are called Query.
- Ranking: The order of search results based on how pages are ranked based on their relevance to the queries that the user searches.
- Search engine: Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., extract the terms entered by the user from their databases and rank them according to specific algorithms and display them to the user in the SERP.
- SERP: The abbreviation for Search Engine Result Page is used to mean the search engine results page. That is, the exact same page that is displayed to you after searching for a phrase on Google.
- Traffic: The number of times users visit a website.
- URL: You have probably heard the name URL many times before. You might be interested to know that this term is also an SEO term. A unique address that exists for every page on the Internet.
- Webmaster guidelines: Guidelines published by search engines such as Google and Bing, with the aim of helping website owners create content that is found and indexed and performs well in search results.
Part 2 of SEO Phrases– Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
- 2xx Status Codes: Among the SEO terms in the section on how search engines work, we can mention 2xx status codes. A group of status codes that indicate that a request for a page was successfully completed.
- 4xx Status Codes: A group of codes that indicate a request to enter a website or page that results in an error. Access to that page may have been blocked or that page may have been deleted.
- 5xx Status Codes: A group of status codes which indicate that the server is unable to fulfill the request.
- Algorithms: Another SEO term in the section on how search engines work is an algorithm, which refers to the process or formula by which information stored in the search engine database from pages that are retrieved and ranked in meaningful ways after users search.
- Backlink: One of the most commonly used terms in off-page SEO is backlinks, or “inbound links.” These are links from other websites that point to your website.
- Bots: Also known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” they are robots that crawl the Internet and find different content.
- Caffeine: In the SEO dictionary of specialized phrases, it refers to Google’s web indexing system. Caffeine is actually an index or collection of web content, while Googlebot is a crawler that crawls different pages and finds content.
- Citations: Also known as “business listings,” which identifies the name, address, and phone number of local businesses (NAP).
- Cloaking: Showing different content to human visitors to a website and search engines. This is prohibited by Google and will penalize the website if cloaking occurs.
- Crawl budget: Crawl budget is also one of the most popular SEO terms and refers to the average number of pages that search engine robots crawl on your website in a day.
- Crawler directives: These are instructions that you create for crawlers to crawl and index what you want and ignore what you do not.
- Distance: In local SEO, it refers to the proximity or location of the searcher or the location specified by the user in the search term.
- Engagement: Engagement is another SEO term and refers to data that shows how searchers interact with your website through search results.
- Google Quality Guidelines: Guidelines published by Google that detail what tactics are prohibited or harmful and are designed to manipulate search results.
- Google Search Console: If you are going to learn SEO terminology, you will hear a lot about Google Search Console. It is a free program provided by Google that allows website owners to monitor how their websites are performing in search. Learning to use Search Console is a must-have item that you have to definitely consider it in your program.
- HTML: Hypertext markup language is the language used to create web pages.
- Index Coverage report: A report in Google Search Console that shows the index status of your website’s pages.
- Index: If you are in the process of learning SEO terminology, you should definitely know what index means. A large database of information that crawlers discover and consider these pages appropriate enough for searchers to search.
- Internal links: Links on your website that point to other pages on the same website.
- JavaScript: This one may not be considered an SEO term, but it is not! JavaScript is a programming language that adds dynamic elements to static web pages.
- Login forms: These are pages that require authentication before a visitor can access the content.
- Manual penalty: This refers to Google’s “Manual Action” where a reviewer (a human, not a bot) finds specific pages on your website that violate Google’s quality guidelines. Such pages are usually reported to Google by these reviewers, who then penalize your website.
- Meta robots tag: A piece of code that provides instructions to crawlers on how to crawl or index the content of a web page.
- Navigation: A list of links that help visitors navigate to other pages on your website.
- NoIndex tag: A meta tag that instructs search engines not to index a page that has this tag.
- PageRank: A component of Google’s core algorithm. It is a link analysis program that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links that it contains.
- Personalization: The way search engines can show results to a user based on their location, search history, and other personal information.
- Prominence: Businesses that are well-known and popular in the real world.
- RankBrain: This algorithm is based on artificial intelligence and is one of the main Google algorithms that shows the closest result based on the user’s intention and purpose of searching.
- Relevance: Another local SEO term, which means that a local business is relevant to what a searcher is searching for.
- txt: Files that indicate which parts of your website are allowed to be crawled by search engines and which parts are not permitted.
- Search forms: Refers to search functions or search bars on a website that help users find pages on that website.
- Search forms: Refers to search functions or search bars on a website that help users find pages on that website.
- Search Quality Rater Guidelines: Guidelines for raters who work for Google and determine the quality of actual web pages.
- Sitemap: A Sitemap is another SEO term that is used a lot. It is a list of URLs on your website that crawlers can use to discover and index your content.
- Spammy tactics: Like black hat SEO, spammy tactics are also among the cases that violate search engine quality guidelines.
- URL folders: Parts of a website that come after .com and the like and are separated by a “/”. For example, in moz.com/blog we can say that “blog/” is a folder.
