If you’ve ever felt lost in the sea of SEO terms and definitions, you’re not alone. Like any specialized industry, search engine optimization has its own unique terminology, definitions, and abbreviations. Whether navigating through anchor text or understanding the complexity of canonicalization, this guide is designed for you. This SEO terms & definitions guide compiles the most common terms you will likely hear and need to know during your SEO marketing. Let’s take a journey into the fundamentals of SEO and build a solid foundation together. No jargon, just clarity. 30+ SEO Terms You Must Know as a Marketer— Search Engine Related Terms
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)
SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages are web pages that appear after a user enters a query on a search engine like Google, Bing, or any other search engine. SERPs include organic search, paid Google Ads, People Also Search For, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs, maps, images, and video results. It typically has 10 results, varying depending on the query and search engine.
Search Engine Crawling
Crawling is the process of search engine bots discovering new and updated content on a website & analyzing its contents. Here, search engines send out bots, also known as web crawlers or spiders, to find new content.
Search Engine Indexing
Search engine indexing is the process of collecting, organizing, and storing web page content so that search engines can quickly and easily retrieve, analyze, and search it. After that, it can process and examine the text as well as essential content tags and attributes, including images, videos, <title> elements, alt attributes, and more. Then, it serves readers in ranked lists on its search engine results pages (SERPs).
Cache
A cache is a stored version of a web page that shows the search engine last crawled and indexed as it saves a copy of the page’s HTML content in its database. Cached pages make sure that it is accessible to users. Some search engines that offer cached versions of web pages include Google Search, Bing, Yandex Search, and Baidu. To check whether your page caches, type “cache” before the web page’s URL. i.e., “cache:https://examplesite.com.”
Cloaking
In search engine optimization, cloaking is the practice of displaying different versions of a website to users and search engines. It’s a deceptive tactic that aims to “cheat” the search engine’s algorithm. For example, a website might optimize a page with some text or keywords for search engines while showing prohibited or unrelated images to the users.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that shows the site structure, including its pages, content, and the relationships between them. Sitemaps are an important part of SEO because they help search engines find, crawl, and index all of a site’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engine bots which pages on a site are most important.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google launched an open-source project to help publishers create webpages, optimize content for all devices & operate at optimal speed. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) can help with SEO in several ways like better UX, providing higher ranking & visibility, getting more traffic, higher click-through rates, faster loading, better page speed & lower bounce rates.
Referrer String
A referrer string is information that a user’s browser sends when they move from one web page to another. It provides details about the source of the user’s traffic, enabling website owners to understand how users find their sites. In terms of SEO, a referrer is the URL of a website that directs visitors to another site through a hyperlink. It represents the webpage a user was on immediately before landing on the current page.— Keywords Related SEO Terms
Keywords
Keywords, aka “keyphrases,” are words or phrases that represent a brand, its products, or services. They help search engines & users understand what a web page is about. For example, if you want to buy a new jacket, you might type something like “women’s leather jacket” into Google. Even though that phrase consists of more than one word, it’s still a keyword. Your keyword should be relevant, have a high search volume, and align with user intent specific, & target lower competition.
Recommended Blog: How To Do Keyword Research for SEO- 10 Proven Ways
Search Intent
Search Intent (also known as “User Intent”) is a user’s main goal when typing a query into a search engine. In other words, it tells you why the user chose to type a particular query into the search engine – and what they hoped to achieve with that search. Common types of Search Intent include informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional.
Keyword stuffing
When you overuse the same keyword phrases in on-page copy or on a web page, it’s known as keyword stuffing. It is false to believe that using the same keywords repeatedly will improve a piece of content’s search engine ranking. Search engines may penalize or remove the page from SERPs if they find this to be an attempt to manipulate the page’s ranking in search results. Let’s examine the following instance of keyword stuffing:
Predictably, neither readers nor Google search engines will be satisfied with the type of keyword-stuffed content shown above. Search engines reward high-quality, in-depth content that answers queries and serves search intent. Repeating primary and secondary keywords may boost keyword density but won’t necessarily improve a page’s ranking.
Search Volume
Search volume is a metric that measures the number of searches for a specific term over a given period. It’s a key component of search engine optimization strategy. Search volume is an estimate that can fluctuate based on time, region, season, industry, seasonality, competition, business needs and goals, niche competitiveness. and theme. It’s important to consider search volume when creating content because it reflects the popularity of the query. The ultimate goldmine for an SEO expert is finding a high-volume, high-converting, low-competition keyword.
Keyword Difficulty (KD)
Keyword difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric that measures how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google SERP for a specific keyword. It’s also known as “SEO difficulty” or “keyword competition.”KD is based on several factors, including domain authority, page authority, and content quality. KD scores are usually presented as a numerical value or a scale, such as low, medium, high, or from 0–100. A higher score indicates a more difficult keyword.
Head Terms
A head term, also known as a head keyword, is a word or phrase that is the focus of a search. Head terms are usually one or two words long and are the most specific and relevant keywords in a search query. Head terms are very competitive regarding ranking, and they are the opposite of long-tail keywords.
It’s crucial to boost organic traffic while maintaining your website’s competitiveness. Because they encompass a large topic or represent a well-known idea, they may be well-liked search queries with a high search volume.
Core Web Vitals
A set of metrics that measure the page’s performance related to user experience. Core Web Vitals were introduced alongside the Page Experience update as the main signals that indicate a good user experience:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – loading performance.
First Input Delay (FID) – interactivity.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – visual stability.
Google did confirm Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor but said that relevance and other factors may be more important. Google Lighthouse is the top recommended tool for measuring Core Web Vitals and other performance metrics. A slow website in Google Algo Lab may also be slow for real users. The real-user Core Web Vitals metrics that Google collects are used as a ranking signal, and if your website scores less in Lighthouse, it performs poorly in front of real users & search engines. — SEO Onsite Terms Glossary
Canonical URL
The canonical URL is the top address for a user to find information, & Google considers it the most representative page from a group of duplicate pages. Sometimes, you might have a situation where the same content page can be accessed at multiple addresses.
Marking the canonical URL helps search engines understand which content address is the best. Most of the time, this is the source URL. The canonical tag goes in the page’s <head> section and looks like this: <link rel=”canonical” ref=”https://www.example.com”>. Below, you can see the canonical URL example on the inspect page.
Stop Word
A frequently used word. For example: a, at, for, is, of, on, the. In the past, search engines like Google have ignored these words to save time and resources when indexing. Search engines have evolved dramatically since the early days, and stop words are sometimes meaningful, so this…
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