Glossary of Important SEO Terms

Basic SEO Terms

Crawling: The process of search engine web crawlers or spiders (bots) discovering the content on your website.
Indexing: The process of storing and organizing website content found during crawling so it can be presented in search engine results.
Ranking: The position of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keywords: The words and phrases users type into search engines; if they are added to a website, the site will have a better chance of being displayed in search results for those terms.
Organic Search: Unpaid listings on search engine results pages (the ones without “ad” next to them).
SERP: Search engine results page; the page displayed after a user enters a search query.

Title Tag: An HTML element on a website that designates the title of a web page that should be displayed in search results; however, Google sometimes chooses to show different titles.
Meta Description: A short snippet that summarizes a web page; appears under the title in SERPs.
Headings: Also called header tags; they are ranked from H1 to H6 in order to separate headings and subheadings on a web page and to convey hierarchy; H1 is usually used for the title of the web page.
Internal Linking: Links that go from one page of a website to another page on the same site.
Mobile-friendliness: How well a website displays and functions on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.

Backlinks: An incoming link from one website to another website.
Link Building: The process of creating backlinks by getting other websites to link to your website.
Domain Authority (DA): A measure of how likely a website domain is to rank in search engine results
Page Authority (PA): A measure of how likely a specific web page is to rank in search engine results.
Local SEO: An SEO strategy of optimizing a website for more visibility in local search results on Google.
Citations: Listings of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites.

Page Speed: Also known as “load speed”; the measure of how fast the content of a web page loads.
Structured Data: Website code that formats and organizes date to help search engines understand your content better.
txt: A website file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can crawl on your site.
Sitemap: A website file that lists all of the pages on your site to help search engines find, crawl and index them.

Black Hat SEO: Using techniques that go against search engine guidelines to try to manipulate search engine rankings; often penalized by search engines.
White Hat SEO: Internet marketing and optimization practices that are approved and allowed by search engine guidelines.
Analytics: The process of collecting data to track website traffic and user behavior so improvements can be made.