The Small Business Owner’s Guide To SEO: Glossary

SEO jargon getting your head in a knot? Don’t panic. We’ve broken down some of the most important phrases and words into laymen’s terms to help you better understand the world of SEO. 

 

A)

• Algorithm – mathematical formula or process to execute functions. An algorithm is used to determine which page within a search engine’s index is the best match for any given search query.
• Anchor text – the clickable part of the link that you don’t see – this can be a keyphrase or a uniform resource locator (more commonly referred to as a URL).

 B)

• B2B – business-to-business – a business’s customers are other business.
• B2C – business to consumer – a business’s customers are end-users.
• Backlink – Incoming link to a web page from another webpage.
• Bounce rate – the % of people who leave a web page without interacting with it.

C)

• Conversion – the conversion of a lead or prospect refers to the successful enticement of the user to complete a desired action like a download, subscription or purchase.

D)

• Domain – Each website has a domain which is part of its URL – for example, here the URL is ‘hookedonmedia’.
• Duplicate content – content on a page that is identical to content on another page.

H)

•  HTML – hypertext markup language – a standardised system used for tagging text files to achieve font, colour, graphic and hyperlink efforts.

I)

• Internal link – hyperlinks between 2 web pages of the same domain.
• IP Address – also known as an Internet Protacol address. This is a unique string of numbers that are separated by decimal points which identifies a device and serves as its address point online.

K)

• Keywords –  These are words which appear in the content on your web pages and are used in search queries. As search engines have evolved, matching a query to a term found in a document has evolved from exact match terms to synonyms to contextually relevant terms.

M)

• Metadata – This is a set of data that is not always displayed by the browser which provides information to the search engines about other data on the page.

R)

• RankBrain –  This algorithm, confirmed by Google in October of 2015, is a machine-learning algorithm which examines search queries the search engine has never seen before and attempts to correlate them with queries it already knows.
• Responsive – One method of site design which resizes the displayed elements to suit the viewport of the device viewing the site. Thus, a site can be easily viewed and read from a desktop, tablet or phone.

S)

• Search Console – previously called Google Webmaster tools, is a suite of free services from Google to check indexing status and optimize a site’s visibility.
• SERP – Search Engine Results Pages.  Web pages of ranked results provided in response to a search query.

U)

• URL – Uniform Resource Locator. Sometimes called the web address. For this site’s home page, the URL is https://www.hookedonmedia.com/ However, that’s not the actual address. The URL is translated to our IP address, ‘208.80.6.139’ by the domain name server.

W)

• White hat – This is commonly believed to imply following only practices which are deemed acceptable under the published Webmaster Guidelines.