50 Important SEO Terms Every Internet Marketer Should Know

In the world of Search Engine Optimization, we use a lot of Important SEO Terms and abbreviations. Because it is always easier to say SEO than to say Search Engine Optimization. Moreover, it saves time. But the negative side is if you are new in this field then you will find it difficult to understand what the SEO Expert use in short form.

So to have an enhanced command on SEO and its methods you better understand the Important SEO Terms and terminology, where they use, how they use etc. Here in this article, I will give you an overview of about 50 Important SEO Terms and they will definitely improve your SEO vocabulary and knowledge.

50 Important SEO Terms & Definitions

If you are an internet marketer but have limited knowledge about SEO Terms then you will find it difficult to implement your methods properly. So I put together 50 Important SEO Terms that every internet marketer should know. They are:

HTTP Status Code 

200 OK: It means the file request was ok. For example, a page or image was found against your URL and loaded properly in a browser.

301 Moved Permanently: It says that the requested resource has been moved permanently to a new permanent URL. This method is used for redirecting pages or websites.

302 Found: This HTTP status code indicates that the requested file/resource has been found but they are temporarily located at another URL. We use this status code for URL redirection.

403 Forbidden: It means the server understood your request but is refusing to authorize it. Normally it is caused by issues where you’re trying to access something that you don’t have access to.

404 Not Found: When the server doesn’t find anything matching the requested URL, it shows 404 errors. It is commonly used when the server does not want to share the reason why the request has been refused or when no other response is applicable.

ALT Tag/ Text

It is an HTML attribute that is used within the IMG tag. When an image cannot load, ALT tag provides alternate text that is displayed instead. It is a very Important SEO Terms and it also has an SEO value because it tales the search engines what the image is about.

Anchor Text/Tag

In SEO Anchor text is used for creating a link to another document or web page or within the current web page. You might have seen this kind of text numerous times but may have no idea what it was exactly. It helps the search engines to understand what the destination page is about and for the readers it describes what they will see if they click through.

Authority Site

When a site has many incoming links from other related experts and trusted sites then it is called an Authority Site. This kind of Site has a higher PageRank and position in SERPs. For example, Wikipedia is a high Authority site.

B2B & B2C

B2B stands for Business to Business. On the other hand, B2C stands for Business to Customer. Transaction of services between companies is called B2B and transaction of services between business and customer is called B2C.

Backlink

It is a very Important SEO Terms and we use it as Off-Page SEO Techniques for link building. It refers to a link that is originated from other website and pointing towards our website or web page. It helps to redirect visitors to our site from different websites. It is very important for our site’s search engine rankings.

Bot

Bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot is a software application that scours the web automatically for various reasons like indexing web pages, for spamming purposes etc. Robots and spiders are the most commonly used bots.

Breadcrumb

A Breadcrumb is a type of secondary navigation system that helps the users to understand where they are on a website and know how to get back to the page where they started. It also helps the search engines to understand the relationship between pages.

Broken Links 

Broken Links are those links in a website/page that are not functioning. From SEO’s perspective, it is a very important term. If a website has a large number of broken links in it then it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Thus your position in SERPs will decrease. Here are some of the reasons why links don’t work:

• A website is no longer available
• Web pages location was moved without a redirection
• The URL of a web page was change
• Domain’s content management system was change

Canonical Issue

It is a very Important SEO Terms. When 301 redirects are not properly implemented on your website, this issue arises. Canonical Issue means your website can be accessed by search engines from numerous different URLs. And all these different URLs can be indexed by search engines, leaving you with a problem of duplicate content. You can resolve this problem by using the “no-index” Meta tag and 301 redirects. Here is an example of Canonical Issue:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

Crawler

A Crawler is an internet bot that systematically visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information. Then it creates entries for a search engine index. It is also known as spider among the webmasters. In general, well trusted or regularly updated sites are crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority.

DA

DA stands for Domain Authority. It is a search engine ranking metrics that is developed by Moz. Domain Authority is calculated on a scale of 0-100. It predicts how well a website will rank on SERPs.

Deep Link

Deep Link refers to a hypertext link that mentions to a page or image within a website. This page is not the main or home page of the site. It is a very Important SEO Terms. If you can implement deep linking properly on your site with anchor text, then it will improve the ranking of these pages.

Duplicate Content

It refers to a content that has appeared on the internet in more than one place. It creates confusion for search engines as they cannot decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of same content, so some search engines filter out content that they think to be similar or duplicate in nature. If you have duplicate content on your site then it can decrease your SERPs position.

Dofollow Link

From an SEO perspective, Dofollow Links are very important. Dofollow links are standard HTML links that do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This kind of links allows Google to follow them reach and the targeted website. It gives link juice and backlinks to our website. Using keywords for anchor tag is the best practice for Dofollow links.

External Link

External Links are those links that point to a page or content outside of your website. In simple words, it means linking out to another website. It is a very Important SEO Terms. Search Engines trust high-quality sites, so if you link out to high-quality sites then there is a great chance of improving your rank in SERPs.

Favicon

Favicon stands for Favorite Icon. According to Wikipedia “A favicon also known as a shortcut icon, website icon, tab icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one or more small icons associated with a particular website or web page”. It appears next to URLs in a web browser.

Googlebot 

Googlebot (also called as a “spider”) is Google’s web crawling bot. Google uses a huge number of computer to crawl billions of pages on the web. The purpose of crawling is to collect all the documents from the web and build a searchable index for the Google Search Engine.

Google Panda Algorithm

Google Panda Algorithm was first released in February 2011. It is a change to Google’s search result ranking algorithm. The main purpose of this algorithm is to lower the rank of low-quality sites in Google’s organic search engine results.

Google Penguin Algorithm

Google Penguin Algorithm was first released on April 24, 2012. The main purpose of this algorithm is to capture sites that are spamming Google’s search results and decrease their ranking in SERPs. It’s an alternative for Google’s regular spamming systems which were not able to detect the new spamming methods.

Google Pigeon Algorithm 

Google Pigeon Algorithm was first released on July 24, 2014. It is a change to Google’s local search result ranking algorithm. The main purpose of this algorithm is to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results. The changes affect the search results of both Google maps search & Google web search.

Google Sandbox

The Google Sandbox is an unconfirmed filter that is placed on new websites and prevents them from ranking in result page for a certain amount of time. The idea behind the Google sandbox is to give new websites some time to become mature before ranking in SERPs. Although, Google has neither confirm nor deny the existence of the sandbox.

.htaccess

The .htaccess is directory-level distributed configuration files which can be used to password protect or redirect files. WordPress uses this file to control how Apache serves files from its root directory and subdirectories thereof. Moreover, WordPress modifies this file to be able to handle pretty permalinks.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the code part of your website that search engines can read. It is very important to keep the HTML code nice and simple. Because it will increase your site’s speed and search engines will be able to read your site very easily.

HTTP

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. This protocol is used for creating communication between servers and web browsers. Data from its residing location on a server is transferred to an active browser through this protocol.

HTTPS

HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It is the secure version of HTTP. That means all the communications between your browser and the server are encrypted.

Internal Link

Internal Links are those links that point to a page or content within the same website. They are generally used for website navigation but you can also redirect traffic to other pages and posts of your site. The best practice of Internal linking is to use keywords as anchor text.

IP Address

IP Address or Internet Protocol Address is a unique string of numbers that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network. IP addresses are usually written and displayed in human-readable notations, such as 172.16.254.1

ISP

ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. It is a company that provides individuals and other companies access to the Internet. Simply an ISP is your gateway to the Internet and everything else you can do online.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a cross-platform, object-oriented scripting language that allows web administrators to apply special effects and dynamic features to their website. JavaScript is not always readable by search engines and they do not index most content in JavaScript. So from SEO’s perspective it is better to use less JavaScript.

Keywords

Keywords refer to informative words that are used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document. From SEO’s prospective Keywords are the words and phrases that people/searchers enter into search engines for searching any information. There are many Keyword Terms. To know more about them you can read this Article: 5 Important SEO Keyword Terms that Affects SERPs Ranking     

Landing Page

Landing Page is a single web page that appears after a visitor click on a link or URL. In online marketing, it is also known as a “lead capture page” or a “lander”, or a “destination page”. The main purpose of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads.

Lead Generation

Lead Generation refers to a process of attracting and converting stranger’s interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. Some examples of Lead Generation are a discount offer, coupons, promotional online content etc. There are two types of Lead in Lead Generation. They are:

Marketing Lead

Sales Lead

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Latent Semantic Indexing is a very Important SEO Terms. It is an algorithm that is used by Google to determine how words are related to each other in the context of a web page. It is regarded as one of the important factors for ranking a web page in SERPs. If you use LSI keywords to support your main keywords then your page gets a boost in ranking for your main keyword.

Link Juice

Link Juice is a commonly used SEO term that refers to the value or equity which is passed from one page or website to another. Link Juice is passed through hyperlinks. If your page or site has quality backlinks from other authority sites then there is a chance of increasing your sites ranking in SERPs.

Meta Description

It is an HTML tag and contains a short description of the site/page/post. The description must be not more than 160 characters long. Meta Description is only displayed in the search result. It helps the searcher to understand what the page is about and why he would want to visit the page. Optimizing the Meta Description is a very important part of On-Page SEO Techniques.

Niche

In SEO Niche is a topic or subject that a website is focused on. For example, if you have a website where you publish sports news then “Sports News” is the Niche of your website.

Nofollow Link

Nofollow Link is a very Important SEO Terms. Webmasters use this kind of HTML attribute to prevent a link from passing link juice/authority to other sites. This method is introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in the year 2005. The reason was to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam and improve the quality of search engine results.

Non Reciprocal Link

Non Reciprocal links are one-way links. In details, when a website links to another website but the second website does not link back to the first website then the link is considered as Non Reciprocal Link. A Non Reciprocal link is more effective then Reciprocal Link. Google will put your site higher in the search result if your site has more Non Reciprocal Link.

Organic Search Result

When we search for anything in search engines like Google, Yahoo, they show us the result. Most of the results are consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. These unpaid listings are known as Organic Search Result. Organic search results are systematized by their relevancy, which is determined based on page content and other metrics. Getting high position in unpaid listing/organic search result is the main objective of SEO.

PA 

PA stands for Page Authority. It is a search engine ranking metrics that is developed by Moz. Page Authority is calculated on a scale of 0-100. A high Page Authority score means your page has a greater chance to rank high in SERPs.

Reciprocal Link

Reciprocal links are two-way links. In details, when a website links to another website and the second website link back to the first website then the link is considered as Reciprocal Links. This kind of links has less SEO value. Moreover, if your website has more Reciprocal Links then Google will consider your site as a low authority site and decrease your site’s ranking in SERPs.

Robots.txt

It is a very Important SEO Terms. Robots.txt is a file that is used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. Website owners use this file to give instructions about their site to web robots. With the help of this file, you can notify search engines which areas of your site are restricted for them.

RSS Feed

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS Feed is a type of web feed where a user can access updates to online content in a computer-readable format. Many news-related sites, blogger, online publisher syndicate their information or content to an RSS feed reader. And it helps people to get all kind of news/information in one place.

SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page. It is a very important and wildly use SEO terms. When you search for anything in Google or other search engines, they show the result on a page. And it’s called the SERP.

Sitemap

Sitemap refers to a file that lists the URLs for a site. You can include all the URLs of your site into this file and tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. It helps the search engine to navigate through your site.

SSL Certificate

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. SSL Certificate is a digital certificate and it is a very important part of website security. SSL Certificates are small data files that provide the encryption and digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. It activates the https protocol and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser. Normally website’s that takes sensitive information like credit card details or passwords from their user, implements SSL Certificates.

URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s another very Important SEO Terms. URL is the unique address of any web document on the internet. A URL has two main components: (1) Protocol Identifier (2) Resource Name

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the second generation of the World Wide Web. It basically refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web page. Web 2.0 is more organized and it emphasizes user-generated content, usability and interoperability for the end users. Some examples of Web 2.0 are social networking sites, social media sites, blogs, video sharing sites etc.

XML Sitemap

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and it’s a very Important SEO Terms. It is a simple and very flexible text format file. The main function of XML Sitemap is to give search engines a map of all the different URLs that your website has.

The Closure

This is not the end. Here I only discuss 50 Important SEO Terms. There are more. If you want to know more about these terms or other terms then feel free to mention it in comments. I’ll be happy to take a look!

Should Read: How To Rank Top 10 With 200 Google Ranking Factors