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26 SEO Terms For Every Letter Of The Alphabet

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Want to gain a better understanding of SEO? Learning a few of the specialist terms is key to better understanding this industry. There’s a lot of unique jargon that you’ll hear used by SEO experts. Below are 26 commonly used terms in the world of SEO – one for every letter of the alphabet!

Anchor text

When creating a hyperlink to another page, the anchor text is the text that is used for that link. It is typically underlined and in blue. Using specific keywords for anchor texts can potentially boost the target website’s search rankings for those terms. Alternatively, you can use terms like ‘here’ or ‘this page’ for the anchor text, or you can just use the website address as the anchor text. 

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the amount of visitors that leave your website immediately upon arrival without clicking on any other web pages or links. The bounce rate can be used to measure how engaging your website is. A bounce rate of 40% or less is considered good. 

Crawler

A crawler or a ‘spider’ is the name for a bot used by search engines. Crawlers help identify and index web pages. They are essentially responsible for how search engine results are displayed. Web pages are typically crawled every few days to every few weeks.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is any type of content that appears on more than one webpage. Search engines like Google typically see duplicate content as a red flag and may lower the rankings for pages that contain such content. This is why it’s important to make sure that content is as original as possible. 

Evergreen content

Some types of content are only relevant for a limited period of time such as posts related to current events or passing trends. Other types of content stay relevant forever. This type of content is known as evergreen content and can be very valuable for a website’s search rankings – helping you to maintain a steady flow of visitors even when you’re not creating new content. 

Featured snippet

A featured snippet is an excerpt of highlighted text that displays at the top of the search engine results page. The text is usually directly relevant to what you have searched and is taken from one of the highest ranking webpages for that search term. Having a featured snippet from your website display at the top of the search engine results pages can greatly increase the amount of visitors that your site gets. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an application that allows you to track and analyse your website traffic. It can allow you to see what pages visitors have arrived from, what country your visitors are from, when they clicked on your page, what search terms they entered to arrive on your page and various other information that can be useful to improving your SEO. There are many other analytics tools that are also worth trying such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Search Console, Google Trends and Moz Pro. 

HTTPS

All website URLS begin with either ‘HTTP’ (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or ‘HTTPS’ (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). ‘HTTPS’ is used to identify websites that are encrypted and therefore more secure to use. Sites that use ‘HTTPS’ tend to rank higher because of this. You can add ‘HTTPS’ to your website by applying for a security certificate known as an SSL certificate. 

Inbound link

An inbound link is a link leading from an external website to your website. These links are also known as ‘backlinks’ and are a key component of SEO. Having lots of inbound links leading to a webpage tells search engine crawlers that this webpage is important – and that it therefore deserves to rank highly. To build inbound links, you typically need to work with an SEO agency

JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO is a type of technical SEO that involves optimising websites that use JavaScript by improving their code. This type of SEO typically needs to be carried out by someone that is fluent in this computer language and may involve trimming down code to make it less bulky and reduce page loading speed. 

Keyword stuffing

Using keywords on web pages is a vital part of SEO. By targeting the right keywords, you can increase a webpage’s rankings when relevant terms are searched. Using too many of the same keywords on a single page can have a negative impact on your rankings however. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ and should be avoided. Make sure keywords are used naturally – search engine crawlers can tell if a webpage’s content feels unnatural. 

Long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are lengthy keyphrases made up of multiple words. They are different to general keywords which tend to be made up of only one of two words. An example of a general keyword is ‘plumbing company’. An example of a long-tail keyword is ‘gas certified commercial plumbing company near me’.

Meta description

The short snippet of text that appears below each search result is known as a meta description. An enticing meta description is key to encouraging visitors. This guide explains how to add a meta description. If you don’t decide upon a meta description, the search engine will choose one for you using some of the content from your page.

NoIndex tag

A NoIndex tag can be added to a page to tell search engine crawlers that you do not want that page to be indexed. Examples of pages you may not want to be indexed include privacy policy pages, ‘thank you’ pages and pages that are still under construction.

Outbound link

Outbound links are links on your site that lead to external sites. A mix of inbound links and outbound links is key to helping a site rank highly. The most common place to put outbound links is in blog posts. Try to always link to high quality sites and avoid broken links. 

Page speed

Page speed is the amount of time a webpage takes to load. Webpages that have a higher page speed have a lower bounce rate and are more likely to rank higher as a result. You should aim for a page speed of less than 3 seconds. There are lots of ways to reduce page speed including optimizing images, trimming bulky JavaScript code, minimizing redirects, getting rid of unnecessary plug-ins and choosing a new website host. 

Query

The word you enter into the search box is known as the ‘query’ or ‘search term’. Relevant results are chosen based on keywords that closely match your query. When choosing keywords on a webpage, it is important to think about the queries that your visitors are likely to be using to reach your page. There are tools that can help you to identify popular search terms, as well as telling you how many webpages are targeting this keyword.

Redirect

A URL redirect can be used to redirect someone from one web address to another web address. This allows you to have multiple web addresses leading to the same page. A downside of redirects is that they can reduce page speed. You should avoid chains of redirects. 

SERP

SERP is an acronym for ‘Search Engine Results Page’. Each search engine results page is determined based on the query that is entered, the search engine user’s past search history and data gathered by crawlers. 

Technical SEO

This term is used to describe the technical side of SEO. This includes taking measures such as altering code, improving site structure and increasing page loading speed to increase a page’s rankings. Non-technical SEO includes things like keywords and content. 

URL

URL stands for ‘Uniform Resource Locator’. It is the string of letters and numbers that appears in the address bar when visiting a webpage. Every webpage has its own URL, which starts with ‘HTTP://’ or ‘HTTPS://’ and then ‘www.’, which is then followed by the subdomain, then the top level domain (such as ‘.com’ or ‘.net’), and finally the subdirectory.

Voice search

Using voice-controlled devices it is possible to look up queries on search engines using your voice. This is known as ‘voice search’. There can be some differences in the way people search using text and using their voice. This can be worth considering when targeting keywords. 

White hat SEO

White hat SEO is a term used to refer to ethical SEO practices. The opposite of white hat SEO is ‘black hat SEO’ – which uses unethical practices like sneaky redirects, link farming, duplicate content, keyword stuffing  and hidden text.

XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are used to list a website’s most essential pages. Crawlers use these sitemaps to determine which pages are most important and where to rank them. This guide explains how to build an XML sitemap.

YouTube SEO

YouTube itself is a search engine. YouTube SEO involves optimizing videos to rank highly in the YouTube SERP when certain queries are entered. This can include adding keywords to the title, adding keywords to the video description and adding captions.

Zombie pages

A zombie page is a page that doesn’t really get any traffic. Zombie pages often rank very low. It is possible to revive zombie pages by adding new information to them, however some zombie pages are better to simply get rid of. 

Conclusion

That’s all 26 SEO terms covered – from A TO Z! However, of course, there are many other SEO terms worth learning. Now you’ve learnt some of the basics, why not consider delving into even more niche terms. This could include different types of keywords, different types of hyperlink and other webpage terminology.