100+ SEO Glossary : Essential Terminologies of SEO Everyone must know

SEO Glossary and 100+ seo terminologies
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Like your test book, search engine optimization has its own unique set of SEO glossary which I expect every blogger must know before starting their own blogging journey.

Here I listed more than 100+ SEO Glossary which are essential terminologies of SEO and will give you an in-depth idea about what this SEO all about.

I have covered all from General to advance and technical to nontechnical terms people use in the SEO industry.

You should go through each one of them to get more ideas on what is this all about and how it works, if not have time to read then better to bookmark this page for future purposes.

Must Read: 11 Fundamentals to start blogging



Table Of Contents

100+ SEO Glossary Fundamentals for Beginners

Below provided all the SEO glossary is a summary of each individual terminologies, so if willing to explore more in detail then better to visit the guided link in the given terminology description.

1: What is a Search Engine? 

The search engine is a collection of billions of web pages or contents and if any particular user visits their platform and search for a particular query then search engine based on its algorithm brings the best of the user interest results.

Eg: Google, Bing, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu all are the different search engines for webpages and YouTube for videos and Amazon for eCommerce products.

2: What is the Google search engine?

Google search engine is the world’s most popular search engine owned by Google Inc, which was started back in the year 1998 by Larry page and Sergi Brin and currently, more than 70% of all the worldwide search traffic comes from Google itself.

Google, is the most trusted and well-established search engine and they are prioritizing their search engine ranking based on the 200 different ranking signals.

3: What is the Bing Search Engine?

Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google and it is owned by Microsoft. At present close to 10% of overall search traffic comes from Bing but Microsoft has partnered with Yahoo to power all the search results back in the year 2009.

That means Bing is a Microsoft owned and Yahoo-powered search engine where all the backend algorithms to ranking the pages or finding the best user query result is done by Yahoo since 2010.

4: What is the Yahoo Search Engine?

Yahoo was the very first search engine started back in the year 1994 but it was sort of directory that asks website owners to submit their web pages manually and based on the user search query was giving them results.

But Yahoo did the partnership with Google in the year 2000 to powered their queries till 2004 until Yahoo itself has developed its own search algorithm.

5: What is the Baidu Search Engine?

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and is in only the Chinese language. Baidu was founded in the same era of Google around 2000 and it holds close to 76% of all the Chinese search engine market share.

Baidu not only offers the search engine but it has a Baidu map to offer the mapping services and it is the fourth largest website in the search engine industry.

6: What is the Yandex Search Engine?

Yandex is the Russia most popular search engine founded in the year 1997 by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich. It mainly serves the Russian and a few commonwealth independent countries’ search queries. 

Yandex is the 5th largest search engine after Google, Bing, Baidu, and Yahoo.

7: What is DuckDuckGo Search Engine?

DuckDuckGo was founded in the year 2008 and it is more organized to protect user privacy by not storing the IP addresses, personal information or use of cookies and it offers the search results from the 400 different sources, hence very well known for the best results.

It compiles the best results using its own crawler bot, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, etc and also uses the crowd search to compile the best user interest results.

8: What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and these are the guidelines of every search engine to optimize your content around those rules, so the search engine can understand and your content rank faster for a particular query or keyword.

Every search engine has three important factors,

  • Search for a particular query,
  • Crawl all the web pages
  • Index all the web pages based on their content quality to the particular ranking positions.

9: What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO stands for On-page search engine optimization, which means your written content should be well optimized around a particular keyword or query, so the search engine can understand what your content all about.

On-Page SEO is the easiest job to do in SEO, as here the content writers themselves focus on writing the good quality user interest-oriented content by placing the keywords to the right places like in the title, middle of content, URL, headings or subheading.

10: What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO stands for the Off-page search engine optimization, where you try to get backlinks or references of your website from the other websites by submitting posts or pages to different directories.

Off-page SEO is more of a blog promotion or marketing strategy by sharing them on social media, different search engines and asking other people blogs to link with your own blog.

Both On-page and Off SEO to combine rank your website very quickly in search engine especially like Google.

11: What is White Hat SEO?

When you are following all the On-page and Off-Page SEO techniques under the guidelines of Google or any search engine then those will be known as White Hat SEO.

The results through the White Hat SEO will be slower but your organic reach will sustain for a very long duration.

12: What is Black Hat SEO?

When you are trying to manipulate search engines using some shady techniques to rank such as publishing plagiarized content, doing auto blogging to copy-paste other content, driving traffic from the bot or linking to spammy sites, these all are known as Black Hat SEO.

You might get quick results as you start all these but in a short period of time your organic ranking will get reduce or maybe your site will be banned or blocked or de-indexed from Google or any other search engine.

13: What is Gray Hat SEO?

When you combine the techniques of both White Hat and Black Hat SEO then that one is known as Gray Hat SEO, which usually business uses to rank faster their upcoming product launch.

This will give a boost to your website for a short period or long period of time but you will be somewhere in a safe zone to avoid de-indexing of the site from Google.

14: What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO a WordPress plugin that is available in its free and premium plan and helps the content writer to judge the On-page SEO parameters based on a focus keyword.

If you use Yoast SEO Plugin then it will give you a Green signal based on total 14 checks to ensure you have targeted focus keyword everywhere in the content but you can use the new alternative RankMath SEO plugin for full free use.

15: What is SEM or Search Engine Marketing?

SEM stands for search engine marketing, where you are running some ad campaigns in Google Adword to display your post on top of the search results and Running Ads in Bing to display ads in Bing search engine.

So basically, it is a paid marketing technique that business or individual site owners use to display in top search results and it will keep displaying until you are paying for the same. 

16: What is Google Sandbox?

Neither Google nor any officials from Google have ever agreed any such thing exists but from the SEO expert points every new site is indexed in different ways as usual site and Google uses a concept of Google Sandbox.

Every new site is first added to Sandbox due to the lack of its authority and Google keeps doing the user acceptance testing, if the site is performing well to the user interest then it starts ranking all other keyword and will be rank as usual sites.

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17: What is a Search?

Search is a process of asking some particular query in the search engine, if you have any query then just go to Google and type in your query using a phrase, sentence or seed keyword.

To function Google, the first action any search engine takes is to identify the search query of the user.

18: What is Crawler in Search Engine?

The crawler is a bot designed by the search engine like Google which visits every website indexed or published on the internet and tries to understand what that contains all about and what is the number of keywords.

Well, crawler extracts the keywords from the content or web pages and pass that to Google algorithm to index them at certain potion in Search engine ranking pages. It is also known as bot, web crawler or spider.

19: What is Indexing in Search Engine?

Indexing means giving positioning of the particular page for a specific keyword in the search engine. When crawler crawls the websites and gets keywords from the post or pages then the job of indexing get started.

Every page can be ranked at multiple positions in the search engine for different keywords but for a single keyword, it has only single positioning, which keeps changing as you improve the SEO of the website and content.

20: What is Toolbar Page Rank of Google?

Google has introduced a Toolbar, which was a rating introduced by Google to rate any website based on the 0-10 scale. The site with close to 10 scores will be having a high ranking in Google.

Page ranks work by counting the number of quality backlinks pointing to the website, which means more links in result more ranking of the pages. But later in 2016, Google has officially dead this toolbar but few other tools still rating them based on DA and PA.

21: What is Domain Authority (DA) of the Website?

Domain authority is also known as the DA of the website which is a number between 0-100 used to rate the authority of the websites, close to 100 will be the higher authority.

It is not official data from Google but different websites like Moz and Ahref rate websites authority based on the number of authoritative backlinks profile but every site has different parameters to judge the DA of the website.

22: What is Page Authority (PA) of the Website?

Page Authority is also known as the PA of the website like website domain authority every web page belongs to that website has its individual authority rated in between 0-100, once again 100 will be the highest authority.

Do remember, if your PA gets increase then automatically that authority will increase the domain authority, as every page belongs to the domain name or website.

23: What is the De-indexing from the search engine?

Indexing means all the listed pages will start ranking or getting impressions in the search engine but if any webpage is deindexed then it will be out from the search engine result pages.

It usually happens if a website has any technical issues or if using some black hat techniques to rank a website quickly in search engines.

24: What is Google disavow?

Google Disavow is a feature available to notify Google that you don’t want to take any credit from any particular website if that website has given the reference to your site without your knowledge.

Imagine, if you have created accidental backlinks on the other adult site or someone has created without asking you on their spam website, then using Disavow you can request Google to not consider such authority.

25: What is the Google Rank Brain Algorithm?

The rank brain is artificial intelligence (AI) and was introduced in the year 2015 by Google to address approx 15% of all the search engine queries which were never been searched earlier.

This is a machine learning added to the existing algorithm to get the best results for those queries which are being searched the first time.

26: What is the Google Panda Algorithm?

Google panda was the biggest update of the Google search engine algorithm introduced in the year 2011 to punish content farming, which means a website with the number of thin or poor content or not sharing any value to users got punished by the downranking.

Yes at that moment approx 11% of overall ranked pages were impacted and sites with high-quality content got huge advantages.

27: What is the Google Penguin Algorithm?

Penguin is the second biggest update rolled out with Google algorithm in the year 2012 to overcome the page ranking based on link farming, this de-ranked all the websites which have created backlinks using the black hat techniques.

Well, it was only checking the number of incoming links pointing to the website instead of outgoing links.

28: What is Google Hummingbird Algorithm?

Google Hummingbirds introduced in the year 2013 to offer the most personalized search results for the better user search intent. Their primary focus is to find the results on the search intent query, not on the query into consideration.

After this rollout, the user starts getting the relevant images based on the knowledge graph and it starts differentiating the results for the same query searched by the different people.

29: What is Google Pigeon Algorithm?

Google Pigeon was introduced in the year 2014 to avail of the best local search results and local business data. Those websites or business which has a good local presence get more visibility in the search results.

Pigeons is more focused to provide a search query like the bets hotel near me, the best cafe near me, etc.

30: What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is an important part of Artificial intelligence, which is an auto bot designed to feed the data in the existing algorithm based on the number of search results and how users are interacting with each search engine results.

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31: What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the free traffic that comes to your website due to the number of keywords are ranking in the search engine. You won’t have to pay for them but it takes time to get good positioning in the search results.

Well, there is no guarantee of how much it takes for a website to maintain organic positioning, as sooner or later will get impacted with other quality content pages, so it is suggested to update your content.

32: What is Paid Traffic?

When it comes to paid traffic than anyone can get this on their websites by advertising content on various social media platforms like a Facebook campaign or in search engines like Google using Google Adwords.

As long as you are ready to pay, your site will keep getting traffic but if you stop paying then your site will be limited with only organic traffic only.

33: What is Index and No Index Tag?

Index and No index are the meta tags used with the HTML code of the webpages to give the command to search engine crawlers to index or not index the particular pages in the search engine results.

By default, every page is set to be indexed but in some cases like thank you page, you should command search engine to not index and not add in the search results.

34: What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are known as the reference of your website on other website and it is one of the most well known Google ranking signals to decide the page ranking in the search engine results.

Imagine you have site A and any other site B has created one post and in middle of that he linked your site A then it referred that site A received 1 backlink from site B.

Always try to grab the good quality backlinks from high authority websites and try to avoid creating backlinks on the spam websites. 

35: What are Do-Follow Backlinks?

When a backlink created on-site B is a Do-Follow then Google crawler will pass through that link and visit your site A and it gives authority to your site, when it comes to search engine Ranking then Do-Follow backlinks are the primary need of Every website.

The more Do-Follow backlinks you have from high authority websites the more keywords will start getting a top ranking.

36: What are No-Follow Backlinks?

If any backlinks specified on-site B is a No Follow backlinks then Google Crawler won’t pass through that link and no authority will be given to your site and in most of the cases, the backlinks created through commenting are always No Follow backlinks.

If you are willing to identify No Follow backlinks then you will see a tag  rel=nofollow within <a> of that particular link in HTML code.

37: What are Anchor Text and Hyperlink?

Anchor text is a word on the webpages, which are clickable and also known as Hyperlink because it is linked with a URL. When anyone clicks to those texts then the reader will be navigated to the linked page.

While creating backlinks on other sites or interlinking other pages of the same site then anchor text and hyperlink uses altogether.

38: What is Internal Link?

An internal link is a process of linking the internal pages of the same website. Let imagine a website has published more than 10 posts and reference of one post is given in other then it is known as Internal link.

Do remember in the internal link you always have to link the webpages created under the same domain name.

39: What is External Link?

Whenever you are linking the external site webpages to your website post or pages then those links are known as external links. It is also known as giving backlinks to other websites.

Do remember, in External link, the linked page to anchor text should be from different domain names.

40: What is Link Juice?

Link juice means passing the authority of one website to another. If your website gets any backlinks from another website that means you are getting link juice or value or some authority from that website to yours.

Your site authority in search engine ranking increases, if you get more link juice or backlinks from high authority sites.

41: What is Broken Link?

If you have provided internal or external link using an anchor text to different web pages and if the linked page no more exists due to change in URL or web page is deleted.

Then if somebody clicks to the anchor text created on your website then instead of that webpage a new 404 page not found page appears.

This means the link created on your website is a broken link, which is no more exists and required immediate attention to change.

42: What is 301 Redirect?

This is the permanent redirect of the old URL to New URL to avoid 404 not found pages. If a website owner is willing to change the permalink or URL of the post or pages then to link Old URL with new, 301 redirects are used.

After 301 redirects, if anyone clicks to Old URL this time instead of page not found page, it will be redirected to the New URL and this is the solution of 404 not found page and it passes up to 90-99% link juice.

43: What is 302 Redirect?

302 Redirect is like 301 redirects but it is for the temporary purpose to let the search engines know that you are willing to show any particular page for a short period of time may be due to maintenance purpose or split testing or willing to highlight old pages for short period of time.

302 Redirect help you to avoid any search engine ranking due to sudden redirection to new pages and maintain the link juice.

44: What is a Private Blog Network (PBN)?

PBN is also known as a Private Blog network where bloggers are creating their 100’s of small blogs to give links to their money-making websites.

This is a part of Black hat techniques and Google penalizes those sites which are using such shady backlinks strategy, for your understanding Google won’t have any such algorithm to detect such sites which are using PBN, so on a timely basis, they do manual reviews to identify those sites and take them down.

45: What is Link Farming?

Link farming is a process of creating a number of backlinks from other irrelevant sites, to just manipulate the search engine ranking. Sometimes people order a bundle of links from service providers to create backlinks on behalf of you, no matter where they are creating.

It is obvious that Google ranks sites higher in search engines based on the backlinks profile but only on the quality backlinks profiles and link farming is a black hat technique.

46: What is Co-citation of Links?

If two websites belong to the same niche have created backlinks on the third website but not provided any link to each other then that type of links are known as Co-Citation.

Co-Citation helps search engine to understand the similarity of subjects for those sites which are getting backlinks from the same site and rank them accordingly.

47: What are Reciprocal Links?

Reciprocal link is a backlinks exchange program were two sites agree to exchange links to each other, these types of backlinks are known as black hat techniques and not recommended by Google.

In most cases, both sites will get punished with search engine ranking.

48: What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is a Google-owned advertising platform was started in the year 2003 to monetize publishers’ content using the different ads inventory. As a website or blog or YouTube channel owner, you can request Google Adsense to get approve or monetize your platform.

If your content is monetized then, as a result, you will start getting the earning based on the number of Ad clicks or ads impressions.

49: What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is Google Owned website analytics tools started in the year 2006 and its primary job is to analyze the traffic of any website getting from the different sources.

It gives a detailed idea of how many visitors are visiting your site and from which location and on which page, which means the best tool to judge your search traffic.

50: What is Google Webmaster?

Google webmaster was earlier known as Google search console and this is a tool to give an idea of how your website and its keywords are performing in the search engine organic ranking.

If your site has any indexing issues with a particular page or you want to explore the number of pages indexed or de-indexed from a search engine then Google webmaster will give you an exact idea on the same.

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51: What is Google Trend?

Google trend is also one of the Google-owned products and free to use by everyone. Google trend’s primary use is to identify the trend of any particular keywords in a specific duration of time or geographical areas.

You can search any particular query and it will give you the search pattern of that query start from 2004 or the filters you already placed. It also gives data on what is currently trending in Google starts from the past 1 hr till 2004.

52: What is Google Page Speed Checker?

Google has introduced its own tool to analyze the page loading speed of a particular page in the search engine. It analyzes the pages based on their DOM structure and suggests the required fixes to improve the page loading speed.

Do remember, page loading speed directly impacts your search engine ranking, if your site is hosted in WordPress then use the fastest hosting, as I use A2 Hosting (Review guide).

53: What is Blogger?

Blogger is a Google-owned content management tool that started in the year 2003, it offers free unlimited hosting for unlimited content. Every beginner can start their blogging journey with Blogger without a single penny investment.

Blogger has limitations with the customization but would be the best platform to start a blogging journey as you can monetize your content with Google Adsense Ad network. 

54: What is WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s largest and one of the most popular free content management tools and according to W3Techs close to 62% of the CMS (Blogs) are using WordPress which is 35% of the total website or internet market shares.

But WordPress needs hosting and domain to get started which might cost you up to $100 per year.

55: What is SERP?

SERP stands for the search engine ranking pages means the pages are indexed or ranking in the search engine and getting impressions while any user is searching for a particular query.

If your website gets a position in the top 10 results in the SERP then it has higher chances to get the most of the traffic.

56: What is Session?

The session is the active duration of time until what any user actively browsed your site. In a single session, a user can visit a single page or can visit multiple pages or can perform any action.

Every user visiting your site will be having some session, in a few cases, it may close to 1 second while in others it may be for as long as possible.

57: What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of users in a particular session leaving your site from the first page from where they have entered into your site.

This means, if anyone visits only a single page in a particular session and without performing any action like navigating to internal pages or performing any action then that visit will be counted as a Bounce rate.

58: What is Exit Rate?

The exit rate is ideally calculated as Page Exit rate, which is the percentage of users leaving your site from a particular page. In a particular session the last page from which if any user is leaving your site then it will be calculated as the Exit rate for that particular page.

Do remember in bounce rate user has only visited one page but in the Exit rate, the entry page will be different and the exit page will be different, learn more on differences in between bounce rate vs exit rate.

59: What is Page Views?

Pageviews is the number of times anyone visits your site, every time if anyone comes to your site then it will be counted as 1 page views and if that user visits more than 1 pages then page views will be accordingly. 

A single visitor can have a more than a 1-page view in a particular session.

60: What is the Impression in Google Adsense?

The impression in Google Adsense is the number of times any particular ads displayed on your webpage, whenever if anyone is reading your blog post or content on the site.

If a single page has more then 1 Ad placements and if all ads loaded properly while reader reading content then it counted as 1 page views with more then 1 ad impressions.

61: What is the Impression in Google SERP?

It is the number of times your website get impressions in the search engine ranking if anyone is searching for a particular query.

In Google SERP if anyone typed any query and if one of your indexed pages displayed to the reader then it will be counted as impressions and recorded in Google Webmaster.

62: What is Click Through Rate (CTR) in Google Adsense?

Click-through rate is also known as CTR, which is the number of times ads clicked to the number of times ads displayed on the web pages. If Google Adsense has an average impression of 1000 ads on your various pages and if you received only 100 clicks then CTR would be just 10%.

CTR is the percentage of ad clicks to the total number of ads impressions, learn more on what is Google Adsense CTR.

63: What is Click Through Rate (CTR) in Google SERP?

It is the number of times readers click to the webpages displayed in the SERP to the number of times any particular webpage got impressions in the SERP.

It is not mandatory that the pages receiving impressions in the SERP will also get clicks and to judge this factor CTR will be recorded in the Google webmaster.

64: What is Dwell Time?

Dwell time is the duration for which any user is actively interacting with your website or blog. Which means it is the session for which any user is consuming your site content.

In search engine ranking the higher the dwell time the better will be the search engine ranking.

65: What is RPM or CPM?

RPM stands for the revenue per mile, which is the matrix of Google Adsense to judge how much revenue generated for a particular website if it got 1000 ads impressions.

However, CPM stands for the cost per mile which is for the advertisers to judge how much money they have to spend to display their ads on the publisher’s website.

66: What is Pogo Sticking?

Pogo Sticking is the situation, when if any reader clicks to your webpage from the SERP and bounced back from a similar page and clicks to another result in the SERP then it will be known as Pogo sticking.

This gives a signal to the google that reader is not willing to interact with your site and he is interacting with other ranking pages instead of yours and your ranking will auto decline if you have read the suggested guide on the bounce rate you will get more idea on pogo-sticking.

67: What is Google Bomb?

Google Bomb is a practice of ranking a particular website for an irrelevant keyword. It is a way to manipulate the Google search engine algorithm for specifically searching a particular page for a particular keyword.

If there are similar searches by millions of searchers then Google will start ranking those web pages for those particular keywords.

This is mainly been observed to promote a political agenda or to get any advantage from a particular search query.

68: What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is a Black hat technique to improve the search engine ranking where the content presented to the search engine web crawler is different then to what is presented to the actual user.

Here the content delivered based on the IP Address or the user-agent HTTP header. If it found the crawler is visiting your site then they deliver different server-level pages that are not searchable by the user.

69: What is Duplicate or plagiarized content?

Duplicate or Plagiarized content is the content that is already indexed in the search engine by another website but you are using the same content or close to 50% matching of the already indexed page then it will be considered as a duplicate content.

Using plagiarized content on your site may negatively impact your website ranking or the content you published might never get ranked in the search engine.

70: What is Feature Snippet or Rich Snippet?

Feature snippet is usually referred to as the #0 ranking just above the #1 page in the top Search engine ranking pages. It usually a summary of the particular query which Google has extracted from a particular page to give a quick answer to the searched query.

Well, the pages converted into feature snippets which are also known as rich snippets get up to 7% more traffic than the #1 ranking page.

71: What is Google Dance?

Sometimes, few websites got different rankings for a particular keyword in a specific period of time then that is known as Google dance. Google does experiment with a number of webpages to find out the best user intent content.

Hence many pages got top rank for a short period of time but soon after may lose that ranking and position with another page in SERP then it is known as Google dance.

72: What is Google UAT?

Google UAT is known as user acceptance testing which could be a reason for the Google dance. Google is well known for sharing the best user results and try to push particular webpages for a particular query.

If it fulfills the user intent then it gets rank else will struggle enough to get higher position until that content fulfills the SERP criteria.

73: What is a Canonical Tag?

This is the tag (rel=canonical) associated with the HTML code of the particular page URL to inform the search engine crawler that this page is the master copy of the already published few duplicate pages

Let imagine, you have an eCommerce site which has a product page description common to all different sizes of the same product but the URL may keep changing due to addition of additional letters at the end then it is the website owner’s duty to tell the search engine not to crawl other pages.

This detailed guide on What is Canonical tag has everything that you must know about technical SEO.

74: What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that is the collection of posts, pages, images, etc which any website owner is willing to index in the search engine. It is mainly used by the big site owners to give an idea to search engine crawlers that which particular section of the website recently got updated.

When a web crawler visits your site, then it could be challenging for the crawler to identify the particular section of the site which got a recent update, hence sitemap gives direction to the crawler.

75: What is a schema?

Schema is a type of microdata added with the webpage to help understand search engine crawler what your page is all about and if it matches to the user intent or Searches query on what your page is all about then based on Schema your pages will get converted into a featured snippet.

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76: What is a Trust Flow (TF)?

Trust flow is also known as TF which is a rank measure by an independent tool Majestic to get an idea how much trust this site has based on the number of backlinks or trustworthy sites pointing to that particular site or pages.

The higher the trust flow the chances of the site ranking might get increased.

77: What is an Image Alt Text?

It is an HTML tag added with an image to help search engine crawlers to understand what this image is all about as a crawler can not read the image and understand its user intent.

By providing Alt text with image, it links that image with that particular keyword or query which will be easily searchable in the Google image search and could be converted into the featured snippet.

78: What are a keyword and Query?

The keyword is a particular query search by any user in the search engine to get any expected results. Every page published on the internet is to solve some particular problem.

And a query is made of different word combinations to address a particular problem and those words are known as a keyword. In summary, the keyword is something that the user searching for.

79: What is the primary keyword?

The primary keyword is also known as a focus keyword, which is the keyword around which a complete post is written. While you use any SEO Plugin like Yoast SEO then it asks for the Focus keyword and later it suggests to optimize the content around that keyword.

A single post can have only 1 primary keyword but more than one secondary keyword.

80: What is LSI Keyword?

LSI stands for the Latent semantic keywords which are the different variations of the primary keywords. Ideally, it is recommended to use the LSI keywords in the content to rank your post for multiple similar queries.

Such as Fast or quick, meal or food, cinema or movie all are different keywords but have similar meanings then all are known as LSI keywords.

81: What is Long Tail  Keyword?

Whenever, if you are targeting a full query instead of a single seed keyword then such type of long keywords are known as a Longtail keyword.

Let take an example, instead of SEO if you target what is SEO then the second term will be known as LongTail keyword. LongTail has a high chance to rank faster in SERP due to addressing particular queries and less competition. You can find a long-tail keyword using a tool call longtail pro.

82: What is a Branded Keyword?

Branded keywords are the name of any particular brand, let imagine if anyone is searching for a keyword Bloggingos in search engine then that will be considered as the branded keyword.

Ideally, the more branded keyword search in a search engine along with any particular query then the search engine will start ranking that site for that particular query.

83: What is a Tag for a Blog post?

Tag is a keyword or category associated with the number of posts or pages to give the search engine an idea that all the content associated with that particular tag is referencing to this particular query.

Earlier it was mandatory to use the tag with any online content but now crawler is smart enough to judge, what your content is all about.

84: What is a Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization is a situation when multiple pages started ranking for the same keyword or query. It happens because website owners might publish different content around the same query or keyword.

As a result, you might get less CTR on the SERP and will create competition for your own webpages.

85: What is a Keyword Density or Stuffing?

Keyword density is the number of times any particular keyword used in the overall content. There is not an ideal guideline by Google but experts expect to use the same keyword up to 1-2.5% max.

It the same keywords are used more than the given percentage then it will be called keyword stuffing or keyword density and search engine may penalize your ranking in the search results. To avoid this use LSI keywords.

86: What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a technique to identify a particular query for which not much more relevant content is already exit. You can use a free and paid SEO tool to get an idea of the search engine ranking possibility and its monthly search volume.

Do remember the lower in difficulty and higher in search volume tend to rank faster and give better organic results, you can check the free keyword research guide.

87: What is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is the number rated in the 0-100 scale to give an idea during keyword research that how much SEO difficulty that particular keyword has to rank in the top 10 pages of SERP.

Keyword difficulty close to 100 will be more difficult as compare to one close to 0.You can use the tool like LongTailPro or Ahref or SeMrush (7-Day Free Trial) to identify the keyword difficulty.

88: What is Keyword Search Volume?

Keyword search volume is the potential number of searches any particular keyword has on an average in a month. It usually calculated as country-specific search volume or global search volume.

The higher the search volume of any keyword the more chances it has to grab the organic and paid traffic because search volume will be recorded by any tool based on the number of people are searching the exact query in the search engine.

89: What is a Meta description?

A meta description is a summary added with a particular webpage, which visible in SERP whenever your page will get an impression in the search engine results.

You are familiar with the SERP results with a blue link and an additional summary just below that blue line. That summary or description is known as the meta description.

90: What are Meta keywords?

The number of keywords used in the meta description is known as meta keywords. It always contains your focus, secondary and LSI keywords.

When your page will be visible in the search engine results then those keywords which matched with the searched query will be highlighted in the bold.

91: What is a Permalink?

Permalink is the URL of any webpage, which gets indexed or rank in the search engine. A permalink is the collection of the domain name, keywords and ended by the Extension.

It is recommended to use the permalink in between 55-60 characters only else will get truncated by the Search engine display.

92: What is a Slug?

Slug is the keyword used in the permalink or URL to address users or help search engines to give an idea of what this page is all about. Slug is the only part of any post editor URL which will be in edit mode to get change anytime you want.

Do remember, if you will do change in the slug, the permalink will get change so use 301 redirect to avoid 404 pages not found.

93: What is a Naked URL?

Naked URL is the complete URL that is not linked with any anchor text or not converted to a hyperlink. If you share your link on any other platform as it is then it will be referred to as a naked URL.

As this http://bloggingos.com is a naked URL however How to start a blog, is a URL linked with anchor text and will be known as a hyperlink.

94: What is a Breadcrumb?

Breadcrumb is the navigation added with your site, which is also known as an HTML sitemap. This helps readers to understand on which page of the site he is reading the content and how to navigate to other similar category pages.

It also helps search engine crawlers to index similar pages, whenever one page of that category is getting updated search engine will auto index other pages in the same navigation map.

95: What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is an address of your website, which is mandatory for any website to get live on the internet. It is ideally a brand name added with an extension such as my site Domain names like bloggingos.com, where Bloggingos is a brand name and .com is an extension.

Domain names are of two types gTLD or ccTLD.

gTLD stands for the generic top-level domain like .com,.info,.org, etc however ccTLD stands for the country code top-level domain like .in,.co.uk,.ca, etc.

96: What is gTLD?

gTLD stands for the generic top-level domain, which is used to represent any particular entities such as .com which is used by mainly commercial entities, .org is used by the nonprofit organization,.edu used by the educational institute, etc.

If your business is targeted to a global audience then always use the gTLD domain extensions.

97: What is ccTLD?

ccTLD stands for the country code top-level domain, which is used to represent a brand targeted within a particular country. If you are willing to expand your service till your home country only then it is advised to use the ccTLD domain.

Like UK based businesses to target, only UK audience can use domain name .co.uk, similarly Canada business can use only .ca domain names, etc.

98: What is Hosting?

Hosting is the container on the internet that hosts your website contents like files, HTML, CSS data, web pages and many other entities to get live on the internet. Imagine hosting as the container of your website which has some space allocated in the internet space.

Every hosting is connected with a domain name, so using domain name users can access all the web pages hosted on that hosting, well I am using A2 hosting.

99: What are HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTP stands for the hypertext transfer protocol, which is file protocols or rules used to transfer the files in between the server and client.

In the case of a website, content is hosted on a hosting server and the user is enquiring any pages using a URL from a machine that is known as the client machine.

Then the data transfer happens through that protocol to ensure the high-level security and it is recommended by the search engine to use HTTPS instead of HTTP for high-security transmission.

100: What is heading H1, H2, H3 tags?

When it comes to content writing then the complete content is divided into various sections, where the title of the post which also visible in SERP results is known as H1 (Heading 1).

However, in the middle of contents, many other headings used such as H2, H3, H4, etc to categorize the content into various other subsections and web crawlers try to understand what that particular section is all about using the headings.

101: What is stop words?

Stop words are the words like a, an, the, etc used in the middle of the content or in the permalink. But the search engine crawler has stopped indexing such keywords to save time and effort.

Well, if you are still using such stop words then no need to worry about from the SEO points of the perspective.

Now you are close to the end, if still not shared then I hope you will do this at the end.

102: What is .htaccess file?

It is the file associated with every website server, which is also known as the server configuration file and mainly used to redirect or rewrite the URLs.

If the user searches for bloggingos.com then I expect him to redirect to http://bloggingos.com, so all such config updates are controlled by the server level file config .htaccess file.

103: What is the Robot.txt file?

Robot.txt is a file created to communicate with the web crawler to give him instructions on which pages of your site need to index and which page to not.

If you are willing to hide any particular page of the site not to get indexed or available to search in search engine then explicitly mention exclude for those pages in Robot.txt file and for rest provide sitemap and it will index all other pages.

104: What is a Blog?

The blog is a kind of website where the content published in the chronological order in which the most recent post will be on the top then the one published very much earlier.

The blog offers information on a particular topic or gives an idea of any personal experiences of learning as in Bloggingos I am offering all my SEO learning and blogging tips.

105: What is a Website?

The website is created to represent any business or service and most of the content published on the website is static content which won’t get change rapidly.

Just for your reference, a website can have a blog attached as a particular section to aware users of their products but a blog can not hold the website as its particular section.

106: What is a Niche?

Consider niche as a category or particular industry. If I will take an example of exercise then it a part of the health and fitness niche. Then niche can be sub-categories into sub-niche and micro-niches.

Like under the digital marketing niche, SEO is one of the niches and within the SEO niche, Youtube SEO is a micro niche or you can further drill down.

107: What is a Micro Niche?

A micro-niche is the problem-focused category where the interest is to share the details only on a particular topic by excluding all other broader ideas.

If I do start sharing the content only on making money through a blog by selling E-Books only then it will be considered as the micro niche for me.

108: What is a Cache?

A cache is the collection of data you have browsed in your computer within a particular period of time.

It is the basic property of any browser to grab the details of the pages user have already visited for a specific period of time, so next time while you visit the same page then it will be available to load instantly instead of sending a request to the server to get you the same page again.

109: What is a Homepage? 

The homepage is the landing page of your website, where you represent your business and from which user gets an idea of where to navigate and from which direction to navigate for particular content.

In the case of the blog, you will always get the recent posts on the homepage to help the reader what content is newly added with the site.

110: What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the partnership program, where you promote other brands’ products to your audience either using the blog or making YouTube videos or sharing content on the social media platform and for each sale, you will get credited with decided commissions.

Affiliate marketing is the major source of revenue that every blogger willing to monetize their blogs or online content, here is a plug and play 12-minute affiliate program.

111: What is CPA Marketing?

CPA stands for the cost per action, where you as a promoter of any particular products if any user will perform any particular action which is ideally filling a survey form, giving an email address, or performing any other suggested activities.

As a result, if any lead generated then to you as a promotor of that program will be paid for a per lead.

Wrap up on SEO Glossary

I am sure you have enjoyed or learned almost everything about the SEO terminologies and SEO glossary. Let me suggest if anything else you want me to add in this.

I am sure if you get benefited from this glossary then others too so help each other by sharing on your social media profile and now this time is to learn step by step on how to start a blog.

Hey, I am Kirtish Vyas an engineer by profession and a Blogger by Passion, and the Founder of Bloggingos. Bloggingos works as an operating system for bloggers to explore Blogging, SEO, and Affiliate marketing tips, Read More

37 thoughts on “100+ SEO Glossary : Essential Terminologies of SEO Everyone must know”

  1. Really it’s a great list for a newbie blogger to start blogging. Every SEO glossary you have described here helps a blogger to lift up their blog.

    Reply
  2. That is all paid guide which is you provide in free of cost… Thank you for this amazing information.. i never read an amazing information like this…

    Reply
    • I love to share quality information because of the reader like you deserve such a piece of great information. I appreciate your valuable compliment.

      Reply
  3. OMG!!! Sir aapne itne saare information ko ek hi post me bta diye..aur aapne itna achha information diya..aapka bahut bahut dhanywaad sir..mai jb bhi aapka article dekhta hu to sochta hu aap itne long articles likhte kaise hai..aur aapko kitna time lgta hai and aapki video bhi bahot achhi aur knowledgeable hoti hai..Again Thank you sir for sharing this information ????

    Reply
    • Hey, Thanks Abhishek, ideally it takes around 2 weeks to lay down such quality posts but it is worth putting efforts while people like you do provide your valuable comment. Appreciate your valuable feedback

      Reply
  4. Amazing articles, It is more useful and I can easily polish my basics by your SEO articles.
    Before I give any interview of SEO related, then I read it again.

    Reply
  5. I read your full blog it is awesome and I really like your strength of spread knowledge about blogging and it is very knowledgeable. so please provide us this type knowledge regularly thank you so much.

    Reply
  6. Mr vyas, you are great seo trainer. Your YouTube channel is like a digital marketing institute for me. I am getting free seo training from both the side 1. Your YouTube channel 2. Your website.
    Thanks for sharing this 100+ seo glossary. But I have confusion on Google docs. But no worry I will clear it. Again thanks.

    Reply
  7. Hey! Nice Article Keeps it up with your Good work. This Article will also helpful to the visitors. Really Nice 🙂 Thank you for sharing a such a content very useful to me. I have learned a lot from this article.

    Reply
  8. I read your full blog it is awesome and I really like your strength of spread knowledge about blogging and it is very knowledgeable. so please provide us this type knowledge regularly thank you so much.

    Reply
  9. Hey kirtish vyas,

    I love reading your blog posts. This one is undoubtedly awesome. I have a question about Google Sandbox.

    How can I come out from the Google sandbox? Is there any trick?

    Reply
  10. First of fall thanks you very much bro for that’s kind of effect I appreciated your hard work.
    I know some SEO but when I read your blog Trust me, bro, I get lots of value only one post.
    Keep doing this bro We love your content whether it from a blog or Youtube.

    Reply

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