SEO Dictionary
While it is already complex to understand what SEO positioning is all about, how to approach it and apply it to your website, understanding all those words or terms that are used is not an easy task either. That is why we have created a very complete SEO glossary and its applications in the dialect:
Table of Contents
A
Algorithm:
In computer terms an algorithm is a sequence of steps that are programmed to provide a solution to a problem or situation. Taking this into account we can say that the Algorithm programmed by Google are the sequential steps how Google reads our site, and in relation to the result of this reading is one of the factors that determines our position within the search results. If we make an analogy, the Algorithm is the quality inspector that comes to visit our company, if we give him the information he needs in an organized and clear way, he will give us a good score.
Application to the SEO dialect: We must be aware of Google Algorithm updates to avoid bad ratings or penalties.
Alt tag:
Also known as alt text, these are a brief description of an image, not to be confused with the name of the image; for example, the name of the following image is Focus-77mm and the alt tag is Camera photo lens, vector. Stock Photo.
These tags have a fundamental objective in the SEO, since they allow us that the images inside our WEB site are 100 % crawlable by the robots of Google and thus to have better qualifications to position us. Alt Tags are configured from the CMS or Content Editor.
In addition to their SEO functionality, these tags are of high importance for visually impaired people who use screen readers, so they do not miss the content of the image.
Application to the SEO dialect: Alt tags should include the keywords or variations of keywords to be positioned from the website.
Anchor text:
Also known as anchor text, it is the text that carries a link to link with the objective of expanding the information that is being provided to the visitor. This text or phrase must contain relevant information regarding the content that we are going to find in the new entry or page, which is quite relevant for google robots as they are an important factor for the site’s qualification and will help us to position ourselves.
Application to the SEO dialect: In the anchor text it is important to use keywords that contribute to the positioning of the site.
B
Backlinks:
These are those links that are on a website and redirect to our site or vice versa. These can be obtained in a paid or organic way depending on the PA of our site. Depending on the content to which they are linked these Backlinks will help or affect the positioning of our site.
Application to the SEO dialect: Backlinks are fundamental in the Seo strategy and these should be in sites related to our services, so that the traffic that arrives is from potential customers.
Black Hat SEO:
Are those improper techniques used by some specialists in order to deceive search engines and achieve faster positioning.
Application to SEO dialect: Black Hat SEO is severely punished by Google.
Bounce Rate:
In Spanish translates to bounce rate and is a metric used to analyze what percentage of visitors who enter our site do not last long enough or do not navigate within our site. It is considered as one of the most important metrics in web analytics, it is the one that allows us to see that our website is not meeting its goal, one of the reasons may be that we are not giving the content that our visitors want.
Application to SEO dialect: The content of the landing pages that come from backlinks must be congruent with the keywords that made the user reach our site, otherwise it will increase the Bounce Rate and therefore we will lower the rating of the site affecting the positioning.
C
Click Bait:
Son los anuncios o titulares que suelen ser muy llamativos pero su contenido no es relevante, en el medio se conocen como la carnada para atraer nuevos visitantes donde su objetivo es únicamente que hagan click.
Aplicación al dialecto del SEO:
Crawlers o Googlebots:
Los famosos Robots o Spiders son los encargados de rastrear cada página del sitio web de forma automática para que estas sean indexadas en Google; sin embargo, también se pueden enviar de forma manual las URL que deseamos indexar.
Aplicación al dialecto del SEO: Los Crawlers de Google rastrean las paginas nuevas y las que se actualizan, por lo tanto, no es necesario hacer el proceso manual a menos de que sea un cambio demasiado relevante.
CTR:
Es la cantidad de clicks o aperturas que recibe nuestra página después de aparecer en la página de respuesta de Google. Esta tasa se mide de forma porcentual, teniendo en cuenta de la cantidad de veces que salimos como resultado en la página de Google sobre la cantidad de veces que nos dan click.
Aplicación al dialecto del SEO: Para medir el CTR debemos tener configurado Google Analitycs de forma correcta.
D
Domain Authority:
(DA) In this case the rating is given out of 100, and what is measured is the authority or relevance of the domain according to the sector in which it is located.
Application to the SEO dialect: One of the references to analyze the SEO of a site is to review the Authority of the site; that is, to evaluate the PA and DA to establish the strategy to develop.
E
EAT
EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is an indicator or variable that Google evaluators are using to rate your website, the objective of this rating method is to provide Google users with results that are reliable and trustworthy. Currently the review is done by individuals but Google is looking for a way for the algorithm to pre-screen to streamline the process.
Application to the SEO dialect: For your website to have a good EAT it is important to focus on the content being done by a professional and knowledgeable person, those websites that deliver complete and detailed information to the user will have a better rating.
G
Google Analitycs:
It is a tool that allows us to have statistical measurements, of the different actions we perform on our site so that we can analyze them, measure them, quantify them and take actions based on real results.
Application to the SEO dialect: Through Google Analitycs we can configure the objectives we want according to the strategy.
I
Impression:
In the SEO and Digital Marketing sector impressions correspond to the amount of times a user sees our ad or in the case of search engine results the amount of times our site comes up as a result. If we were to make an analogy with a traditional marketing strategy such as flyering, impressions are the number of flyers delivered.
Application to the SEO dialect: CTR is measured impressions/amount of clicks * 100.
Index:
We can define it as the search engine’s large database, where all the information collected by the crawlers is housed.
Application to the SEO dialect: When a query is made through a search engine such as Google, the results are given based on the information in the index.
K
Keyword stuffing:
As its Spanish translation says, it is a technique that consists of stuffing keywords in the content of the site. About 10 years ago it was one of the most used SEO techniques, today it is part of Black Hat SEO and is penalized by Google.
Application to the SEO dialect: For your content not to fall into Keyword Stuffing make them in a natural way and do not look like a robot repeating incoherently.
L
Landing Page:
It is a page that is created within the site with a specific objective; that is, this is temporary is not a fundamental section of our website. Generally they are created for campaigns with the objective of attracting new contacts.
Application to the SEO dialect: In the Landing page it is fundamental that we collect basic contact data.
Link Baiting:
Unlike Link Farm this is a technique that seeks to attract other users to link their websites to yours by creating relevant content for your potential visitors.
Application to SEO dialect: Blogs’s are a clear example of Link Baiting so they are one of the best sources of Backlinks.
Link Building:
While above we already explained what Backlinks are, link building is the strategy that we are going to develop for the implementation of these.
Application to the SEO dialect: One of the processes involved in Link Building is to validate that the pages on which we are going to place our backlinks have a high DA and PA.
Link Farm:
It is another of the techniques of Black Hat SEO which consists of making link farms; that is, pages that exchanged different links regardless of category or content. This technique is punished by search engines by being determined as Spam content.
Application to the SEO dialect: The pages on which we put our Backlinks must have a high PA which will give us the certainty that it is not a Link Farm.
Link/Link:
It is a text or image that takes us to another section of our website or even to another website.
Application to SEO dialect: For our Link Building strategy it is essential to verify that the links are correct.
Long-tail Keywords:
Are those keywords composed of more than three words (should be called key phrases) which usually do not have a high traffic, but the conversion rate is good, since those users who search in a specific way are already interested in a particular product or service.
Application to SEO dialect: When the website is new it is suggested to use Long-tail Keywords, as these tend to rank faster.
M
Meta Description:
It is a brief description of what is going to be found on the page; however, this in not visible to users, it goes in the HTML code of the site which allows it to be crawled by crawlers and displayed on the results page.
Application to the SEO dialect: The meta description must be a message that makes an impact and has enough commercial strength to get the user to click on our site and not on another regardless of the position.
N
Natural Search / Organic Searches:
They are those searches that as its name says are given in an organic or natural way; that is to say, the results of these searches are not related to those paid campaigns that we can perform.
Application to SEO dialect: Organic searches take longer to rank than paid ones, but their position with continuous work is maintained and tends to improve.
Nofollow:
It is an HTML tag that is put on those link or links that we do not want to be crawled by Crawlers in order to avoid possible penalties.
Application to SEO dialect: Links from social networks are usually left nofollow since this redirection in terms of content is not relevant to the positioning of the site.
O
Off-page SEO:
Are those techniques that we implement outside of our website to improve organic positioning.
Application to SEO dialect: The creation of a Blog or the use of the same social networks are Off-page SEO techniques.
On-page SEO:
The On-page SEO is the opposite of Off-page SEO, as they are all the techniques we use within our website aiming at the first positions on the search engine response page.
Application to SEO dialect: Creating content of value to the user, using keywords within our articles, having a good site architecture, are some of the On-page SEO practices.
Outbound Links:
These are those links that are within our website, but redirect to other websites in such a way that they enrich the content of our website.
Application to SEO dialect: Just as we must be cautious of where backlinks come from, we must take care of where outbound links go, as this significantly affects our Google ranking.
P
Page Authority:
(PA) Is the page score in relation to how the page is displayed in search engines, the rating is given from 1 to 100 by a platform called MOZ.
Application to SEO dialect: One of the references to analyze the SEO of a site is to review the Authority of the site; that is, to evaluate the PA and DA to establish the strategy to develop.
R
Rank:
It is the position that our page obtains within the results of a search engine, this depends on the keywords we are working with.
Application to the SEO dialect: One of the objectives of SEO is that the page is in the RANK of the first response pages.
Relevance:
It is a term that is directly linked to the content we have on our website and how important or meaningful it can be for users. Taking into account one of the fundamental objectives of search engines (to give the best result to users) relevance becomes a fundamental aspect in SEO.
Application to SEO dialect: The higher the relevance of our content, the better rank we will have.
Rendering
Rendering applied to SEO or computer science is the graphical representation of the website based on the robots’ reading; that is to say, it is how the robots plot the website. This rendering has nothing to do with how the user sees the website, but it does have to do with how Google rates it, having hidden elements or elements that Google cannot read through its robots will give a bad rating to the site and therefore affect its positioning.
Application to SEO dialect: We will use Google Search Console to verify that the website is rendered and avoid penalties or bad ratings.
Robots.txt:
A text file stored in the root directory of a site that tells the search engine crawler which pages and subfolders should not be indexed.
S
SERP:
An acronym for Search Engine Results Page. It is the collection of the listings positioned in response to a query in the search engine
Session:
It is the time it takes a user browsing our website, by default if inactivity of more than 30 minutes is generated the session is terminated and in the event that the user returns it is taken as a new session.
Application to the SEO dialect: Measuring the sessions will allow us to identify if the content we are creating is to the user’s liking; however, another factor that is not positive is that the usability is not the most effective and we must restructure the navigation map.
T
Title Tags:
It is a phrase or copy of what is inside the page in which the user is browsing, we could summarize it as the short version of the meta description, unlike the Title Tag can be specific for each internal page of the site or use the same in all.
Application to the SEO dialect: The Title Tag must provide enough information in short words to the crawler and the user.
W
White Hat SEO:
These are all the good practices that we should follow for the positioning of our website and avoid penalties by search engines.
Application to SEO dialect: A good design of our website, having valuable content for users and the HTML structure or code of our website in order, are some of the practices of White Hat SEO.
X
XML Sitemap:
It is a file in XML language hosted on the website servers, which carries a list of the pages that we require to be crawled in indexed to search engines.
Application to SEO dialect: Some CMS like WordPress automatically update the Sitemap with the pages that are updated, removed or created.
