SEO Glossary: Terminology and Definitions

This SEO glossary contains the most used terms and jargon among SEO professionals, consultants and agencies. Whether you're just getting started with SEO, looking to hire an agency or happen to be a seasoned expert, this page provides simple definitions that are easy to remember.

A - F

Alt Tag Attribute

An alt tag is a type of HTML text that contains information telling users and crawlers that there is an image present on the web page, and information about that image.

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Anchor Text

Anchor text, also known as a link title or link label, is the clickable phrase or keyword that embeds a hyperlink within it. It can link internally or externally. It often stands out from the rest of the text as a coloured link.

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Article Spinning

Article spinning, also known as content spinning, is where a piece of content, like a blog post, is rewritten hundreds of times, often with the help of ‘spinning software’. It is considered a black hat SEO technique as it usually produces poor quality and unhelpful content for the end user.

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Automatically Generated Content

Auto-generated content is programmatically created content via code for the purpose of publishing and indexing large amounts of pages in SERPs. Not all auto generated content is inherently "black hat"

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G - L

Backlinks (SEO)

Backlinks are external hyperlinks used to link from one website to another. They form an integral part of search-engine optimization, often touted as the main ranking factor search engines use to rank pages.

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Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO, is a form of search engine optimization where a website uses ill practices in order to artificially improve their rankings for search queries. These practices often break service agreements and can lead to penalties.

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Bottom of Funnel Keywords

Bottom of Funnel Keywords

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Breadcrumbs

A breadcrumb trail is a tool that helps users navigate a website and appears in the form of a menu or single line at the top of the page. Breadcrumbs notify the user of the structure of the website, enabling them to return to the homepage after exploring the site’s pages.

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M - R

Cloaking

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique whereby a website presents different content to the crawler, in an attempt to index better and rank higher in SERPs. The user experience is very different and sites often appear unreadable.

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Content Decay

Content decay is a piece of content that has been decreasing in organic traffic over a long period of time.

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Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network (CDN) refers to a group of web servers which are dispersed globally to provide a speedy delivery of content. This is much more efficient than using a central server and is typically used for websites that attract a lot of traffic.

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Content Farms

A content farm is a website or company that creates vast amounts of content that is usually duplicated and low-quality, written specifically to fulfil algorithms and rank highly in SERPs.

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Content Gap

A content gap can be defined as the space between what users are seeking out on the web, and the results they receive. It is essentially a gap in the market that needs to be filled in order to fulfil search intent.

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Content Optimization

Content optimization in SEO involves ensuring content is written and presented in a way that search engines can understand and serve it to your target audience. 

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Crawl Budget

A budget assigned to a website by Google bots. Your crawl budget determines the number of URLs a Google bot is able to crawl.

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S - Z

Disavow Backlinks

Disavow backlinks is the process of instructing Google to ignore unwanted backlinks in order to positively impact ranking in SERPs. This can be done using Google’s Disavow Tool.

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Dofollow Links

Any link that is not assigned a nofollow is a dofollow link. This is a HTML attribute assigned to a backlink that allows users and crawlers to discover and access the website.

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Domain Authority

Domain Authority or DA is a search engine score created and developed by SEO platform MOZ to determine how well a website will rank on SERPs.

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Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to content that is similar or identical to content elsewhere on your domain or other domains.

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Dwell Time

Dwell time is the duration of time a searcher spends on a web page after clicking on the link in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), before then returning to the list of search results.

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