Search engine optimization (SEO) can be complicated to understand and learn, but thankfully there are so many great articles out there that are great resources for both content creators and creatives. The downside to these articles? The verbiage. With so many terms, it’s hard to understand what they mean if you’re not familiar with SEO.
We’ve put together a great SEO glossary that you can refer back to whenever you’re reading these articles to better understand some of the most commonly used SEO terms.
SEO Term Glossary
Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) – A feature developed by Facebook and Twitter to improve the loading times of websites on mobile devices.
Alt Text/Tag – Information on an image within the alt attribute of the <img> tag that is used by search engines and screen readers to understand the contents of an image.
Average Position – How your website is currently ranking on search results against other pages (this will vary depending on the search query).
Backlink Link – Also known as inbound or incoming links, backlinks are when one website links to another.
Bounce Rate – A metric measuring the percentage of users that only visit one page on a website before leaving.
Broken Link – A link that doesn’t work and leads the user to a 404 error.
Call to Action (CTA) – Wording used to direct a user to perform a specific action (i.e. schedule a call, make an appointment, call now).
Click through Rate (CTR) – A metric showing the percentage of people that click on your ad/website after it’s been displayed in SERPs (percentage of clicks/percentage of impressions).
Cost per Click (CPC) –The monetary cost of a user clicking on an ad.
Crawl – An algorithm that scans and analyzes the pages of a website in order to be indexed in SERPs.
Domain – The location of a website displayed as a domain name or IP address (for example, www.studiothirtyseven.com).
Impressions – The number of times your ad/website has been viewed in SERPs.
Index – Once the pages of your website are scanned and analyzed, they will be pulled into the search engine’s index to be pulled into results once a query is submitted.
Internal Link – When you link within a piece of content to another page or post on your website.
Keyword – A word or phrase used as a search query to find related content.
Landing Page – The page that a user lands on when clicking a link to a website.
Meta Description/Data/Tag – A description of the content on a specific page or post, containing keywords and locations, used by search engines to better understand a page. This description is also the short paragraph you see below the link to a website in SERPs.
Organic Traffic – Search results that are not paid for and take time to build. When a user finds and visits a website by submitting a query to a search engine, this is considered organic traffic.
Page Title – The title of a page that you see in both the tab of your browser and the link you see in SERPs for a website. This includes a title of a page, keywords, and locations.
Pageview – A metric showing the number of times a user loads a specific page (pageviews is the total number of pages viewed).
Permalink – The tail end of a URL identifying a specific page.
Referral Traffic – Traffic that comes from a third-party website linking to your website.
Rich Snippet – When structured data is added to a page or post, it allows search engines additional information regarding a page that can result in an enhanced listing on SERPs.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of growing the quality and quantity in order to increase the visibility of your website on search results organically (non-paid traffic).
Search Engine – A program that searches the web and shows the best results based on the query submitted.
Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) – The page a search engine shows after a user submits a query.
Session – An individual visit to a website.
Sitemap – A list of all pages on a website that helps a search engine index the pages on a website.
