SEO Term Glossary: Essential Terminology for Search Engine Optimization
When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of terms and jargon that tend to be thrown around. If you’re starting your SEO journey, you might be a bit confused by what all of the websites are talking about. Here are a few common but potentially obscure SEO terms and what they mean:- Alt text. Also known as an alt attribute, this is a description of an image in the HTML code.
- Black hat. This term refers to SEO practices that violate Google’s guidelines.
- Bounce rate. This is a term for how many users leave a website after viewing one page.
- Crawling. This is how search engines discover your website and its pages.
- Headings. Tags organize content on a page, starting with a single H1 tag for the title and H2 tags for subheadings.
- Indexing. When content is stored and organized during a crawl, it’s indexed. De-indexing is a similar term but refers to when a website is removed from Google’s index.
- Metadata. This data tells search engines exactly what your website is and what you’re all about.
- Organic. Also known as “organic traffic,” this is the term for people visiting your website through a regular search-engine result instead of a paid advertisement.
- Page rank. Page rank is Google’s way of estimating a web page’s importance through the links’ quality and quantity.
- SERP. The search engine results page is what you get after you search.
- White hat. The opposite of black hat, white hat practices obey the search engine’s guidelines.