Glossary of Terms

Chapter 2

4xx Error –

4xx errors (also referred to as 400 errors) occur when a page that once existed on a website is no longer live and has not been redirected elsewhere.

Ad blockers –

Ad blockers are tools designed to remove or hide content identified as advertising during browsing.

Ad Density –

Ad density refers to the sum of the heights of your ads and how much of your mobile page they cover.

Article Body –

The body of the article is where the majority of the research and content are located.

Atom feeds –

An Atom feed is a web feed that uses the Atom Syndication Format and the Atom Publishing Protocol. Atom comprises an XML-based format that describes an Atom feed and the items of information in it, and a protocol for publishing and editing Atom feeds.

Auto-Play Ads –

Autoplay ads are video ads that start on a user’s device on their own. On one side, we have browser companies who are adamant on blocking such ads. Though on the other side, most marketers and publishers believe autoplay video ads are the next big thing in ad tech.

CDN – 

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers that speeds up webpage loading for data-heavy applications. CDN can stand for content delivery network or content distribution network. When a user visits a website, data from that website’s server has to travel across the internet to reach the user’s computer. If the user is located far from that server, it will take a long time to load a large file, such as a video or website image. Instead, the website content is stored on CDN servers geographically closer to the users and reaches their computers much faster.

CLS –

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a Core Web Vital that measures the cumulative score of all unexpected layout shifts within the viewport that occur during a page’s entire lifecycle. Its aim is to measure a page’s “visual stability,” as that heavily influences the user experience.

Cluster Content –

Cluster content is the supporting content pieces that you develop around your pillar pages.

Content Cannibalisation – 

Content cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages targeting the same or similar keywords, causing these contents to compete with each other for Google ranking and, consequently, harming your site’s organic performance.

Content Silo – 

A content silo is a method used in search engine optimization (SEO) that involves structuring your website content around keyword-based themes. Basically, when you create a silo structure, you are grouping related and relevant content into distinct sections on your website.

Core Web Vitals – 

Core Web Vitals are speed metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience.

Crawl Budget – 

Crawl Budget is the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe.

Crawling – 

Crawling is a process which is done by search engine bots to discover publicly available web pages.

CTR –

CTR (Click-Through Rate) is a metric that measures the ratio of users who clicked on the website pages to the total number of people who saw the pages. CTR is calculated as the total number of clicks on the page divided by the total number of times the page was displayed (so-called impressions).

CTR = (Number of clicks ÷ Impressions) × 100

Each set of tags will consist of itemscope, itemtype and itemprops.

FID – 

First Input Delay (FID) is a Core Web Vital that measures the time in milliseconds from when a user first interacts with your site (i.e. when they click a link, tap a button, or press a key) to when the browser is able to respond to that interaction.

Footer – 

The website footer is the section of content at the very bottom of a web page. The purpose of a website footer is to help visitors by adding information and navigation options at the bottom of web pages.

Googlebot – 

Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine.

Header – 

A website header is the top section of the web page. It is the first thing your website visitors are going to see when they land on your website’s homepage.

Headline –

Headlines are top-level headers on an article or piece of content that summarize the substance of a piece.

Hreflang – 

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage.

HTML Sitemap – 

An HTML sitemap is just a clickable list of pages on a website.

HTTPS –

HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It is a protocol for securing the communication between two systems e.g. the browser and the web server. It is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

Indexing – 

Indexing is how search engines organize the information and the websites that they know about. Indexing is part of a normal search engine process – arguably the most important, because content that is not in the index has no possibility of ranking for a search result.

Interstitials –

An interstitial is an interactive page or pop-up on a website that usually loads between one page a visitor stops on and the next or within a page as a user scrolls.

It is used to help search engines better understand the elements on a page, allowing them to create more dynamic search experiences for their users.

JSON-LD – 

JSON-LD (JavaScript Objective Notation for Linked Data) is a structured data format for marking up your website and supported by the biggest search engines Google, Bing and Yandex. It’s Google’s recommended method of implementing structured data.

Latency – 

Latency is generally considered to be the amount of time it takes from when a request is made by the user to the time it takes for the response to get back to that user.

Lazy Loading – 

Lazy loading means waiting to render content on a webpage until the user or the browser needs it.

LCP – LCP (largest contentful paint) – 

The amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport, from when the user requests the URL. The largest element is typically an image or video, or perhaps a large block-level text element.

Microdata – 

Microdata is a set of tags that allows you to mark up your web page. These tags are added directly to the HTML.

Mobile Friendliness – 

Mobile friendliness is the measure of how well a website is designed and optimized to load on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

News XML sitemap – 

Google News Sitemaps provide the search engine Google with metadata regarding the specific news content on a website. This Sitemap allows the site owner to control which content is submitted to Google News. Using the News Sitemap, Google News can quickly find the news articles contained on a site. The crawler is pointed directly to the URL for each news article, which ensures full coverage.

Noindex – 

A ‘noindex’ tag tells search engines not to include the page in search results. The most common method of noindex-ing a page is to add a tag in the head section of the HTML, or in the response headers.

Page Experience –

Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value, both on mobile and desktop devices. Google evaluates page experience metrics for individual URLs on your site and will use them as a ranking signal.

PageSpeed Insights – 

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.

Pop-up Ads – 

Pop up ads are ads that open in a new window during an online browsing session.

Prestitial Ads – A prestitial ad is the advertisement, displayed to site’s visitors before the Home page is opened.

RDFa – 

RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is an extension to HTML5 used to markup metadata within web pages. RDFa is similar to Microdata and just like Microdata RDFa uses tags inline with the existing HTML.

Redirect error – 

This error happens when the browser can’t establish a connection between the initial page and the destination page in a redirect. The reason you see the “too many redirects” error is because your website has been set up in a way that keeps redirecting it between different web addresses.

rel = “nofollow” – 

Nofollow links are links with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them. The nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore that link.

rel = “sponsored” – 

For example, rel=”ugc sponsored” is a perfectly valid attribute which hints that the link came from user-generated content and is sponsored.

rel = “ugc” – 

Rel=”ugc” (user-generated content) is an attribute that indicates all links generated naturally by users, e.g. forum posts, blog comments, blogs etc.

Rich snippets – 

Rich results are the cards and snippets that improve search results with images, reviews, ratings and other similar information from your site.

Robots.txt – 

Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website.

RSS feeds – 

RSS stands for “really simple syndication” or “rich site summary,” depending on who you talk to. An RSS feed is a web feed that allows applications and their users to access automatic website or content updates.

Semantic HTML Markup – 

Semantic HTML or semantic markup is HTML that introduces meaning to the web page rather than just presentation.

Server error [5xx] – 

5XX error messages indicate server-side errors where your website’s server has been unsuccessful in performing a request, for whatever reason.

Site Depth – 

In simple terms, the depth of a site corresponds to the number of clicks between a given page and the homepage. For example, if you’re on a service page and it is accessible after 4 clicks from the homepage, we consider that this page’s depth is 4.

Site Structure – 

The structure of a website basically means how all the different pages on a website are connected to each other. In other words: the pages and posts on your website. These often have a variety of – related – topics, and site structure deals with how this content is grouped, linked and presented to the visitor.

Structured Data – 

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Taxonomy – 

A website taxonomy is the structure used for a website that organizes content in a logical manner so users can easily navigate the site and understand its purpose. Visually, this may look like different sections and pages within a website, or categories within a blog.

Technical SEO – 

Technical SEO is all about improving a website’s crawlability and indexability in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines.

The itemscope tag is used to identify what item is being referenced. Itemscope is followed by an itemtype tag. Itemtype identifies the type of item the microdata is referencing. For example, it could be a local business or recipe.

Topical Authority – 

Topical authority is an SEO strategy where a website becomes an authority for one or more topics. It is achieved when the site includes content that covers the topic as a whole rather than focusing on single keywords. Each topic represents a single entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

TTFB – 

TTFB refers to the time between when a visitor arrives on your site and when their browser receives the first byte of data from your server.

Web Crawler –

A web crawler (also known as a crawling agent, a spider bot, web crawling software, website spider, or a search engine bot) is a tool that goes through websites and gathers information. In other words, the spider bot crawls through websites and search engines searching for information.

XML Sitemap – 

An XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. It can include extra information (metadata) on each URL, with details of when they were last updated, how important they are and whether there are any other versions of the URL created in other languages. All of this is done to help the search engines crawl your website more efficiently, allowing any changes to be fed to them directly, including when a new page is added or an old one removed.

Chapter 3

Alt Text – 

Alt text (short for alternative text) is text included in HTML code to describe an image on a webpage.

Anchor Text – 

Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web.

Backlink Profile – 

A backlink profile is the quantity, anchors and quality of links pointing to your website.

Backlinks – 

A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.” Backlinks are important to SEO.

Broken links – 

Broken Links are links that send visitors to a webpage that no longer exists.

Clickbait – 

Clickbait is a term that refers to online content that has a headline whose main purpose is to get web users to click on the linked webpage.

CMS – 

A CMS, short for content management system, is a software application that allows users to build and manage a website without having to code it from scratch, or know how to code at all.

Content Freshness – 

Fresh content is content that has been updated recently, is updated frequently, or was published recently. Fresh content is the opposite of stale content, which is content that hasn’t been updated for a long period of time.

Content Pillars – 

Content pillars, also known as pillar pages, are high-level introductions to a topic. They link to more detailed resources about each subtopic to form a content hub.

Contextual Interlinking – 

A “Contextual Link” is a text link within a paragraph in which a related idea or context is found.

E-E-A-T – 

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines and it became well known after the infamous Medic Update in August 2018. E-E-A-T is one factor that Google uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page.

High Quality Content – 

Content quality is how well your content achieves its goal(s). It refers to the depth of information and insight contained within a piece of content. Content quality goes beyond information to include formatting, readability, and grammatical correctness.

Image optimization – 

Image optimization is about reducing the file size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality so that your page load times remain low. It’s also about image SEO. That is, getting your product images and decorative images to rank on Google and other image search engines.

Internal Linking – 

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website.

Keyword difficulty – 

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

Keyword search volume – 

Keyword search volume is an SEO metric that tells you how many times per month, on average, a certain keyword is searched for in a specific location.

Keyword Stuffing – 

Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.

Knowledge graph – 

The Google Knowledge Graph is an enormous database of information that enables Google to provide immediate, factual answers to your questions. If you’ve ever Googled a query and received a useful answer without having to make another click, you have the Google Knowledge Graph to thank.

Link Equity – 

Link equity or “link juice” is a level of authority or value that is passed from a linking page to the page or pages it links to. That value depends on several factors such as the topical relevance and authority of the linking page, the authority of the site that the linking page is on, and more.

Link Spamming – 

Link spam is the posting of out-of-context links on websites, discussion forums, blog comments, guestbooks or any other online venue that displays user comments.

Location –

Based SEO / Local SEO – Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business be more visible in local search results on Google.

Max image preview Attribute – 

The max-image-preview:large directive allows search engines to display large image previews for the site resulting in an enhanced user experience.

NAP – 

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone of the business. Google uses this set of information to identify, index, and rank a business.

NLP – 

NLP or natural language processing is a field of artificial intelligence that allows a machine to understand human language, whether written or spoken. It’s a field that combines linguistics and computer science allowing computers to analyze and ‘understand’ language in order to extract meaning from text and speech.

Page Source – 

Also known as “source” and “document source,” it is the HTML code (source code) of a Web page (HTML document).

Referring Domains – 

A referring domain—which is also sometimes called a linking domain—is a website that links out to another website whose backlink profile you analyze. Every referring domain can have one or multiple links to a website.

Scraped content – 

Content scraping (also referred to as web scraping or data scraping) is nothing but lifting off unique/original content from other websites and publishing it elsewhere.

Topic Clusters – 

Topic clusters are groups of related content that collectively cover a broad subject area. Content clusters provide contextual support for all pages within a group. They also lay the foundation for a strong internal linking structure.

Topical Relevance – 

Topical relevance is a process search engines use to determine how relevant a web page is to a user’s search query. It is usually based on a combination of factors, including but not limited to content, backlinks and keywords.

Unnatural Links – 

Unnatural links are links artificially created to manipulate a website’s ranking in search engines. Unnatural links violate Google’s guidelines and a website can be penalized for them.

User Experience (UX) – 

UX or user experience is all about providing every page visitor with good content and an excellent overall experience.

YMYL – 

Websites that sell products or provide services or information that can impact users’ happiness, health, financial stability, or safety are categorized by Google as YMYL – which stands for “Your Money or Your Life.

Chapter 4

Content Velocity – 

Content velocity is measuring the amount of content a brand is putting out during a defined period of time.

AI Writing Tools – 

AI writing tools, also known as AI content writers, are pieces of software that generate text based on user input powered by artificial intelligence. AI writers can generate human-like text content with the power of AI technology.

Content Marketing – 

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Hummingbird – 

Hummingbird is a search algorithm used by Google. It was first introduced in August 2013, to replace the previous Caffeine algorithm, and affects about 90% of Google searches. Hummingbird update helps Google to understand the search queries. This helps the searcher to get results as per one’s own intent.

RankBrain – 

RankBrain is a component of Google’s core algorithm which uses machine learning (the ability of machines to teach themselves from data inputs) to determine the most relevant results to search engine queries. Pre-RankBrain, Google utilized its basic algorithm to determine which results to show for a given query.

The machine learning aspect of RankBrain is what sets it apart from other updates. To “teach” the RankBrain algorithm to produce useful search results, Google first “feeds” it data from a variety of sources. The algorithm then takes it from there, calculating and teaching itself over time to match a variety of signals to a variety of results and to order search engine rankings based on these calculations.

Taxonomy – 

A website taxonomy is the structure used for a website that organizes content in a logical manner so users can easily navigate the site and understand its purpose.

Content Silo – 

A content silo is a method of grouping related content together to establish the website’s keyword-based topical areas or themes.

Promotional Content – 

Promotional content is content that directly communicates your brand and the products and services you offer, as well as their uses and benefits. It highlights the strengths of your products and services, as well as your values as a business.

Top Stories – 

“Top stories” is a section that appears within Google Search when we detect a search query is news-oriented.

AMP – 

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are light weight pages designed to give mobile users a lightening fast experience that is easier to read and more engaging.

Google Trends – 

Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

Page Experience – 

The Page Experience report provides a summary of the user experience of visitors to your site. Google evaluates page experience metrics for individual URLs on your site and will use them as a ranking signal for a URL in Google Search results.

Mobile Friendliness –

Mobile friendliness is the measure of how well a website is designed and optimized to load on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

A/B Testing – 

A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

People Also Ask – 

People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google SERP feature that provides users with additional questions related to their original search query and quick answers to them. Generally, each question in the People Also Ask section contains a featured snippet for that query.

Long-tail keywords – 

Long tail keywords are search terms with relatively low search volume and competition levels. Also, long tail terms tend to be longer in length (3+ words) than most other keyword types.

Cost per click – 

Cost per click (CPC) is a paid advertising term where an advertiser pays a cost to a publisher for every click on an ad. CPC is also called pay per click (PPC). CPC is used to determine costs of showing users ads on search engines, Google Display Network for AdWords, social media platforms and other publishers. CPC is a significant factor in choosing bidding strategies and conversion bidding types to maximize clicks relative to budget size and target keywords

Search Term –  

A search term, or search query, is the word or phrase someone enters into a search engine to search for on the internet.

Live Blog – 

A live blog, sometimes referred to as “live text,” is a blog post that provides a rolling textual coverage of an ongoing event supplemented with images, videos, and other digital material. Live blogs provide commentary and analysis alongside breaking news rather than summarising the event after it is over. It’s a transparent format in which the writers are able to update and amend their commentaries in easily digestible paragraphs.

LiveBlogPosting Schema – 

The LiveBlogPosting schema type is structured data that allows you to signal to search engines that your content is being updated in real-time. This provides search engines with contextual signals that the page is receiving frequent updates for a certain period of time.

Deep Linking – 

Deep linking is the use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website, rather than the website’s home page. The URL contains all the information needed to point to a particular item.

International SEO – 

International SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines can easily identify which countries you want to target and which languages you use for business.

Multiregional SEO – 

Multiregional SEO is the method of creating optimized, targeted content tailored for specific geographical areas. Multiregional SEO differs from basic SEO in the way it targets. Specifically, the targets are based on geography, and language.

Multilingual SEO – 

Multilingual SEO is the act of optimizing the content on your website for different languages, so you become searchable in new markets, and people in different countries can find your website through organic search.

URL Structure – 

A URL is an address on the internet. It’s made up of a protocol, domain name, and a path. The protocol is how the browser gets the information about that page, either http:// or https:// (“s” stands for secure).

gTLDs – 

A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is a top-level domain (TLD) category that is easily recognized by a suffix attached to a domain name. Examples of of well-known gTLDs are com, org, info, net, and biz.

ccTLDs – 

A ccTLD is a top-level domain (TLD) that indicates a country or geographic location of the website. These “country code” TLDs help internet users understand where the entity behind a website is located.Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) represent specific geographic locations. For example: .mx represents Mexico and .eu represents the European Union.

TLDs –

A top-level domain (TLD) is the rightmost segment of a domain name, located after the last dot. Also known as domain extensions, TLDs serve to recognize certain elements of a website, such as its purpose, owner or geographical area. For example, a .edu top-level domain allows users to immediately identify that site as a higher educational institution.

Subdomains – 

A subdomain is an additional part to your main domain name. Subdomains are created to organize and navigate to different sections of your website. Common subdomains include blog, store, shop, support, help, and events.

Subdirectories – 

A subdirectory is a type of website hierarchy under a root domain that uses folders to organize content on a website. A subdirectory is the same as a subfolder and the names can be used interchangeably.

Meta Content-Language Code – 

The “content-language” tag is a meta tag in the <head> of an HTML document that states the language and country of that a page’s content is most relevant for. The tag looks like this: <meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=””>

Web Stories – 

Web Stories are a visually rich, full-screen content format for the web, which allow you to tap or swipe through stories. To consume content, you can tap or swipe through Web Stories. Google supports Web Stories, so you might find them across Google Search and Discover.

Google Discover – 

Discover is an updated Google feed experience that keeps you inspired and informed about the interests and hobbies you care about most.

External Linking – 

External links are a hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). External links have a greater impact on search engine rankings than internal links because they are valued by search engines as external votes of confidence/popularity in a web page.

Content Monetization – 

Content monetization is a way of leveraging content so that, when users consume it, you earn money. You can be paid either by the users themselves, or a third party that markets products through your content.

UTM Codes – 

A UTM code is a simple snippet code that you can add to the end of a URL to track the performance of campaigns and content. UTM codes are also used to pinpoint specific sources of traffic to a website.

Copyrighted Content – 

Copyright ownership gives the owner the exclusive right to use the work, with some exceptions. When a person creates an original work, fixed in a tangible medium, he or she automatically owns copyright to the work.

Under the DMCA or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, all content published online is protected under copyright law, regardless of it having the copyright symbol on the page. Any content, no matter the form it takes (whether digital, print, or media) is protected under copyright law.

Call-to-Action – 

A call to action (CTA) is a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action.

Google AdSense – 

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.

Ad Manager – 

Google Ad Manager is an ad management platform for large publishers who have significant direct sales. Ad Manager provides granular controls and supports multiple ad exchanges and networks, including AdSense, Ad Exchange, third-party networks, and third-party exchanges.

Page views – 

A pageview (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.

Unique page views – 

Unique Pageviews represent an aggregate of pageviews generated by the same user during the same session (i.e. the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times).  The time limit for a given session is 24hrs.

Average time on page – 

Average Time on Page is a web analytics metric that measures the average amount of time spent on a single page by all users of a website. This metric does not consider exit pages or bounces, and only measures the average time spent by users on non-exit pages.

Bounce rate – 

Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking an action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase. Bounce rate is determined by calculating the number of bounces over the total number of pageviews to a page.

Exit percentage – 

The exit rate determined by the number of people who exit your website after landing on a page and compares it to the total number of views the page received.

Google Algorithms – 

Google search algorithm is a complex system that allows Google to find, rank and return the most relevant pages for a certain search query.

Content formats – 

Content format is the way you present your content, e.g. an infographic, an e-book, an article or a video.

Chapter 5

Clicks per search – 

Clicks Per Search (or CPS) is the ratio of Clicks to Keyword Search volume. It shows how many different search results get clicked, on average, when people search for the target keyword in a given country.

Search features – 

Search features are any content on the results page that falls outside of the basic list of links. You might see images, ads, featured snippets, and a number of other things that fall under the search feature umbrella. Depending on the type of search you’re performing, you’ll see different search features.