SEO dictionary

Improve your SEO knowledge with our comprehensive SEO dictionary. From algorithms to SERP, find definitions for all important SEO terms in one place.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a term describing Google’s new mobile format. AMP is made to increase the speed on websites that are loaded on several mobile devices.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the actual text inside of a hyperlink.

Search engines occasionally use the anchor text to understand the content on the page being linked to.

Backlinks are every single link from other websites that link to your page.

The more relevant links pointing to your page, the easier and faster search engines will be able to understand the value of your content. By having more relevant backlinks, you can increase your visibility in the organic search results and gain an edge over your competitors.

BERT

BERT is one of Google’s larger algorithmic updates which arrived in October of 2019. Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

The update improved the algorithm’s ability to understand longer and more complex search queries, so the most relevant results would be presented. By using Natural Language Processing, Google has improved its understanding of the semantic context in searches.

Black Hat SEO

Black hat or Black Hat SEO is a type of tactic that goes against the Google Quality Guidelines.
The idea behind Black Hat is to cheat or manipulate Google’s Algorithm.

Black Hat techniques are often seen in linkbuilding. Google however is improving — with every Core Update — their ability to detect these tricks. If you use black hat SEO, it can result in a manual action where Google punishes your site, among other things with a penalty.

Blog

Blog is an abbreviation of weblog or an online logbook

Blogs can be news, guides or other content that doesn’t lend itself to be a landing page.

Bonzer

Bonzer is Denmark’s serious SEO bureau for ambitious businesses. Focus is 100% on SEO, which builds on three columns; Technical SEO, content and linkbuilding. These cornerstones shape the foundation for organic growth on search engines such as Google.

Canonical / Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is a way to tell search engines that a URL represents a master page or an original, which other sub-pages are copies of.

If you have several sub-pages with similar keywords or content, it can confuse Google’s algorithm. Because of this, you should implement a canonical tag pointing to the page you wish to be shown in the search results.

A canonical tag with a link is first and foremost on the page that you don’t want to be shown in the search results, with the canonical linking to the page you do wish to be shown in the search results.

The master page (canonical page) has a canonical tag pointing to itself.

CMS

CMS stands for Content Management System

A CMS is an online program or a system that handles your website and content.

WordPress, Squarespace, SiteCore, Webflow etc. are CMS’s

Content

Content is all of the content available on a website.

This can in principle be everything from texts, images, movies and other forms of interactive content such as calculators and tests. In other words, content is the way your business conveys your messages or sell products and or services.

In SEO, the purpose of content is to live up to the search intent behind a given search query. Therefore it’s required that you deliver useful and deliberate content to rank in the search results.

Conversion

Conversion is an umbrella term for desired events that are essential for the business.

A conversion could for instance be sales, sign-ups for a newsletter, downloads or visits to a specific page.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is Google’s measurement of how optimized your website is. This includes:

  • How fast the primary content is loaded on the page

  • How quickly the page responds to interaction

  • How stable the visual elements are on your page.

You can view your own site’s Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console.

In 2021, Core Web Vitals became a part of Google’s ranking factors.

Crawler

A crawler is a piece of automated software, attempting to visit different pages online in order to index them.

Crawling

Crawling is the process whereby a search engine reads your website.

A crawl helps search engines such as Google to understand your page — and potentially give you better rankings in the search results. Crawling finds web addresses by following links, reading sitemaps or navigating around on your website.

CTR

CTR stands for Click-Through-Rate. This is the number of clicks on a link.

In SEO it’s specifically clicks on your website from the search results.

Dead or broken page (404)

A 404 is a dead or broken page. This is a page that either never did, or doesn’t exist anymore.

Links pointing to a 404-page is also called dead links.

A Dofollow link is a link that passes on SEO-value. In other words, it’s a link that search engines’ algorithm follows.

Domain Rating (DR) / Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are two metrics from Ahrefs and Moz respectively, which are both big SEO tools. Your DR or DA is an estimation of how authoritative your website is, based on the amount and strength of unique domains that link to the page. This measurement goes from 0 to 100.

To this day we don’t know precisely how Google’s algorithm determines the quality of websites, but DR and DA give us a qualified evaluation of how strong of a link profile the website has.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is content that is copied from another source.

Google is not interested in showing search results with duplicate content.

E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness.

It’s a term used by Google to determine the quality of your content. This is especially important on YMYL-pages.

FeaturedSnippets are organic informational boxes shown at the top of Google’s SERP on selected searches. It’s an excerpt of the content on a website with the purpose of answering the search query already within the SERP.

Google

Google is the worlds largest search engine.

Google has a market share of over 91% of all searches worldwide. In their search engine, you’ll both find organic search results (SEO) and paid links (ads)

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an analytical tool from Google. This tool provides insights related to traffic and user behaviour on your website.

Google Manual Action

Manual actions are Google’s way of down-prioritize or completely remove websites or specific subpages from its index.

These actions are unrelated to algorithmic changes. This is Google that manually goes in and punishes websites that break their specified guidelines.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free service where businesses can add their physical stores and locations to local searches or Google Maps. By doing this, it becomes easier for users to find your businesses location or profile. This can help with geographical searches. (“shoe store Copenhagen”)

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google’s own SEO tool. Here you can among other things see your organic traffic, Core Web Vitals, and which keywords generate the most traffic to your site.

Googlebot

Googlebot is the generic name for Google’s crawler which regularly crawls the internet and its content.

Grey hat SEO

Grey Hat or Grey Hat SEO is an optimization technique positioned in the “grey area” between white hat and black hat SEO.

Grey Hat SEO will occasionally go against Google’s guidelines but might do so without the intention of doing it.

Health Score

Health Score is Ahref’s judgment of a site’s health — how many errors are found on the page. This can among other things be dead links (404), slow reading speeds, too many redirects, etc.

A hyperlink is a clickable, highlighted word, image or symbol that leads to another page. Hyperlinks are by default marked with blue or some other contrast colour.

An image carousel is a group of images in the SERP that can be scrolled through. These are ranked and chosen based on the search engine’s algorithm.

Indexing

Indexing is the process after a crawl is finished, where the search engine registers your website in its index. The index-posts for the pages provide a description of the page contents. Specifically, indexing means that Google visits a page, reads it through and adds the page to their search results.

Internal links is every link that sends the user to another location on your own website.

An internal link helps users navigate to other relevant content, while at the same time helps search engines understand the meaning and importance of content on your subpages.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing. is content that is inappropriately filled with one or more keywords. This used to be a black hat SEO-tactic when Google initially couldn’t read into the purpose and readability of content.

Keywords

Keywords or search phrases are the words users type in when searching online.

The users’ purpose with the keyword is to find an answer or result that lives up to the search intent.

Knowledge Graph

A Google Knowledge Graph is an infobox shown in the search results.

This infobox acts as a knowledge base of content collected from different sources with the intent of providing better information based on a simple search.

KPI

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. It’s a measurable value used to determine whether a goal has been achieved.

Landing Page

A landing page is a page on your website that you want to lead visitors to.

It’s also called a target page or destination page. Occasionally the term is used on all pages that aren’t blog pages, category pages or the front page.

Link Juice is an informal SEO-term regarding links passing on SEO-value from one page to another. This depends on the page’s DR, UR, Relevance, etc. The term is frequently used in the SEO universe but is not an official term for the function of a link.

Linkbuilding

Linkbuilding is a process where you try to get links from other websites/domains. Among other things you can do this by producing content that others want to link to.

A link works as a virtual like or recommendation of your page or content. The more relevant links pointing to your page, the more authority and trust you have according to the search engines. This has a positive influence on your placement in the search results.

Longtail Keywords

A Longtail Keyword is a prolonged variation of a primary keyword.

Longtails will often have a smaller search volume, but they are more concrete. This means that longtail keywords often indicate that a user is more purchase-ready or knowledgeable on the topic. This way the search becomes more targeted and specific.

Meta description

A meta description is the short text under an organic search result.

The purpose of a meta description is to summarize the content of a page. It can at most be 155-160 characters.

Money Pages

Money Pages are the pages that generate income for your business. It’s the pages you want to lead your visitors to, in hope of conversions.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is a black hat tactic where you get a bunch of bad links pointing to a competitor’s website.

The purpose of this technique is to trick Google into thinking that the competing page buys or acquires bad links in unsavoury ways.

A nofollow link is a link that doesn’t transfer SEO-value in a classic way. This is to say that search engines don’t follow the link in the same way as it would on a dofollow link.

Google invented nofollow in 2005 to combat spam. You can mark outgoing links as nofollow yourself, if you don’t want search engines following the link in the same way. Some people would describe this as “link juice”.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is any and all optimization happing outside the bounds of your website. Primarily link building.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is all the work performed on your own website with the intent of strengthening your own placement in the search engines’ organic results. This includes both technical SEO and content.

Organic search results

Organic search results are the results you see in the search engine’s SERP underneath the paid ads. These results are determined based on the search engine’s algorithm with the intent of living up to the specific search in the best possible way (Search intent).

On average, the majority of all traffic from search engines goes to organic search results.

Organic traffic

Traffic is a count of the visitors on a website. Organic traffic is exclusively visitors from regular search results.

Visitors from the search results are referred to as “organic” because they found your page in a natural way. Search results that aren’t paid ads are therefore also called organic search results.

Page Speed / Page Speed Insights

Page Speed or Page Speed Insights (PSI) is Googles free tool to evaluate your website’s speed.

PSI analyses both your page and comes with suggestions as to how you can make it faster.

notice: Page Speed isn’t always equally reliable. So we recommend that you also test your site’s speed on other webservices such as Pingdom and WebPageTest

PageRank

PageRank is the first of Google’s search algorithms. It measures a website’s importance by counting the amount and the quality of the links from other pages.

PageRank is still being used today – in addition with a bunch of other algorithms.

Paid search results such as Google Ads is a digital advertising platform developed by Google. Here you can as an advertiser pay to have adverts shown with the intention of gaining more traffic to your site. The advertisements can be shown in several formats where the ranking is determined by price among other things.

Un-indexing

An un-indexing refers to a page that has been removed from the search engines’ index.