SEO Dictionary: 250+ Essential Terms You Need to Know

SEO often sounds like a load of nonsense to newbies. It’s like when my architect sister takes me to Home Depot and tries to tell me about different types of hinges (apparently if you say they all look the same, it’s the same as asking for a 30 minute lecture).

Or when my grandma tries to tell me about when she worked in the tax department and what all the codes mean.

I just disassociate and nope right out of that convo.

But I don’t want you to nope your way out of a career path that makes me over $30k a month! And I’ve only been doing this whole SEO thing for 3 years now. 

So I’m gonna break down EVERY blogging and SEO term you could possibly need to know. 

Yes, it’s long. But that’s because I am trying to include every term, abbreviation, and concept for ya. It’s not meant to be memorized. That’s why it’s here and free for you to refer back to whenever you want.

I’ve also included a PDF version so you can print it off for later. Maybe tape it up beside your computer the way I taped a miles to km conversion chart to my car’s dashboard for my 6 month US road trip.

I’ve arranged it with the most common terms first, then alphabetically beyond those so it’s easy to search through. But the PDF is in alphabetical order completely.

✅ Don’t have time to read the whole post now? You can download a copy here!

# | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s all of the methods and strategies used to rank websites and webpages on the first page of a search engine to attract more organic traffic. It’s not about gaming the system though. It’s about providing quality content in a way that the search engine understands its relevance.

It’s most commonly used to refer to optimizing for Google since it’s the most popular search engine, and typically has the highest RPMs for ads. 

SEO has also become a stand-in term for people who do SEO. Unlike bloggers or influencers, we just go by “SEOs” – no -er ending. 

People will also often say something is “SEO optimized”, which is technically redundant since that’d be search engine optimization optimized. However, since the abbreviation isn’t “search engine optimized”, but “optimization”, the English nerd in me feels ok with the redundancy. 

SERP

This is one of the most common abbreviations that I actually didn’t know the full term for. It stands for Search Engine Results Page.

Aka the page that loads once you’ve typed in your question or search term that reveals a variety of results. 

Here’s an example:

SEOs will typically refer to the SERPs when talking about ranking on the first page of Google. We typically ignore anything below page 1 (or the first 10 results on continuous scroll), so it’s usually safe to assume we’re referring to the top 10 posts on a search engine when we say SERPs. 

Search Engine

A search engine is basically an online directory of information with the goal of helping users get answers to their questions. Think of them like a digital library that you can ask anything and get an instant result.

The most common examples are:

• Google
• Microsoft Bing
• Yandex
• Duck Duck Go

But there are so many out there. 

DA

DA stands for Domain Authority. This is a standard metric used by Moz.com to approximate the authority of a website as Google might see it.

We don’t know how Google rates websites exactly, so this metric is meant to help bloggers understand where their site stands in comparison to others.

DA runs from 1 to 100. Some people say 0, but I have never seen a site have 0, even if I just started it. The higher the number, the more authority the site has.

To my knowledge, Google is the only site with a DA of 100.

It uses a variety of metrics to determine this number, but it’s primarily based off of backlinks.

You can check yours for free here.

DR

DR stands for Domain Rating. It’s a metric created by Ahrefs to approximate the authority of a website as Google might see it.

It’s often confused with DA – a more popular metric – because people will pick whichever is higher to represent their site.

It runs from 1 to 100. The higher the number, the more authority the site has.

It uses a variety of metrics to determine this number, but it’s primarily based off of backlinks.

You can check yours for free here. 

301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is a permanent move of one URL to another.

For example, if I wrote a post with the URL “sheknowsseo.co/this-is-a-long-and-ugly-url-that-is-from-2002”, and I wanted to change it to “sheknowsseo.co/pretty-url”, I need a 301 redirect to move the traffic from the old URL to the new one.

It’s kind of like moving houses and forwarding your mail to your new address. …but the old house also burnt down so it doesn’t exist anymore.

The point is to prevent broken links and dead end traffic ending up on a 404 error page. We want to ensure all that traffic – or mail – gets to the new address. 

You can create these with the RankMath, Redirections, or Link Whisper plugins.

302 Redirect

A 302 redirect is a temporary transfer of one URL to another. 

It’s like if you move to your parents house for a couple months while your house gets renovated. You’ll move back eventually, but your mail needs to move to your new place for now.

The same goes for a website if you are updating a page, having a temporary sale, or other website maintenance.

307 Redirect

A 307 redirect is a clearer 302 redirect. It is a temporary transfer of one URL to another, with a clear signal to search engine crawlers that it will be returned to its original URL later.

302s and 307s are used pretty interchangeably, and are often sometimes ignored for 301 redirects even if it’s a temporary move.

Google seems to see them all the same way, which was verified by John Mueller in 2021. 

403 Forbidden

A 403 error acts like police caution tape or an employee only sign: you do not have permission to access something on this webpage or server. 

These can happen for a number of reasons, like the browser you’re using not supporting the site, your IP being banned/blocked, you’re not logged in, it’s behind a paywall, or something else entirely.

I always get a 403 error when I try to go to Mediavine’s website with my ad blocker on. So sometimes it comes down to your own settings, too. 

404 Not Found

A 404 Not Found error occurs when a URL doesn’t exist. 

This happens often on websites when they delete a page and forget to find all the links to it. Users click on an old link and get this broken page. 

These are often also called “broken links” since it’s the wrong link that leads to the 404 error page.

Search engines frown upon sites with a bunch of error pages, so try to keep yours to a minimum. Users will often leave a site if they reach a 404 message, which will cost you traffic. 

I use this free link checker to find broken links.

500 Internal Server Error

A 500 Internal Server Error occur when something unexpected happens with a server that prevented it from loading a website.

It can happen due to server glitches or host down-time, or just from using the wrong browser. Typically you’ll just need to refresh the page for it to work again. 

502 Bad Gateway

This is a general error message when a website couldn’t connect with another site. This can happen when your network isn’t strong, if there’s a server glitch, or if you’ve recently changed nameservers and it hasn’t fully processed yet. 

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a method of user research where you’re running a test to see which of (usually) 2 options is most popular. 

The test is served to a random part of your audience, 50/50, at the same time to see which gets better results.

This can be done to test blog titles, featured images, Youtube thumbnails, email subject lines, and more! It’s a great way to find out what works best for your audience. 

I used A/B testing to figure out which affiliates convert best for my audience so I could prioritize those networks. Affilimate helped me track this.

Above the Fold

Above the fold is a term that comes from newspapers, but is also used in the SEO world. It means anything before the title of piece of content.

Technically it means anything that loads before the user starts scrolling, like how “above the fold” would be the front page of a newspaper before they unfolded it.

But it’s come to mean anything before the title since adding content above the fold would push the title beneath the fold. 

This area is really important for UX and pagespeed. Users want the content immediately, so not hiding it beneath ads is a good idea. Not having large animations, videos, or pictures above the fold speeds up your initial load time for the post. 

Here’s a diagram:

Ads

Advertisements on a webpage or post. Typically blogs will run them via Google Adsense, Mediavine or Raptive. The site owner can control the placement, exclude certain types of content, and adjust the frequency of ads. They make money based on impressions or clicks of the ads. 

Adsense

Google Adsense is a free to use ad marketplace that connects website owners with companies that want to place ads on their website.

Google does the selling between the two so site owners can site back while 3rd party ads get run on their site, and the site owner will make money based on a CPM model. 

Aged Domain

An aged domain is a domain name that has been used before and has some amount of history.

It could have been a parked domain, a site that existed for a few years, or even a landing page. 

Typically it’s something someone bought and let expire when they no longer needed it.

You can buy aged domains at auctions. Their benefit is that they often have a backlink profile and DA, so they start with more authority in Google’s eyes.

Some SEOs buy aged domains and redirect them to their existing site to try to transfer that authority. Others rebuild the site using the Wayback Machine to try and mimic what previously existed to keep that authority. Then they either try to grow it or use it to link to their other site(s).

Buying an aged domain does come with risks though, as it could have spammy backlinks, a Google penalty, or some other flag on the content.  

Affiliate

An affiliate is a third party who promotes the products or services of another company and gets a commission for doing so. They get a special link or tracking code that collects data when a user clicks and purchases through it, so that the affiliate can get a commission.

Affiliates in plural can be used to refer to multiple people who earn commissions from a company (i.e. we’re all Booking.com affiliates). Or it can be used to refer to multiple companies that an individual promotes (i.e. these are my favourite affiliates I earn money from).

Affiliate Post

An affiliate post, sometimes called a review post, is a post dedicated to promoting an affiliate product, service, or other offer.

The entire purpose of the post is to get the user to purchase the product.

For example, my TryInteract Review post is an affiliate post. It is reviewing the product and explaining why it’s beneficial to bloggers in order to get them to purchase it

Another example is my round up of the best AI writers for bloggers. This is a list of products I’m recommending people purchase. 

Affiliate posts are usually tied to an affiliate keyword – this is when they perform best for SEO. 

AI

AI stands for artificial intelligence. It covers any software or machine intelligence.

In the SEO world, AI is usually used to refer to AI writers. These are programs like ChatGPT or Jasper that can assist in writing content at scale.

It can also refer to AI art programs, like Midjourney, or other programs. But if you see someone referring to AI – especially if they’re saying it’s ruined blogging – they’re usually referring to AI writers.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an HTML code for creating a clickable hyperlink. In the SEO world, it’s also an SEO keyword research tool.

It can help you track your DR, keywords, and backlinks. It also helps you find new keyword opportunities, mine competitors for keywords, and analyze competitors’ sites. 

Alt Text

Alt text stands for alternative text. It’s the short description that is paired with an image for someone who is visually disabled or uses a screen reader. It also shows when an image can’t load for some reason.

Alt text is incredibly important for SEO, as Google reads your site like a blind person. And it’s important to allow disabled users to engage with your content.

You can add alt text to any image in the block editor here:

Or in your image library here:

I created a free alt text GPT you can learn more about here.

AMP

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s an open-source HTML framework that created fast loading mobile versions of webpages but without any of the extra coding so they’d load faster.

AMP started as a way to serve faster images on mobile before themes were very responsive – and as a way for Google to compete with Apple News. You needed to use it to rank in Top Stories in the news section for a long time, but it’s fallen by the wayside since themes got more responsive.

Analytics

Analytics are any data you can track and analyze. It allows you to determine what has worked, what hasn’t, and what to do next. 

In SEO, Google Analytics or GA are what we focus on. 

Anchor Text

Anchor text are the clickable words in a hyperlink. It tells your user what’s about to happen if they click the link and where they’re going to go.

Anchor text can be anything from “click here” to the title of the post to something inferring what will happen when they click.

For example, “Summer in Barcelona is full of so many things to do.” If I make “things to do” the anchor text and link to a post about “things to do in Barcelona”, the user understands where they’re going. 

Authority

Authority is a big part of ranking on a search engine. It is a combination of different signals, largely backlinks, that a search engine uses to assess whether a website is helpful to a user and a trustworthy source of information.

API

API or “application programming interface” is a set of protocols and tools for building different softwares and applications.

In SEO, APIs are commonly used to connect systems and pull data. All of your favourite keyword research tools connect to the Google Adwords API. And the Amazon affiliate program now requires you to use the API to pull images for your site.

It’s basically a way of letting two different systems talk to each other to automate a task or communicate information. 

Archive Page

An auto generated blog page that is just a collection of posts/pages that have been previously published, often sorted newest to oldest. 

The most common example is a Category Page, where WordPress collects all of the posts in that category and lists them on paginated pages (aka. page 1, page 2, page 3). 

Autocomplete

Autocomplete refers to Google Autocomplete. This is the system of predictive text on Google that anticipates your complete search result when you enter a keyword or query.

It’s meant to make it faster for users to find the answer to their question without typing it out. But it can also reveal related questions.

Google uses the users’ search history to determine what the person might be looking for. It adjusts its suggested based on the text it sees, the user data it has via cookies, and the location of the mouse. 

B2B

This stands for business-to-business. It’s when a company markets to a user who is also a company. 

For example, She Knows SEO is a B2B business since I’m teaching y’all strategies to grow and market your online business. But my travel blog is B2C because my audience are consumers, not businesses. 

B2C

This stands for business-to-consumer or customer. It’s when a company markets to a user who is an individual consumer, not a company or organization.

The target audience will not be going on to resell or profit off of the product/service they purchase. 

For example, someone who buys a cooking class one time is at a B2C cooking class. But cooking school at Le Cordon Blue is B2B since those students want to profit from their cooking skills. 

Backlink

A backlink, or an inbound link, is a link from another site to your site. 

So if I link from this article to a post on your site, you would have gotten a backlink from me.

It’s essentially the same as someone else talking about you to a friend and hyping up your business.

Backlinks are used to grow your authority with Google. The more people talking about you (linking to you), the more popular you are with other businesses, so Google trusts you more.

I teach you how to get backlinks here.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is a system of SEO that uses tactics that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

They include things like buying links, hidden text (writing the keyword a bunch of times and making it blend in with the background so people can’t see it), link farming, keyword stuffing, sneaky redirects, cloaking, paid links or do-follow paid links, comment spam, PBN links, URL hijacking, and an form of gaming the system to rank poor quality content.

Some things are technically “black hat” that every SEO does, like building links. I call this “grey hat SEO” since it’s so common.

Block Editor

Gutenberg, the system that builds pages on WordPress by default, is a block editor. It uses pre-coded blocks to format your posts in an easier way. It comes with different styles of blocks, such as an image block and a header block.

It’s much easier than coding from scratch in the code editor or using the old fashioned classic editor of WordPress that required more HTML and was hard to customize. 

I use the block editor to build all of She Knows SEO with Kadence blocks. 

Blog

A blog is an online publication that is regularly updated with new material and displayed in chronological order, with the most recent content at the top. Typically it’s written by an individual rather than a corporation, or multiple individuals.

It comes from the term “web log” which was also a record of the web server’s log files. It got confusing, so they created a new term.

Now a blog can be anything from a collection of pictures to a niche site to a hobby.

Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of a website’s visitors that leave a site from the original page they landed on.

If you clicked onto this post from Google and left without clicking to any of my other posts/pages, that would add to my bounce rate.

Bounce rate isn’t a great metric to show a lack of user engagement, for the most part, as the person could have left to purchase something you recommended, go to a source site you sent them to, or even go to a sales page you have elsewhere.

Some people say that too high of a bounce rate is a negative signal to Google. It seems likely that Google pays some attention to this, but a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as your user may have gone off to another resource you provided.

Average rates vary wildly by industry, niche, and audience. 

Bot

Bots are automated software that crawl the internet and collect information about websites. They mimic the behavior of a real user, often to test a site.

Bot traffic can be a problem for sites.

Good bots exist, like when Google is using its bots to crawl your site or if you have a tool that monitors your site’s downtime.

But bad bots can exist too. There are comment spam bots, email spam bots, bots trying to hack your website, and even ticket bots that keep crashing Ticketmaster. 

Branded Keyword

A branded keyword is any keyword with an exact match or common variation of the specific brand’s name.

For She Knows SEO, it would be anything with “she knows seo” or “SKS” in it.

Breadcrumb

A breadcrumb isn’t just a way for Hansel and Gretel to find their way home in the forest. It’s also a navigational element that helps search engine bots and users figure out the site architecture of your site. It helps them understand where a piece of content is location within the structure of your site.

For example, this post’s breadcrumbs looks like this: “Home > SEO > SEO Dictionary”. But if it was in a subcategory like Beginner SEO, it would look like “Home > SEO > Beginner SEO > SEO Dictionary”.

Broken Link

A broken link is any link that leads to a 404 error page.

These occur when a website is offline, a domain has expired, a page/post has been removed without a redirect, an image got deleted (if it’s an image URL), or it’s the wrong URL.

No one likes showing up to an address and it being an empty lot. The same goes for your website. So Google frowns on broken links.

This is the free site I use to find broken links.

Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building is a method of building backlinks where you target sites that have broken links and ask them to link to a piece of your content instead.

Let’s say I linked to a post about “dogs wearing crocs” in this post, but that post got deleted for whatever reason. 

A broken link builder might find out that I have that broken link on my site and email me to suggest I link to their post on “dogs wearing cute crocs” instead so my site doesn’t suffer from the broken link.

It gets them a link, typically without them needing to do any writing or additional research. This is a method used by a lot of link building agencies and people on Fiverr selling links – if they’re not using a link farm. 

Cache

A system, usually a plugin, that remembers website content to load it faster for returning users. So if a person comes back to your chicken alfredo recipe, it’ll load faster since the cache remembers it. 

I recommend this cache plugin.

Calculator

A calculator is a coded calculator on a website that can run calculations on any topic. Learn more about them here.

Canonical Link

Also called a canonical URL or canonical tag.

This is an HTML element that specifies which of multiple URLs is original content.

If I published this post on two of my websites, I’d get flagged for duplicate content. But if I only want a search engine to see one, I’d set the canonical URL for Site B’s post to Site A.

It basically tells Google “I know I’m a clone. Go look at the original.”

I set them via Rankmath here:

Captcha

Captcha or reCaptcha is an easy to solve problem to prove your humanity. It stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

It can be used on websites to prevent bot comments or email sign ups. 

Category

Blog categories help search engines understand the architecture of a website. It is basically a topic hub to show the focus of your content.

The categories for She Knows SEO are AI, SEO, and Travel Blogging. You can see them linked in the menu. 

CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a collection of servers across the globe that deliver your site to a user from the closest server to make the page load faster.

I recommend Cloudflare – it’s free!

Cloaking 

The most common kind of cloaking in SEO is when a black hat SEO site shows one version of a URL to a search engine bot but another to actual users. 

Another method is link cloaking, which is white hat SEO. It converts links from sheknowsseo.com/anfibgliuer;uighbselitbges to sheknowsseo.co/recommends/coolthing. This is most often used to share prettier links for social media and for on-site affiliate links, when the program allows it..

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Measures how much a webpage shifts until the whole page is loaded for a user. The longer it takes for the page to stop jumping around, the larger the CLS score would be. For example, if a reader loads the page and banners keep loading and making it jump around, or the images keep shifting the content, it’d have a higher CLS score. 

You can track this with Pagespeed Insights. 

Click Bait

Click bait is any content that is intentionally misleading just to get clicks/traffic. You’ll see this often with titles like “you won’t believe who has plastic surgery!” and then it never tells you anything or it’s a completely different article. 

Click Depth

How many clicks it takes to get from the homepage of a website to a specific post/page. 

Google prefers fewer clicks so it can easily crawl the site. It’s also better for users to be able to find the content on your site. 

CMS

A content management system is any app that allows people to build and manage a website without coding it from scratch. WordPress is a CMS – and the most popular one for bloggers.

Collab Posts

Collab posts or collaborative posts are blog posts where the author of the blog got other bloggers to write sections of the post with credit in exchange for a backlink.

Competitor Analysis

SEO competitor analysis is examining the other sites that compete with you for keywords, are in the same niche, or have the same target audience. Analyze what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and it’s success to replicate it for your audience and increase your search engine rankings. 

Content Freshness

Content freshness refers to when the content was last updated. Newer updates = fresher content.

Many SEOs believe that Google prefers fresher content, although Google’s liaisons on Twitter deny this. In many cases it does affect user experience, as users would like the most up to date information.

I feel it’s definitely a ranking factor and better for UX. 

Content Gap

A content gap is a missed opportunity or lack of information that needs to be filled. This content gap could be in a niche or on a topic. It identifies missing pieces of content that would benefit the user. 

In SEO, it typically refers to something your competitor ranks on Google for, but you don’t. Many tools like Keysearch can test for this. 

Content Optimizer

A tool meant to assist with optimizing content for on page SEO, like RankIQ or Neuronwriter.

See one in action here.

Cookie

A cookie is a little bit of code that moves through the internet with a user, tracking their web usage, storing data, and reporting on their interests.

Cookies used to be a method of tracking user activity to help advertisers find places their target audiences spent time in order to pay for more effective ads. However, they’re phased out as of 2024 on Chrome, and have been phased out on most other internet browsers for years. 

Core Update

A Core Update is a change Google makes to its ranking algorithms. It typically targets the site as a whole, using factors like pagespeed, to readjust rankings. 

Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content has a few definitions:

1. Content that is the core of a website/most relate to its pillars
2. The most in depth posts on a website on a broad topic
3. Hub pages for links that then link out to other content within the text

It’s not a very common term anymore unless you use Yoast. Now it’s more often called a “pillar post”.

CPanel

The CPanel is a server management platform to helps you edit your site files. It’s best left to tech SEO pros. 

CPM

Cost per thousand (mille in Latin) shows the cost for display ads per 1,000 impressions that ad will get.

CPC

Cost per click is the cost for display ads on average per click on the ad.

Crawl

Search engines use web crawlers or bots to “crawl” a website systematically to learn about its contents and mine data. It’s how they move through the site and read the data.

CTA

A call to action instructs a user to take a specified action. This could be “Sign Up”, “Buy Now”, “Read This”, etc. It’s generally a button or a hyperlink. 

CTR

Click through rate is the number of total clicks divided by the number of impressions to show the percentage of people who clicked onto your website from Google. 

You can find your CTR per keyword in Google Search Console.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets are a coding language that offers more control and visual changes than HTML.

Customer Avatar

A customer avatar is a marketing device to create a detailed profile of your ideal customer. This can also be called an “audience avatar”, “marketing persona”, “ideal customer”, or even just “audience”.

CWV (Core Web Vitals)

Core Web Vitals are Google Pagespeed Insights’ metrics to measure the speed and responsiveness of websites. They measure pagespeed, content loading times, code on a site, and usability for a user.

Deep Linking

Deep linking is using a hyperlink (it looks like this) within the text rather than written out like this: sheknowsseo.co.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is when a user arrives directly at a website without being referred by another website. 

Direct traffic typically comes from a user typing in your site’s URL and arriving at it or opening a bookmark.

However, it also includes any traffic where the referral source is unknown. Email, Google Discover, and even Pinterest traffic often end up under Direct Traffic in G4 reports. 

Disavow

Google has a Disavow tool for people to disavow harmful links to a site.

Website owners can do this to block spammy/toxic links or a fraudulent site linking to their site. 

Do Follow Link

Do follow (or dofollow or do-follow) links allow Google’s bots to crawl the link and follow to the site you’re pointing to.

It’s like someone pointing to a street someone should take, and it’s open for them to walk down. It allows the bot to go to the thing on the other end, thereby passing link juice. 

Internal and external links can be do follow.

Domain

A domain is the address of a website online that the user types in to arrive at the website. SheKnowSEO.co is the domain of this site.

The domain name is SheKnowsSEO and the domain extension is .co. 

The domain should reflect the name of the website.

Domain Age

How long a domain has been in use online, even if the website isn’t/wasn’t active.

I bought SheKnowsSEO.co in October of 2021, so as of October 2023, it was 2 years old, even though I didn’t make the site for it for 6 months. 

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is exceptionally similar or identical content that appears in multiple locations online. 

For example, this post exists on SheKnowsSEO.co, but if I also put it on NinaIsTheGreatestSEOEver.bazinga, it would be duplicate content.

It would also be duplicate content if I put the same page on SKS twice, with one minor change in one of the versions.

This confuses search results, because they don’t know which one to crawl. They often default to the one that they noticed first, but I’ve also seem them prioritize the higher DA. 

We want to avoid duplicate content. Set up a canonical URL if you need to have the same content in two places.

Ecommerce

Ecom or E-commerce is is the act of trading goods or services online. It’s basically running a digital storefront, typically with that storefront selling physical goods/products.

Even though I sell digital products, I don’t consider my site e-commerce. But under some definitions, technically it is.

Ecommerce SEO more commonly refers to sites that only sell products (99% of the time physical products) to consumers. It has its own variation of SEO about structuring product listings and sometimes local SEO elements for local shipping.

EEAT

EEAT stands for Expertise Experience Authority and Trustworthiness. It’s one of Google’s ranking algorithms that assesses content for author expertise writing about the subject/niche, experience doing the thing/using the thing that the content is focusing on, their authority to speak on the subject, and their trust signals to the user.

The extra “E” for Experience was added on in a 2022 Google update. Before that, it was EAT. 

Some people also spell it E-E-A-T. 

Embed

Embedding a link or a video refers to integrating content from elsewhere onto a website.

People can embed Youtube videos, Instagram posts, links that convert to videos, Google Maps, etc.

With Gutenberg, this can be done by pasting a link or using the custom HTML block to add the embed code.

Engagement Time

Engagement time is the amount of time a user spends on a website, according to G4.

The data, formerly called “Dwell Time” by SEOs, tracks how long, on average, users stay on a site. This helps site owners determine if their content is not keeping the attention of their users. 

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is like an evergreen tree: it’s green all year round. So it gets traffic within a 20% margin throughout the year.

This post is an example of evergreen content, as it’s always relevant and isn’t tied to holidays or a trending topic. 

Expired Domain

Domains expire when users don’t renew them. These domains can then be resold by the domain host to other website owners.

Expired domains, like aged domains, have a backlink profile and some level of authority from their age. SEOs buy these domains to start new sites, sticking with the topics of the old site and trying to replicate pages the site used to rank for. It’s said to speed up rankings.

Like aged domains, it’s risky as the site could have spammy backlinks or other issues lurking. 

External Link

Linking outside of a domain is an external link. If I link from She Knows SEO to any other website, where the URL doesn’t start with “sheknowsseo.co/”, then it’s an external link.

External links can be do follow or no follow. They can go to external sources or affiliates. 

Ezoic

Ezoic is an ad network for bloggers. It does not have a traffic requirement to join.

You can read my review here. 

Favicon

A small icon that represents a company/website in the tabs beside page titles on browsers. For example, She Knows SEO’s is a 50px x 50px version of the logo.

They can be as small as 16px x 16px. 

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions give additional information that is not in the main body of the content, or is made more skimmable for users to have a complete understanding of the topic.

FAQ sections are common at the bottom of a blog post, but before the conclusion. It is best to use FAQ Schema for this, so Google understands its purpose.

This is the best way to find them.

FAQ Pages are also used for business websites, where they house all of the FAQs about their services and/or products.

FCP

First Contentful Paint is a CWV that measures from the start of loading a webpage to when any of the page’s content has rendered. This is the time when the user can first see the site, but maybe not interact with it yet. 

Featured Image

A featured image is a picture assigned to a post or page on a WordPress site that displays in search results and on socials when the post is shared. It’s often used to identify a post in an archive page. 

You set it here:

Featured In Section

A “Featured In” or “As Seen In” section on a website is an opportunity for website owners to show off their authority. Websites will list publications and media they’ve appeared in, as well as highlighting any awards they may have. 

They are often included in Homepages, Contact Pages, in Media Kits, and on About Pages. 

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is an excerpt of text highlighted by Google at the top of the search results. It is often referred to as position 0 since it exists above the top 10 SERPs. 

It provides a short summary response to the query, pulling from text within a website it finds and highlighting the key point for the user.

Find out how to optimize for them here.

Footer

The bottom section of a website that typically contains a site’s copyright information, privacy policy, logo, and contact information. It can include a menu, additional information, and an email opt in. 

Forum

Any online discussion site where anyone can post information and/or questions to crowdsource information from other users. Common forums are Reddit, Quora, and Tripadvisor’s Forum. 

Forum Keyword

A forum keyword is a keyword where a forum ranks in the top 10 SERPs.

G4

Google Analytics 4 is a free tool for website owners to measure, track, and analyze user behavior and engagement on their website. It shows pageviews, sessions, engagement, top pages, and more. 

Get my free guide here.

GA

Google Analytics is commonly shortened to GA by SEOs. It is the free system that hosts G4 and formerly UA (Universal Analytics).

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation is the European Union’s information privacy regulation. Any website viewed in the EU must be GDPR compliant, even if the company is not from the EU.

Golden Ratio Keyword

Also called KGR, this is a method of finding low volume keywords or keywords that haven’t been answered by many sites yet.

The term was coined by Doug Cunnington.

KGR is the number of Google results showing when you search “allintitle:[keyword]”, divided by the search volume for the query from a keyword research tool. If the score is less than 0.25, it should work. If it’s under 1.00, it may work. But if it’s over that, it won’t work. 

These usually end up being very low volume, which is the point of the strategy. You are meant to find as many of these as possible around a topic and use them to create a lot of content so you’ll have topical authority.  

Google Analytics 360

Analytics 360 is a system like Google Analytics but for enterprise level customers. It’s a paid tool you can learn about here. 

Google Discover

Google Discover, or Discover, is a personalized feed Google is serving to their audiences on mobile devices. It is highly personalized content based on the user’s interests and search history.

It’s Google’s answer to Tiktok feeds. 

Google My Business (GMB)

A free business profile on Google that you can tie to a Google Maps Location or collect reviews.

Here is She Knows SEO’s GMB.

Google News

A news aggregate by Google, like Apple News, where the latest news articles are shown to users.

Google Penalty

Sites that violate Google’s webmaster quality guidelines can receive a penalty or punishment. This is also known as a “Manual Action” that may result in a site getting blocked from ranking on Google. 

Penalties can occur for keyword stuffing, thin content, thin affiliate content, duplicate content, spammy auto generated content, user generated spam, doorways, cloaking, unnatural links, selling links/link farms, intrusive pop ups, misleading or false content, free hosting, hacked content, etc. 

Basically Black Hat SEO.

I’ve also seen people get snippet bans where they couldn’t rank for a featured snippet anymore. 

Google Sandbox

The Google Sandbox is an unofficial term for new sites not ranking immediately. They get put in a sandbox for months (I’ve seen a year before) before it will start to rank their content.

Google gets billions of new webpages a day, so it can’t rank them all. It waits to see if a site will fizzle within the first month or until it proves itself with lots of good content.

Building backlinks and writing for zero volume keywords will get you out of the sandbox faster.

Google Trends

Google’s tool for revealing trending search queries from around the world. You can see daily, monthly, or quarterly trends from the last few years and from different countries. 

GSC

Google Search Console is where SEOs can find the keywords their sites are ranking for. It shows clicks (approximate and usually not accurate. G4 is more accurate), impressions, CTR, and position for all of the keywords a website and specific pages rank for. 

GSC is where a site’s Sitemap is hosted and how it tells Google what content is on a site.

Learn all about interpreting GSC data here.

Guest Post

A guest post is when one person writes a blog for another person and gets “paid” in backlinks. It is the best way to build backlinks to a website.

To jumpstart getting people talking about my site and getting Google to notice my site, I can write guest posts for others and build some links back to my site. Google sees that this site mentioned you, and since they trust that site already, they start to trust you more. 

You can find over 100 sites to pitch guest posts to here. 

HARO

Help a Reporter Out is an online service for journalists to connect with expert sources on a variety of subjects to enhance their articles. It is a way for bloggers to get featured in major publications like Business Insider or the Washington Post.

Bloggers can sign up to get emailed lists of queries from journalists, and then pitch their responses to queries they have expertise in.

It is a method of link building, although not every citation will include a link. This still builds brand awareness and can be featured in a “Featured In” section. 

I tested HARO vs. guest posts here to see which help a blog the most.

Header

There are 2 types of blog headers:

1. The header area at the top of a webpage (usually where the logo and menu are).
2. The headers for each section of the post. They are formatted as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

The first one organizes your site for Google to understand what the site is about.

The second one organizes individual posts to break up content and make them easier to read.

Heatmap

A heatmap is a tool that tracks user behavior across a site so the site owner can analyze user experience and click data. These tools often track clicks, how far users scrolled down a page, engagement, and time on page. 

Microsoft Clarity and Affilimate both run heatmaps. 

They look something like this:

Hidden Keyword

A hidden keyword is a search term that keyword research tools aren’t aware of yet. Typically they have little to no volume in a keyword research tool.

These can be found in a variety of ways, such as searching Google Autofill for queries with no adequate answers. 

High Volume Keyword

A keyword that has a large search volume according to a keyword research tool. Often considered to be anything over 1,000 pageviews a month. 

Hreflang

An HTML tag used to specify the language and geo targeting of a URL. 

If you go to apple.com it’ll be in English. But apple.com/es/ is Spanish. The /es/ is the html tag. 

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is a coding language for basic adjustments to the web. It does things like make headers, add hypertext links, make lists, and bold text.

HCU

The HCU is the Helpful Content Update Google launched in September 2023 that changed all its ranking systems. It’s one of the most hated Google updates for its prioritization of forums, outdated content, and branded content.

Host

A blog host or web host houses the domain of a site. If the domain is the physical address, the host is the lot of land where everything exists.

Every blog needs a host since its servers hold all your site’s data and deliver it to your users. 

Hook Element

A hook element is a block on WordPress sites that automatically inserts itself across a website, following preset rules. 

The blue box at the end of this post with some of my favourite tools is a hook element. 

I use Kadence Pro to make this.

Image SEO

Images also need to be optimized for search engines. 

This includes factors like: image format (png vs. jpeg), image size and compression, unique images, having the right copyright usage for stock photos, file name, alt text, presence in your sitemap, responsive sizes, and adding structured data like a recipe card. 

Indexing

Google indexes content by having its bots crawl the content, read it, and then storing the data of the webpage in their database to show on the search results.

Indexed pages are visible by Google and can be shown in the search results. 

Informational Post

Any post that primarily intends to give the audience information, not to sell something.

Some posts can exist on a balancing beam between informational and affiliate posts, such as “things to do” posts in the travel space. Your blog needs a good mix of all different types of posts, but especially a good amount of informational posts.

Interstitial

An interstitial ad shows up when you click between pages on a website. If you clicked from this post on SKS to my homepage, an ad could appear as kind of an in-between page. 

Interstitials are most common on mobile views of sites. 

Here’s a demo from Raptive of what they look like:

Internal Link

Any link within the same domain. If I like from sheknowsseo.co to any other post that starts “sheknowsseo.co/”, then it’s an internal link.

Internal links help Google’s crawlers navigate between your content to see its relevance and topical authority. They also help to keep users on your site longer, as you serve up other pieces of information for them with these extra posts.

IP

An internet protocol address is the unique network address of a computer a user is using online. 

Javascript (JS)

Javascript is a coding language that creates dynamic content with multimedia elements. Without Java, most sites would be very stagnant pieces of text on a white background with limited functionality. 

Keysearch

Keysearch is a keyword research tool that is the most affordable and best bang for your buck. Learn more about how to use it to find keywords and get 20% off here (code “KSDISC”).

Keyword

A keyword is any query a user types into a search engine to yield a result. It can be one word, a phrase, a question, or really anything else a person might type in to generate answers. 

Keywords are what drive SEO. We need to know what a user is searching to know what to write. If you try to write a post about your experience seeing little blue penguins in New Zealand, but you don’t know the way people are searching for it, you’ll get 0 visitors.

SEOs typically look for the most popular keywords to try to get the most traffic.

Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is when two posts on a website try to rank for the same keyword.

If I wrote this SEO Dictionary post, and in 6 months I want to write another one using the same keyword, I’m cannibalizing. There are only 10 spots in the top 10, and I’d be competing with myself for the #1 spot.

This can also happen from similar, but not exact match keywords. Rule of thumb is, don’t write from a keyword you already rank #1 for or that is the primary keyword of another post on your site.

Keyword Cluster

A keyword cluster is a group of keywords around some common theme or element.

If your niche is SEO, your categories are SEO and AI, then one of your clusters could be around ChatGPT. All of the posts in that cluster will in some way relate to ChatGPT under the AI pillar.

These can be grouped by location, price, user type, season, topic, etc. 

Keyword Density (KD)

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on a page based on the total word count. You divide the number of times the keyword is used by the total word count, then multiply it by 100 for the percentage.

This is what most free SEO plugins, like RankMath and Yoast, base their “green” scores on.

It’s not the ranking factor it once was.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty, also something called KD, is the process of evaluating how challenging it would be for a specific website to rank #1 for a keyword in a search engine.

Many SEO tools have their own metrics for calculating these scores and turn them into different colours. Both Keysearch and Ahrefs mark “easy” keywords as green and “hard” as red.

Keyword Difficulty is evaluated by a number of factors including topical authority, domain authority, page authority, backlinks, and content quality. 

Keyword Research Tool

A keyword research tool helps you find keywords your audience are searching for, evaluate your rankability, and track your successes. It’s the only essential paid tool I believe everyone should invest in ASAP if they’re getting into SEO.

This one is my favourite.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing was an old SEO technique where you used the primary keyword and any secondary keywords as many times as possible in a post to game the search engine’s bots into thinking it is the most relevant content.

Now it more often refers to someone using a keyword too many times in an unnatural way. 

For example, if someone used the primary keyword as the alt text for every image on a page, that is keyword stuffing. Or if every header is “Best Thing to Do in Barcelona – Thing Here”, that would be keyword stuffing. 

Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a family tree-style understanding of the relationships between entities and companies.

It is how Google understands the connections between queries like “small green dude with lightsaber” and “Yoda”. 

The way most users will know it, is that it’s the box that appears before search results summarizing an answer to the query (i.e. bringing up a little box about Yoda), listing company information, or offering a selection of recipes/people to choose from.

The Knowledge Graph is similar to the Knowledge Panel in the sidebar, which you’ll often see summarizing a person, place, or thing with a Wikipedia style run down of important facts. 

KPI

Key Performance Indicators are measures to track progress towards a goal or return on investment.

In SEO, the KPIs typically involve the performance of individual posts for keywords and affiliate conversions. But they can be for any goal one is working towards.

The action would then be evaluated to see if it is meeting the KPIs or if it is underperforming. If It’s underperforming, something needs to change. 

Landing Page

A landing page is a single page where a user “lands” when they click a link.

Technically, this means any page online.  In fact, G4 has a filter to see the most popular landing pages on a website.

But in SEO and blogging, it is more commonly used to refer to landing pages for email conversions or sales pages.

It’s a short, to the point page that details an offer for the user that they need to be convinced to accept.

Lazy Loading

A web design technique to defer the load of large elements, usually pictures, until a user reaches that element in order to reduce initial load times.

If you land on SKS, you’ll notice the first pictures load, but as you scroll, the pictures have to load when you arrive on them. That’s lazy loading.

It ensures that the initial content is available immediately so the user can start reading, rather than waiting for extra images halfway down the page. 

LCP

Largest Contentful Paint measures the time it takes for the largest piece of content (usually the main piece of content) to load on a webpage. The faster it loads, the better your LCP score.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a free piece of content or special deal that attracts users to become leads, or email subscribers. These can be ebooks, checklists, templates, calculators, a discount code, a quiz, or anything else that offers a benefit to the reader. 

Link Building

Any active efforts to attract or attain backlinks from other websites to your website. This includes collab posts, guest posts, link swaps, buying links, HARO links, and directory links, among others.

Link Farm

A link farm is a website, or group of websites, that only exist to sell links. These sites typically have a high DA, but no clear topical authority or actually helpful/ranking content. You’ll notice they constantly link out to all manner of other sites. 

Link farms are considered a Black Hat SEO link building strategy. You will often find link farms on Fiverr and Upwork when people are selling hundreds of links for $20.  

Link Juice

Link juice is SEO slang for the power/authority a backlink passes to another website/webpage. More juice refers to more authority. Less juice, refers to less authority.

It’s also referred to as “link equity” by some websites, but I’ve never heard an SEO use that term.

Link juice helps with the visualization of the way the authority from one link to another website can move through the website via internal links and site architecture. 

Link Swap

A link swap is when two site owners agree to link to each other’s sites.

A 2 way swap occurs when Site A links to Site B, and Site B links to Site A. Usually this occurs between 4 posts, so Site A links from Post 1 to Site B’s Post 2. Then Site B links from Post 3 to Site A’s Post 4.

But it can also happen in 3 or 4 way systems, which are meant to look more natural and not tip Google off to the swap.

In that case, Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A.

Link swaps are one of the easiest ways to build backlinks because no new content creation is required. But they are also at a high risk of looking spammy to Google when done too often or between the same sites repeatedly.

Listicle

Any blog post written in a list format. Usually these are number lists, where each H2 will be “1. [text], 2. [text]”.

They tend to be quick round ups of a topic, rather than diving in depth into each section. They are highly skimmable and easy to read. 

For example, “10 Things to Do in Barcelona” would have maybe 100-200 words per thing. It wouldn’t have 1,000 words per thing to do. 

Listicles perform especially well on Pinterest and Google Discover. 

Local Pack

A SERP feature that shows a map with highlighted items on the right hand side and a list of the locations summarized on the left hand side. Typically it lists 3 businesses.

This feature often shows up for results including “near me” or “best restaurant”. 

It looks like this:

Local SEO

Local SEO optimizes a business’s website to generate local traffic organically. Where traditional SEO seeks global users, this type requires users from specific regions.

One part of local SEO is optimizing for terms like “near me” but including locations in the keywords for the site. For example, a dentist would have “Toronto dentist” on their page to ensure Google knows their location to recommend the site to their audience, and not to recommend the site to someone in Russia looking for a dentist. 

Long Tail Keyword

A 4+ word keyword or keyphrase that is more specific. In travel, long tail keywords tend to be 6+ words.

For example, “Rome” is the root of the keyword. But a long tail keyword would be, “best places to eat in Rome with toddlers” or “best things to do in Rome at night”. 

LLM

Large language models are an AI algorithm that uses deep learning to understand complex data, synthesize and analyze the information, and create new content. It’s essentially what runs generate AI’s ability to create new content. 

LSI Keyword

Latent semantic indexing keyword, or must word, is a way that search engines understand the content on a page. A search engine can see that “New York tourism” has been said 8 times on the page, but it needs to understand if the information beyond that is relevant and/or helpful.

So it processes the LSI words on the page that help add context and show relevance.

Articles about New York tourism are sure to mention the Statue of Liberty. So “Statue of Liberty” would be an LSI keyword for the primary keyword “New York Tourism”.

Content optimizers primarily help users find these LSI words to help signal to search engines that the content is relevant to the user intent. 

Mediavine

Mediavine is a premium ad network that places ads on blogs with over 50k monthly sessions. 

Media Kit

A Media Kit is an at-a-glance document that highlights a website, blogger, or influencer’s reach and unique selling points that can be shared with brands. Media kits are an essential part of a pitch for brand deals, sponsorships, and even client work.

A Media Kit typically features a site or person’s following, engagement rates, demographics, package and rate options, past brands/partnerships, about me section, and contact details. They are usually PDF documents. 

Menu

A blog’s menu is a list of its primary pages for user navigation. It is at the top of every blog in the header, or collapsed in a “hamburger menu” for mobile, that expands when you click on it. 

Meta Description

A 160 character description of a webpage that appears in the search engine result for the page beneath the title. Google is known for changing the meta description at random, but it is still best practise for SEO to write a meta to entice readers. 

Minify

To reduce the size of code by removing extraneous characters, variables, unused elements, and delimiters. It is often used on CSS and JS to reduce the weight of code on a site’s loading time to make them faster.  

This is typically managed by a cache plugin.

Mine Keywords

Mining keywords is a form of competitor analysis, where a website owner uses a keyword research tool to find all of the keywords their competitor ranks for. The website owner uses those keywords to find easy opportunities to rank, content to fill gaps on their site, and content ideas their users may be searching for that they hadn’t thought of before.

You can learn how to mine Mediavine sites here.

Mobile Optimization

Optimizing websites to be viewed and used on phones or tablets.

Monumetric

An ad network that requires 10k pageviews to enroll in. 

Must Word

See “LSI Keyword”. 

Name Generator

A name generator is a coded element for a blog that randomly generates text when a user presses a button. Here is an example.

Nameserver

A nameserver is like an internet phonebook that helps your computer find websites. When you type a website name like “www.domain.com”, the nameserver translates it into a numerical IP address, guiding your computer to the website’s location on the internet. Without a nameserver, you’d have to remember the complex number associated with each website to visit it.

Niche

A niche is a specific topic a blog or website focuses on.

There are generic niches, such as “food” or “travel”. But typically SEO’s use more specific niches when referring to “selecting a niche”.

For example, digital nomad travel or gluten free desserts. 

Audiences like niche sites because they know what to expect when they arrive, and what content they’ll consistently be served. This ensures it continues to match their interests.

Niche Down

To niche down or nicheing down means to focus your content on a specific topic.

For example, a general travel blog might niche down to Spanish travel only. This means they are narrowing their content to target a more specific audience. In this case, people who want to travel to spain.

This helps content creators connect with their ideal audience, shows their expertise by deep diving into the topic, and develops topical authority with search engines. 

Negative Keyword

A negative keyword is in Google ads is a word you do not want your ad to show up for. So if a user searches “worst food blogs ever”, your ad for your food blog won’t show up.

It is sometimes used for organic SEO to refer to a keyword with a negative meaning, rather than a positive one. For example, “worst egg salad recipes” or “worst places to visit in Europe”.

No Follow Link

A no follow link has a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to prevent Google from following that link to its target location. Essentially, it puts up a roadblock so Google’s bots can’t crawl through it to see what it links to. You’re telling Google “nope, no link here!”

You can add them in Gutenberg by editing your link:

No follow links are used for any link you might make money from (affiliates and sponsored links) or when you don’t want to pass ranking power (i.e. to a competitor).

This happens often in the travel niche when you need to link to a tourism board, but it’s a direct competitor for a keyword. 

NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a technology that helps computers understand and interact with human language. 

It’s used in software like ChatGPT, which relies on NLP to comprehend and generate human-like text responses. Google’s search engine uses NLP to interpret search queries and provide relevant search results, understanding the intent and context of what people are searching for. 

NLP enables these systems to process language, whether written or spoken, as if it was a person understanding these human interactions. 

Off Page SEO is the portion of SEO that happens off your website that impacts your search rankings. This includes building backlinks, getting brand recognition and branded searches, and getting social media engagement.

Off Page SEO

Think of it like PR. It’s all the things that happen off your site that get people talking about your brand.

It includes building backlinks, going on podcasts, and winning awards in your industry.

On Page SEO

On Page SEO are ways of optimizing a web page for search engines to recognize their topic, authority, and usefulness for a user.

This includes: keyword use, title tags, meta descriptions, headers, URL structure, internal linking, external linking, schema markup, images, LSI keywords, alt text, and the content itself. 

Organic Search Results

Organic search results are the results that appear on a search engine that are not ads. 

On Google, the first 1-3 results are often sponsored ads. The results beneath them that appear organically – usually from SEO – are organic search results because they showed up organically (i.e. not paid). 

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is visits from search engines that occur organically (i.e. you didn’t buy ads).

1 click from Google is organic traffic, only if it was from an organic ranking. If it’s from a paid ad, then it’s paid traffic. 

Orphan Page / Post

An orphan page is a post or page on a website that has no inbound internal links from other content on the same website. It has no connections to other posts/pages on the website, so it’s harder for Google’s bots to find it or for a user to discover it. 

Page Authority (PA)

Page authority is a metric in SEO to estimate the value a search engine gives to a specific web page/post. 

Domain authority refers to the site as a whole, while page authority refers to a specific URL.

Higher PA typically correlates to higher rankings on a search engine.

You increase PA in the same way as DA: build links and get people to share the content. 

Page Speed

Page speed is the amount of time it takes for a web page to load from the time a browser requests access. It is influenced by the content and code on an individual page.

Faster loading pages tend to rank higher in search engines because the user can interact with the content more quickly, thus offering a better UX. 

Page speed is measured for each individual URL, but is often also referred to as “site speed”, even though the speed varies from page to page. 

PageSpeed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a free report of the loading time for individual pages on a website. It shows the overall loading time, as well as loading time for certain elements.

It provides suggestions for improvements based on the errors it encounters. 

Pageviews / Views

A pageview, also called a “view”, is when a web page is loaded once, or reloaded, on a browser.

If I go to SheKnowsSEO.co and click to 5 pages, I have been 1 user, 1 session, and 5 pageviews. But if I come back 2 hours later and visit another 2 pages, I have been 1 user, 2 sessions, and 7 pageviews total. 

Pagination

Results or content divided into discrete pages are paginated.

This stops one page from being and endless scroll to see all of the content.

Google used to have strictly paginated pages, but now has an endless scroll for the results.

Archive pages on most websites are paginated so that after the first 6-10 results, you need to click to the next page to see more content. 

Paid Search Traffic

Any traffic from paid ads on a search engine. 

Panda

A former Google Update in 2011, back when Google gave animal names to all their updates, meant to reduce rankings of low quality sites with thin content. 

The update targeted thin content, duplicate content, poor user engagement/bounce rate, content farms, keyword stuffing, and content not useful to users. 

Parasite SEO

An SEO tactic where a website owner posts content on a high-authority site, typically a news website, to leverage that site’s authority to make the content rank on search engines faster. They leverage this to increase sales, authority for their own site, and make their site rank faster for new keywords. 

It is considered a Black Hat SEO technique. 

For example, a blogger might write a high-quality news article for Business Insider to promote a new brand of sports shoes they created. This gets the brand notoriety and recognition faster than if they grew their own website’s SEO over time.

Parasite SEO also happens on forums and social sites that can pass authority or have large audiences already. 

There are many specific subtypes of Parasite SEO, but they all exist on the base idea of leeching the authority of another site (aka. being a parasite) for the benefit of a personal site/brand. 

Parked Domain

A domain that is purchased but not used. This can be done to reserve a domain for future use or sometimes to prevent someone else from buying it for their own purposes. 

Parsing

Parsing is a common computing term. For SEO, it refers to the way search engines break down and analyze the content/structure of web pages to figure out their meaning. It’s one of the ways they index and rank pages. 

Google does this to dissect the elements of a page to determine what the topic is and if it should rank for that topic. 

PBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a group of websites created to build links to a single main website for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. This network of sites generates backlinks to the target site to artificially boost its authority and relevance. 

PBNs are considered a black-hat SEO strategy and are against the guidelines of search engines like Google. 

Using PBNs can lead to severe penalties in search rankings, however many bloggers continue to use them. 

Penguin

A Google Update from 2012, back when Google named its updates after animals, that targeted manipulative tactics meant to game Google rankings. It specifically targeted keyword stuffing and unnatural or low-quality backlinks, like PBNs. 

With the Penguin update, Google started to better identify and reduce the rankings of sites engaging in these black-hat SEO practices, thereby promoting higher-quality, more relevant search results for users.

People Also Ask

The People Also Ask, or PAA, results in Google suggest related questions based on the user’s query. These questions are dynamically generated based on what other users have asked and what Google’s algorithms deem relevant to the search topic. When a question in the PAA box is clicked, it expands to show an answer snippet, often pulled from a website, along with a link to the source page. 

These results are often pulled from FAQ Schema on web pages or from text inside related content. 

Permalink

A “permanent link” is the full URL of a webpage. It’s the full URL of the page – like sheknowsseo.co/specific-post-name-here. 

Pillar

Think of a website like a house. Its foundation is the niche. From that foundation, the website builds pillars out of its content. Every piece of content is like 1 straw that makes up the overall pillar.

For She Knows SEO, the niche is SEO blogging and the content pillars are AI, SEO, and Travel Blogging.

This post is in the SEO pillar and is adding a straw to the collective pillar so it is stronger.

The more straws together, the stronger the pillar. Then it’ll stand up to the weight of Google’s scrutiny – like when your science teacher balances a book on multiple straws, but it crushes one straw. 

Pillars are also often called silos or categories.

This is different from a “pillar page”.

Pillar Page 

A pillar page is a singular page on a site that provides a comprehensive review of a broad topic area that is one of the pillars on a website.

For example, “Canada Travel Guide” with an overview of everything someone needs to know to go to Canada, is a pillar page.

These pages often link out to most if not all of the posts within that pillar somewhere in the text.

Pixel

A pixel is a small piece of code used for tracking, like a Facebook pixel, to gather data about visitors to a website. This data is used to understand the users already on a site and click through to a site from paid ads. 

Typically they are used to track conversions, create targeted audiences, re-show ads to users, and optimize ad performance.

Plugin

A piece of software containing code that adds or extends the functionality of a WordPress website. Plugins offer customization without the need for site owners to know how to code.

These are my favourite, and these are my most hated.

PPC

Pay-Per-Click is a model where online advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.

On Keysearch, PPC refers to the advertising difficulty for a keyword based on the competition, where 1 is the highest and 0 is the lowest. 

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is a way to create web pages at scale that target often variations of a keyword within a keyword cluster.

For example, “best places in [location] to visit in [month]”, where a site owner would generate a post for each of the 12 months in each location of their choice.

It is best used for bottom of the funnel, hyper specific keywords.

To produce the content at scale, it is usually done with an software to automate the creation and publication of the webpages.  

Query

See “keyword”. 

Rank / Ranking

Ranking is a webpage’s position in the search results of a search engine, like Google. Lower numbers (aka. 1-10) are more desirable than higher numbers, as they appear first and have higher click through rates – which means more organic traffic.

The aim of SEO is to rank #1 for a keyword at all times. But failing that, to rank within the top 10 in the SERPs. 

Raptive

Raptive, formerly Adthrive, is a premium ad network for bloggers. Blogs need 100k pageviews per month to apply. 

Readability

How easy it is for people to read and understand the content on a web page. It’s an important factor because search engines, like Google, aim to provide users with the most useful and relevant content, and part of that usefulness is how readable the content is.

Content is easier to read when it uses simple language, has shorter paragraphs, is broken up with headers and bullet points, and avoids complex jargon. 

Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is similar to a link swap, in that it’s Site A linking to Site B and vice versa.

However, it is more commonly used to refer to Site A linking from Post A to Site B’s Post B. And Site B linking back from Post B to Post A on Site A.

Occasionally it happens organically, and that’s ok. But it’s best to avoid, as Google will either ignore the reciprocal link – so it has no link juice – or the sites might get penalized. 

Redirect

A redirect is like a virtual change of address. It’s a way of telling browsers and search engines to go to the new location of a webpage.

Redirects should be set up whenever a website deletes posts that get traffic or have backlinks, so that the users aren’t sent to a 404 page and the link juice isn’t lost. 

Related Posts

Related post sections appear at the bottom of blog posts after the content is finished. These can be generated via plugins, but the best way is to generate them manually by listing up to 10 posts the reader should visit next. It’s best if the next posts are related to the current post in some way.

For example, it would make sense to suggest a user read my “What Are Snippets?” post or “How Long Should a Blog Post Be for SEO?” because they are about SEO and are beginner-friendly.

It wouldn’t really make sense to send them to a post about travel blog cameras.

Referral Traffic

Any traffic referred to your blog by a site that is not a search engine. If a website gives your site a backlink, and someone clicks on that to come to your site, that is referral traffic.

Repurpose

Adapting content that already exists to be used on another platform, such as taking a blog post and reworking the content into a newsletter.

Responsive Design

A website design that adapts for different devices, screen sizes, and operating systems automatically so the content can be viewed on any type of technology.

Review Post

A blog post that reviews an experience, location, software, service, or product. 

Review posts are typically for a single item rather than a list of items – but not always. 

Like this.

Review Update

A Google Update that adjusts the algorithms’ methods of analyzing and ranking review-style posts. These updates typically aim to improve the quality, authenticity, and reliability of any reviews in search results.

Google prioritizes reviews where the user has actually experienced all of the things they are reviewing.

Rich Media

Advanced forms of media like videos, audio, and animations with interactive elements that encourages viewers to click or interact with it. 

Rich media is typically used in ads to encourage clicks. 

Rich Snippet

Rich snippets or rich results are search engine results that include extra details about a webpage, with that data pulled from schema markup.

This includes star ratings, reviews, product info, recipes, event information, music, organization details, or video.

Robots.txt

A file used by websites to tell web crawlers and bots which pages or sections of a site should be crawled. It also tells them what not to crawl, such as no indexed posts. 

ROI

Return on investment is a financial metric to show the profitability of an action or investment. In SEO, this can refer to money paid for a service/product, or time invested.

Roundup

A piece of content that feature links to other blog posts. These are common in the food and craft niches.

For example, “20 best chicken recipes” would be a post that lists 20 recipes from other sites, with links to those sites so the user could try the recipes.

They are a method of link building, and of ranking for listicles without needing to make 20 chicken recipes yourself. 

RPM

Revenue per mille is the average amount a website earns per 1,000 pageviews. This is a way to determine average ad income for a site as a whole, and per post.

It is calculated by (total Earnings / # of pageviews) * 1000.

If a blog made $500 and has 20,000 pageviews, it would be (500 / 20,000) * 1000 = $25 RPM.

RSS

A web feed that allows users and software to retrieve updates for new content. It is a standardized, reduced version of the content, just showing headlines and summaries with links to the content.

RSS feeds can be used in emails to automatically send a newsletter to a blog’s audience when new content is published. 

Schema Markup

Structured data that search engines use to read and understand content on a website.

Popular schema includes product markup, faq schema, author schema, organization schema markup, video schema, recipe schema, review schema, news schema, and Q&A schema. 

Search Intent

Search intent is the reason why a user is typing a certain query into a search engine. Search engines need to know the intent to offer helpful content, and so do SEOs trying to optimize for that query.

Common types of intent are informational (answers to questions), commercial (researching products), navigational (looking for a specific page/company) and transactional (ready to purchase). 

Seasonal

A seasonal keyword or topic gets most of its traffic during a small period of time or season during the year. Seasonal topics are often related to the weather or to holidays. 

Secondary Keyword

Keywords that are closely related to the primary keyword, either by being a minor semantic variation or by being a more broad/specific addition to the topic. These keywords can be synonyms, subtopics, broader topics, long tail variations, or questions related to the topic.

They help contextualize the content and can help the post get additional rankings that bring in more organic traffic.

For example, a post about “things to do in Rome” could have secondary keywords like: Rome things to do, best thing to do in Rome, Rome activities, what is there to do in Rome?, things to do in Rome with kids.

Secondary keywords in one post can be a primary keyword in another. 

Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO optimizes for the meaning to help a search engine’s crawlers understand the content better. 

This is done in a number of ways including writing for related keywords, write comprehensive content that answers all questions around a topic, include synonyms and related terms as secondary and LSI keywords, use schema markup, and internal link content clusters. 

Good standard SEO should also be good semantic SEO. 

SEO Audit

A review and in depth analysis of SEO elements on a website to determine how effective a current strategy is, and how to improve it. 

This can come in the form of a content audit, backlink audit, internal linking audit, technical SEO audit, and more.

Session

A visit to a website by a user from the time they visit the site until there is 30 minutes of inactivity.

If I go to SheKnowsSEO.co and click to 5 pages, I have been 1 user, 1 session, and 5 pageviews. But if I come back 2 hours later and visit another 2 pages, I have been 1 user, 2 sessions, and 7 pageviews total. 

The same is true if I don’t “leave” the site, but leave the page open on my laptop while I go for groceries. When I return and interact with that page again, it’s a new session. 

Session Duration

How much time on average visitors spend on your website as a whole when they visit.

SGE

Search Generative Experience is Google’s new AI-powered search results that appear before the standard SERPs.

SheMedia

An ad network for bloggers that accepts blogs at 20k pageviews officially. But I applied with a site with 4k pageviews and got in. They require a 1 year commitment, and auto-renew each year.

Short Code

A text-based code written between square brackets that can be placed in a blog and is interpreted by WordPress to generate custom coded features.

For example, I could type [table1] and a table plugin would generate a table I had coded in the backend of my website into this post. 

Silo

A different term for a “pillar” of content.

Silo Page 

A silo page or navigational silo page groups related content for users to find more easily. It also helps web crawlers understand the connection between content on a website. 

My pillars/silos of AI, SEO, and Travel Blogging on this site all have a silo page that lists all of the posts in those pillars.

Unlike a pillar page, there is no extraneous content and the links aren’t hidden in content. 

Sitelinks

Links to other pages or sections of a website that appear beneath the initial search result for a page under some search terms. These most commonly show up when you do a branded search where it pulls from the site’s navigation links.

There is no way to adjust your sitelinks unless you adjust your site’s navigation and architecture. Having a streamlined menu and breadcrumbs can help this. 

These are the sitelinks when I Google “She Knows SEO”:

Sitestripe

An Amazon affiliate feature that allows you to create links from within the Amazon website without having to convert them inside Associates Central.

Skyscraper Technique

An SEO strategy for creating content that is better than the competitors. It involves evaluating the competitors, finding content gaps in their piece, and writing a better piece of content.

It is like adding an extra floor to a skyscraper to make it taller.

The added backlink element of this technique is to then find the sites linking to your competitors, and reach out to them asking them to link to your more helpful article in place of your competitors’. 

Slug

The part of a permalink after the domain name. It is the unique identifier for each page.

These are the best ways to make an SEO friendly slug.

Social Proof

Any evidence of a website or author’s credibility and authority. This can come in the form of reviews, testimonials, photos, real world experience/stories, proof of expertise, and case studies.

Social Traffic

Traffic to a website from social media. 

Spam Score

A Moz score to determine how spammy a site might be. It is based on the percentage of similar sites that have been marked as spam by Google in the past. Scores range from 0-100%, with lower being less spammy. 

SPEAR Framework

A method of writing introductions for blog posts to improve trustworthiness, affiliate conversions, and ensuring the reader knows you can help them. It was developed by Jamie IF.

You can read his detailed explanation here. 

Sponsored Link

A link with the HTML tag rel=”sponsored” shows that a link is part of a paid advertisement or was paid to be placed there.

Any links to a company within a sponsored article should be marked as sponsored and no-follow. Same for individually paid link placements or manually added ad banners that link to a site. 

Sponsored Post

A piece of content that the author was paid to write by another company or individual.

SSL

An SSL certificate enables a site to use HTTPS instead of HTTP so that it is more secure for the user. 

Staging Site

A duplicate version of a site under a staging subdomain where a user can make edits, change themes, or run tests without impacting the live site their user sees.

This is the best way to change a blog’s theme without having downtime for the user.

Structured Data

See “schema markup”. 

Subdirectory

A folder within a webpage’s directory that organizes the site’s pages into a hierarchy. This commonly happens with categories where a site’s URL structure is domainname.com/categoryname/blog-post-here. 

It can also be used kind of like a subdomain to organize content. Some sites use it for their blog section. 

Subdomain

A separate branch of a website that is denoted by [text].domain.com. 

Subdomains are treated as separate sites by Google and can rank on their own.

They are often used for shops, apps, a blog section of a larger website, and forums.

Syndication

Content syndication is republishing the same piece of content without edits on multiple websites to get in front of a new – often larger – audience.

It is a method of getting a high DA backlink as well, even if it’s pointing the canonical URL to the original site, thus it isn’t supposed to be able to rank on Google.

Tag

A system inside WordPress to organize content. Tags used to be used for searching a website to find all related content on a subject before internal site searches became an option. Now they are used for internal organization and are typically no indexed.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO are all of the site-wide technical elements that go into optimizing a site for search engines. 

It includes the site’s hosting, sitemaps, URL structure, robots.txt file, SSL, sitespeed, CWV, indexing, CDNs, image compression, theme, site code and plugins, mobile-friendliness, schema, broken links, and more. 

Theme

A blog theme is a design template formatted with code that determines the appearance and layout of a website. It includes the colour scheme, fonts, page layout, and other visual design elements.

A slow blog theme or a heavy-coded blog theme will hurt site speed.

Title Tag

The HTML element that specifies what the title of a webpage is. It’s enclosed it the <title> HTML.

This is different than the H1, even though it can often be the same text.

The title tag is set in your SEO plugin – think of it as the “SEO Title” in many ways. It can be different from the H1 title that is what physically appears on the page when you open it.

90% of the time, it’s the same. 

Topical Authority

The increased perception of authority by continuing to write on the same topic repeatedly until you answer all of a user’s questions. This helps Google understand your authority in that niche space which helps you get higher rankings. 

This happens by writing more posts on the same topic and related topics repeatedly. 

Topic Cluster

A collection of content written around the same topic and subtopics. Similar to a keyword cluster, but without the same sentence structure, this cluster helps show Google the site’s authority on a topic.

A topic cluster might be travel in Italy, while the keyword cluster might be “best places to eat pizza in [location]” – with different cities and regions being the location.

Sometimes they cross over, and something the keyword cluster operates between topic clusters. If the location in the example keyword cluster could be anywhere in the world, it would connect to other topic clusters for different locations.

Topical Map

A way to group a semantic SEO strategy by clustering topics and subtopics to ensure the site answers all questions on a topic. It uses topic hierarchies to connect content and visually represent the connection between topics.

For example one topic might be travel in Italy, and the map would have branching lines out to topics within that silo.

Traffic

The number of people or visits a site gets within a period of time. 

UGC

User Generated Content has 2 definitions for content creators.

For influencers, UGC is original content created for a company or brand by an influencer. The rights are sold to the company for it to post it on their channels.

In SEO, it more often refers to content created by users on places like a forum or in the comments section – where users of a site weigh in on content. 

URL

A uniform resource locator that is the unique address on the web. 

User Intent

See “search intent”.

USP

A unique selling point is a marketing term for the thing that differentiates a product or business from its competitors. For example, there are a million water bottle companies, but each has something to slightly set them apart. 

UX

User experience on a website or while engaging with content. A good UX is key for SEO. 

VA

A virtual assistant to help with a myriad of tasks in a business. 

Vlog

A video blog, typically in a narrative form about an experience.

Volume

Search volume is a metric used by keyword research tools to show the approximate number of impressions a query gets on a search engine. 

Waterfall Test / Chart

A waterfall test is a speed test that shows a waterfall chart of network requests as they load when the page is loading. It identifies individual site speed issues by highlighting the files as they load to find the longest load times that need optimization.

I use the waterfall test from Webpagetest.org to check my speed.

Web Stories

Google Web Stories are Google’s answer to Instagram stories. They are a clickable slideshow of images and videos the user can tap through. These typically appear in Google Discover. They are meant to tease the topic of a post and drink clicks through to the post on your site.

WebP

An image format that compresses an image to make the file smaller and quicker to load without sacrificing quality. 

White Hat SEO

Any SEO practice that follows a search engine’s guidelines to the tee. At the core of white hat SEO is offering the best user experience and most helpful content. 

WordPress

A CMS with open source code so anyone can create a website and publish blog posts. Learn more about WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org here.

XML Sitemap

An XML file that lists a website’s pages to be indexed so they will appear in Google search. It can contain posts, images and videos’ links.

YMYL

“Your Money or Your Life” is a term for a web page or website that covers topics that could “impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.” These include medical topics, finance, and health/safety. It is harder to rank in these areas, and they often require proof of a degree to appear in the SERPs. 

Zero Volume Keyword

A zero volume keyword is NOT a zero volume keyword. It refers to a zero competition keyword. There are numerous ways to find them: Forum Keywords, Golden Ratio Keywords, GSC Keywords, and Hidden Keywords are some of the methods/types.

Zero volume keywords are keywords that keyword research tools have not yet learned are important, so they get underreported volume – which can be 0. These keywords are undiscovered and bring more traffic than is reported by the tools. 

They usually don’t require backlinks to rank, which makes them easier for getting traffic fast.

I teach more about them here.

✅ Want to refer back to this post offline? You can download a copy here!

Conclusions 

Now you know more than some SEO experts!

You’ll be able to chat it up with technical SEOs, impress at your next SEO conference, and drop abbreviation bombs on Twitter like you’re getting a million pageviews a month. 

Use your newfound linguistic power for good, not evil please!

If I missed a term or a new one crops up, please let me know in my free Facebook Group, SEO for Bloggers, so I can keep this the most thorough and helpful resource for y’all.

Ready to dive deeper into the world of SEO? Learn how many keywords you should actually use in a blog post so you sound human, but also please the robots. 

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