A server configuration file that can be used to rewrite and redirect URLs.

After search engines moved to secure search in 2011, keyword data was removed from Google Analytics, replaced with “(not provided)” – thus making it impossible to know which queries were responsible for visitors finding a website.
Recommended reading:
Not Provided: A Complete Roundup

The format search engines used to display search results; ten organic results all appearing in the same format.

Coined by Rand Fishkin to describe content that is “10x better” than anything else on the web for that same topic.

A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page has succeeded.

A signal to the search engines that a web page has moved. A person attempting to reach the original page gets taken to a new page that’s the closest match.

A class of status codes that indicate the request for a page resulted in error

A class of status codes that indicate the server’s inability to perform the request.

Content that appears on a website before the user scrolls. Google created the Page Layout Algorithm in 2012 to lower the rankings of websites featuring too many ads in this space.

Special characters and commands you can type into the search bar to further specify your query.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a type of programming that allows a webpage to send and receive information from a server to change that page dynamically without reloading.

Alexa Rank is a public measure of a website’s popularity. Every day, Alexa ranks millions of websites according to traffic data from the previous three months. The resulting Alexa Rank metric shows how a website compares to others. The lower the number, the more popular a site is.

A complex computer program used by search engines to retrieve data and deliver results for a query. Search engines use a combination of algorithms to deliver ranked webpages via a results page based on a number of ranking factors and signals.

Some algorithmic changes go completely unnoticed. However, the impact of a major algorithmic change can usually be seen quite quickly, though the change sometimes takes a few weeks to completely roll out. Algorithmic changes come in three forms:

The search engine re-runs an existing algorithm using the exact same signals as last time.

The search engine changes certain signals of an existing algorithm.

A process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways. A formula that calculates the rank of search engine results. These algorithms evolve with the goal of providing a searcher with the most relevant content based on their specific search.

HTML code that provides information used by search engines and screen readers (for blind and visually-impaired people) to understand the contents of an image.
Also known as: Alt Text

Alternative text is the text in HTML code that describes the images on web pages.

Tags placed on images which provide the search engines with a written description of an image. Also known as “alt text” or “alt tags.” Including alternative text is, first and foremost, a principle of accessibility, but alt text also helps the search engines derive meaning as well.

Refers to a search phrase where the goal of the searcher is unclear and requires further specification.

Often described as “diet HTML,” accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are designed to make the viewing experience lightning fast for mobile visitors.

Sharing or spreading the word about your brand; often used in the context of social media, paid advertisements, and influencer marketing.

The science of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to take future action based on what has (or hasn’t) worked historically.

The clickable word or words of a link. This text is intended to provide contextual information to people and search engines about what the webpage or website being linked to is about. For instance, if you were creating a link to send your visitors to Search Engine Journal, “Search Engine Journal” is the anchor text.

An application programming interface (API) allows for the creation of applications by accessing the features or data of another service like an operating system or application.

The paraphrase tools or more commonly known as the article rewriter tools are the services provided by different websites that are responsible for changing and rephrasing of old and already published content to change it into a new and unique one. The only thing you have to do is to post a paragraph or a complete article that needs to be rephrased and let the tool do the rest of the magic.

The science of making computers perform tasks that require human intelligence. Rather than following a set of programmed rules (like an algorithm), an AI computer system is basically a digital brain that learns. AI can also make and carry out decisions without human intervention.

Short for “asynchronous,” async means that the browser doesn’t have to wait for a task to finish before moving onto the next one while assembling your web page.

A measurement of a website’s strength, which gets built up over time via backlinks. The software company Moz has a measurement tool for “domain authority,” which acts as a proxy to calculate your website’s authority in the eyes of Google. A website with stronger authority will get its content to rank more quickly and easily.

The combination of signals search engines use to assess websites and webpages for the purposes of ranking

Content that is created programmatically, not written by humans.

Short for business-to-business. In B2B SEO, the buying cycle is longer, products and services are more expensive, and the audience is professional decision-makers.

Short for business-to-consumer. In B2C SEO, the buying cycle is typically shorter (though it still varies by industry), products and services are (mostly) cheaper, and consumers are the audience.

Our free backlinks tool is for carrying out a thorough analysis of the backlinks of your website.Although developed by Small SEO Tools (SST), this free backlink analyzer is fully integrated with Ahrefs’ engine to pull and display a detailed backlink report for any active website or web page.

Backlink Maker is the web’s #1 tool for instantly generating quality backlinks to your website. Built with SEO best practices in mind and in accordance with Google’s recommended link building guidelines, Backlink Maker does a clean job at building free high-value backlinks and bringing you closer to the top of SERPs.

Or “inbound links” are links from other websites that point to your website. Links that point from other websites to yours. These links are valuable because of their ability to pass authority (ranking power) from one website to another. In the simplest terms, links act as votes of confidence between websites. The higher the authority of the website giving the link, the more authority that link will pass to the website to which it’s pointing.

The most popular search engine in China, Baidu was founded in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu.

The name of Microsoft’s search engine. Bing launched in June 2009, replacing Microsoft Live Search (previously MSN Search and Windows Live Search). Since 2010, Bing has powered Yahoo’s organic search results as part of a search deal Microsoft and Yahoo struck in July 2009.

A complex computer program that is poorly understood. Inputs and outputs can be observed, but there is no access to the process itself due to its confidential nature. For example, Google’s algorithm is a black box.

Search engine optimization practices that violate Google’s quality guidelines. Risky tactics that go against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Practices that try to increase search engine rank by violating Google’s quality guidelines.

The blacklist check will test a mail server IP address against over 100 DNS based email blacklists. If your mail server has been blacklisted, some email you send may not be delivered. Email blacklists are a common way of reducing spam.

A frequently updated section of a website (or and entire site) which is typically written in a more conversational manner. A place to publish your expert content. A publication of content, sorted in chronological order, with the most recent content appearing at the top. The content reflects personal or corporate interests, and can be written by an individual or a group of contributors. Blogs were originally called web logs or weblogs. However, as “web log can also mean a server’s log files, the term was confusing. To avoid this confusion, the abbreviation “blog was coined, and became the common term.

Also known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” these are what scour the Internet to find content.
Another name for search engine spiders or web crawlers.

The percentage of total visits that did not result in a secondary action on your site. For example, if someone visited your home page and then left before viewing any other pages, that would be a bounced session. The percentage of visitors to a web page or website who leave after viewing just one page on the website. Bounce rate is a measure of interaction with your site. A “good bounce rate” varies from industry to industry and also depends on the traffic source.

When a user’s query includes an exact match, or variation, of a specific company or brand name. For instance, “Search Engine Journal”, “SEJ”, “SearchEnginejournal.com”, and “Search Engine Journal SEO 101 Guide” are a few examples of branded keywords.

This type is less popular than it once was. Essentially, each webpage shows a “trail” to help quickly tell visitors where they are on your site. For example: Home > SEO > Link Building > What Is Website Navigation?
Also known as: Internal Links (or Internal Linking), Site Architecture

A link on the web that points to a moved or non-existent page. Broken links are frowned upon by the search engines because the crawlers are being directed to dead ends, which wastes resources.
A link that leads to a 404 not found. Typically, a link becomes broken when:
A website goes offline.
A webpage is removed without implementing a redirect.
The destination URL is changed without implementing a redirect.

Broken Link Finder scans your page or the whole site and provides a broken links report within a few minutes. The report is generated directly without installing and running any additional program files. Then ‘Broken Link Checker’ highlights which links are functioning and which ones are broken.

A web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, is software that allows you to access information on the web. When you make a request in your browser (ex: “google.com”), you’re instructing your browser to retrieve the resources necessary to render that page on your device.

Bulk GEO IP Locator is a tool to get location of multiple IP addresses in one click with a graphical interface. Domain and IP bulk lookup tool allows to lookup domain, location, ISP and ASN for multiple hosts (IPs or domains) at once. It also supports lookup of MX or NS DNS records for multiple domains. This tool is commonly used for investigating IPs found in server logs.

To combine multiple resources into a single resource.

Technology that temporarily stores website content in order to improve the load time of web pages.

A snapshot of a webpage as it appeared when a search engine last crawled it

A saved version of your web page.

Google’s web indexing system. Caffeine is the index, or collection of web content, whereas Googlebot is the crawler that goes out and finds the content.

An HTML code element that specifies a preferred website URL, when multiple URLs have the same or similar content, to reduce duplicate content.

Short for “country code top level domain,” ccTLD refers to domains associated with countries. For example, .ru is the recognized ccTLD for Russia.

The different vehicles by which you can get attention and acquire traffic, such as organic search and social media.

Also known as a “business listing,” a citation is a web-based reference to a local business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP).
Business listings which include your business’ name, address, and phone number. Think Yellowpages.com or Apple Maps.

Class C IP Checker Tool is a simple yet efficient tool that displays to you the class of IP address of the domain which you can use to know that whether or not the same address is duplicated. You can use this IP address Class C Checker to determine if the same C range is hosting various websites.

Content that is designed to entice people to click, typically by overpromising or being intentionally misleading in headlines, so publishers can earn advertising revenue.

The ratio of people who click on your link when they see it appear in the Google search results. Higher click-through rates mean more clicks or visits. The closer your website is to the top of Google, the higher its click-through rate.

The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an organic search result. This is calculated by dividing the total number of organic clicks by the total number of impressions then multiplying by 100.

Client-side and server-side rendering refer to where the code runs. Client-side means the file is executed in the browser. Server-side means the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.

Showing different content to search engines than you show to human visitors.
Showing different content or URLs to people and search engines. A violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Content Management Systems provide the structure and power to websites. The most common content management systems include WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. These software platforms help you create and manage digital content.
Stands for Content Management System. A web-based application that lets people create, upload, and manage digital assets.

How frequently two websites (or webpages) are mentioned together by a third-party website, even if those first two items don’t link to (or reference) each other. This is a way search engines can establish subject similarity.For instance, imagine Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable never linked to or mentioned each other. However, other websites and blogs would likely mention both SEJ and SER on lists of popular search engine news publications.
To see this in action, see: related:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ search engine journal

If your website has a high code to text ratio, there is a chance it will be ranked better by search engines and positively impact on SEO performance.

The Color Picker Tool is used to select a color on any image opened on your screen. By clicking a point on an image, you can change the active color to that which is located under the pointer. By default, the tool works on the active layer, but the Sample Merge option lets you grab the color as it is in the image, resulting of the combination of all layers.

Poorly written comments, often off-topic and self-promotional, posted by spambots in the hopes of getting a free (but ultimately worthless) link.

A query in which the searcher wants to compare products to find the one that best suits them.

Other websites that are also trying to rank based on — and drive traffic from — your keywords. Other websites that are trying to reach the same audience as you are.
“”There are two types of competition:
Direct Competitors: Companies that sell similar products and/or services, serve the same needs, and target a similar audience both online and offline.
SEO Competitors: Companies that vie for the same keywords and organic search visibility, but with unalike products or services that address different needs and/or target audiences.””

Words, images, videos, or sounds (or any combination thereof) that convey information that is meant to be distributed to and consumed by an audience.
One of the two most important Google ranking factors (along with links). Search engines want to reward content that is useful, informative, valuable, credible, unique, and engaging with better traffic and visibility.

An often-used phrase which emphasizes the importance of content to search engine optimization. The search engines value content because it’s proof of your relevance and expertise.
“”A phrase often used by speakers at conferences and writers on popular SEO (and digital marketing) publications. In this context, “content is king” usually means that content is essential for you to have any SEO, digital marketing, or business success.
This phrase actually dates back to a Bill Gates essay, “Content is King”, published January 3, 1996.
Recommended reading:
Content is King (Wayback Machine)””

Links that appear within your main content (e.g., articles, landing pages).

When a user completes a desired action on a website. Examples of conversions include:
Completing a purchase.
Adding items to a shopping cart.
Completing a form (e.g., requesting a demo, registering for a webinar/event).
Downloading premium content (e.g., ebook, whitepaper).
Subscribing to an email newsletter.
Video views.

The ratio of visits to conversions. Conversion rate answers how many of my website visitors are filling out my forms, calling, signing up for my newsletter, etc.?
The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which website users complete a desired action. This is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by traffic, then multiplying by 100.

The process of improving the number or quality of conversions that occur on a website. Some popular CRO tactics include testing changes to website design, copy, images, price, call-to-action, and messaging.

The extent to which a relationship exists between two or more elements. Often used in SEO research to infer relationships of variables on search rankings due to the black box nature of algorithms. Always remember, however, that correlation ≠ causation.

The average number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site
“”The total number of URLs search engines can and want to crawl on a website during a specific time period.
Recommended reading:
What Crawl Budget Means for Googlebot (Google Webmaster Central)””

URLs that a search engine bot is unable to crawl.
URLs that return a status code error.

A program search engines use to crawl the web. Bots visit webpages to collect information and add or update a search engine’s index.
Also known as: Bot, Spider, Web Crawler

Instructions to the crawler regarding what you want it to crawl and index on your site.

The process of gathering information, using a crawler, from the billions of public webpages to update, add, and organize webpages in a search engine’s index.
The process by which search engines discover your web pages.

The sequence of steps a browser goes through to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a viewable web page.

A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is the code that makes a website look a certain way (ex: fonts and colors).
Cascading Style Sheets make websites look good (or bad) by controlling fonts, colors, etc. independent of the content itself.
Cascading Style Sheets describe how HTML elements (e.g., color, fonts) should appear on webpages and adapt when viewed on different devices.

This measures page stability. It’s an algorithm that looks at unexpected layout shifts when a page is loaded. This means that if you’re loading in banners very late in a page’s load time, the unexpected layout shift would harm your CLS score.
Unlike LCP and FID, CLS isn’t measured in milliseconds. The calculated metric consists of the size of the visual elements moving and how far it moves.

All of the potential moments (or touchpoints) at which a prospect is exposed to or engages with a brand. All of these interactions are designed to eventually persuade, influence, and convert that prospect to become a customer, client, or subscriber.
Though customer journeys can vary greatly by business type and industry, typically it is made up of four main “stages”:
Awareness > Consideration > Decision > Retention
Google’s Avinash Kaushik offers an alternative framework:
See > Think > Do > Care
Also known as: Buying Process, Consumer Decision Journey, the Customer Journey to Online Purchase, Marketing Funnel, Path to Purchase, Purchase Funnel

Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz metric used to predict a domain’s ranking ability; best used as a comparative metric (ex: comparing a website’s DA score to that of its direct competitors).

All the hard numbers that represent real customers – the who, what, where, when, why, and how – all of which is needed to make informed decisions about SEO strategies and tactics.

A webpage that links to no other webpages. So called because once a user or bot arrives on this page, there is no place to move forward.

When Google removes a website or webpage, either temporarily or permanently, from search results, specifically its search index. Google provides a Remove URLs tool in the Search Console for voluntary cases; however, a website may also be de-indexed as punishment for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, in the form of a manual action.
Also known as: Delisting

When a URL, section of URLs, or an entire domain has been removed from a search engine index. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as when a website receives a manual penalty for violating Google’s quality guidelines.

Refers to a page or group of pages being removed from Google’s index.

A list of websites, usually separated by related categories and maintained by human editors. Depending on the directory, inclusion could be free or paid. In the past, links from directories were highly sought after (e.g., DMOZ), leading to widespread abuse and overall devaluing of this sort of link building.
Also known as: Web Directory, Link Directory

“Directory” in the context of local SEO is an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business’s name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website. “Directory” can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google’s guidelines: “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.”

If your link profile includes a high number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality inbound links that may be harming your rankings – and don’t have the ability to get them removed for a legitimate reason (e.g., the link exists on a site you have no control over) – you can use Google’s Disavow Tool tool to tell Google to ignore those links.

In the context of the local pack, distance refers to proximity, or the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query.

The Open Directory Project. This human-edited directory of websites launched June 5, 1998 and closed March 17, 2017.

A Domain Name Server (DNS) allows domain names (ex: “moz.com”) to be linked to IP addresses (ex: “127.0.0.1”). DNS essentially translates domain names into IP addresses so that browsers can load the page’s resources.

A link that doesn’t use the “nofollow” attribute. In other words, a link. This is a link that you want link juice to flow
and for crawlers to crawl.

The Document Object Model (DOM) is the structure of an HTML document — it defines how that document can be accessed and changed by things like JavaScript.

A website address – typically ending in an extension like .com, .org, or .net. For example: www.searchenginejournal.com is the domain of this website.

Domain Age Checker is an online tool that helps you to find the accurate age of a domain or website, from the time when it was registered till its active. A Domain’s age is determined by how long it has been indexed ever by Google. One thing that is awesome for an SEO professional is when they are able to purchase a domain that has been indexted by Google years prior. These are a gold mine, and using this seo tool you can find out how old a URL really is.

The overall “strength” of a website, built up over time, which can help a new page rank well quickly, even before that content has earned links or engagement.
A score, between 0-100, SEO software company Moz uses to predict the ability of a website to rank in search results.
Recommended reading:
The Three Pillars of SEO: Authority, Relevance, and Trust

Domain authority is the most accurate representation of the search results landscape and a key to understanding why certain websites rank higher than others. Higher DA sites perform better than lower DA sites. As a result, there’s a direct correlation between high DA scores and higher rankings.

A web hosting service provider is a type of online business that offers website owners the technologies and services needed to make the website or web page available for viewing on the World Wide Web.With web hosting service, website owners can reach out to millions of people because it makes their website accessible via the internet 24/7 without interruptions.

The Domain into IP tool lets you check a domain name for different IP addresses. Therefore, it lets you save time since you can convert it by just entering the correct URL on the interface. No wonder why this is considered as the best domain to IP checking tool existing today.

A company that manages the reservation of internet domain names. Example: GoDaddy.
This is the name of the company that holds your web address (domain) for you. GoDaddy and Network Solutions are examples of popular registrars.

Webpages that are created to rank in search engines for specific keywords only for the purpose of redirecting users who click on that page to a different website.

A search engine that was founded September 28, 2008. It is often praised for its heavy focus on user privacy and a lack of filter bubbles (search personalization). DuckDuckGo relies on more than 400 sources to serve its search results, including vertical search engines, its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, Bing, and Yandex. In 2016, 4 billion searches were conducted on DuckDuckGo.

Content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain.
When a significant amount of content contained on one webpage matches, or is incredibly similar to, content that exists elsewhere on the same website or a completely different website.

The amount of time that elapses between when a user clicks on a search result and then returns to the SERP from a website. Short dwell time (e.g., less than 5 seconds) can be an indicator of low-quality content to search engines.

The buying and selling of products, all conducted online.
Recommended reading:
A Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for E-Commerce Websites

A link that is given by one website to another without the recipient asking or paying for it.
Also known as: Natural Link.
When links are earned naturally and given out of an author’s own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.

Email privacy refers to keeping emails secured, either while in transit or while they’re stored in a server. The process of sending an email involves many hardware and software systems like the email clients, ISPs, and servers. The emails processed through these systems are susceptible to unauthorized attacks at various stages.

Data that represents how searchers interact with your site from search results.

Methods to measure how users are interact with webpages and content. Examples of engagement metrics include:
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Time on page/site
New vs. returning visitors
Frequency and recency
Dwell time

People, places, organizations, websites, events, groups, facts, and other things.
Also see: Knowledge Graph

Facebook (stylized as facebook) is an American online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, and a flagship service of the namesake company Facebook, Inc. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Often used on e-commerce websites, faceted navigations offer a number of sorting and filtering options to help visitors more easily locate the URL they’re looking for out of a stack of thousands or even millions of URLs. For example, you could sort a clothing page by price: low to high, or filter the page to view only size: small.

For certain queries, usually questions (i.e., who/what/where/when/why/how), Google sometimes shows a special block above the organic search results. This box contains a summary (in the form of paragraph, list, table, or video), as well as the publication date, page title, link to the webpage from which the answer originated, and URL.
Also known as: Position Zero.
Recommended reading:
Optimize Your Site for Featured Snippets

Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs for certain queries.
Answer blocks which appear at the top of a search engine results page, featuring content pulled from another web page and displayed on Google.com.

A tool available in Google Search Console that allows you to see a web page how Google sees it.

The process of encoding information using fewer bits; reducing the size of the file. There are many different compression techniques.

DNS records fetch the IP address of the server and serve the website. The domain name system or DNS is a system that makes it easy to access websites. Without this system in place we would all have to remember complex IP addresses instead of easy to remember domain names. DNS refers to the large-scale system of information that contains the IP addresses, domain names, hosting, and other registration information across every site on the Internet. Before this system was created the only way for people to access your website would be by typing in your IP address.

How easily the content on a website can be discovered, both internally (by users) and externally (by search engines).

The default state of a link, “follow” links pass PageRank.

Links that appear in the bottom section (or “footer) of a website.
See: Website Navigation

Typically this includes links to pages that contain important informational resources about a brand or business. These pages usually aren’t important for ranking purposes. For example, SEJ’s footer navigation links to our About Us page, privacy policy, and our various social profiles.

A Moz tool that allows you to scan the web for mentions of a specific word or phrase, such as your brand name.

Fresh updates to existing pages is a great way to increase your website’s visibility on Google.

Terms that describe a physical location or service area. For example, “pizza” is not geo-modified, but “pizza in Seattle” is.

Source code is the fundamental component of a computer program that is created by a programmer. It can be read and easily understood by a human being.

The search engine founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998. Google marked a radical departure from human-edited web directories, relying on web crawling technology and a complex algorithm to analyze hyperlinking patterns to rank websites. Google is the most-used search engine in nearly every country in the world.

An advertising platform from Google which powers the paid listing space on www.google.com and so much more. Google Ads are sold on a cost-per-click basis, and can be utilized for businesses of all sizes.

A free (with an option to pay for upgraded features) tool that helps website owners get insight into how people are engaging with their website. Some examples of reports you can see in Google Analytics include acquisition reports that show what channels your visitors are coming from, and conversion reports that show the rate at which people are completing goals (ex: form fills) on your website.
A free, enterprise-level web analytics tool from Google which allows you to monitor your website’s performance.

Google Analytics goals

A practice intended to make a website rank number one for a surprising or controversial search phrase. This was accomplished by having a large number of websites link to a certain webpage with specific anchor text to help it rank for that term.
For example, in 2003 President George W. Bush’s White House bio ranked number one on a search for “miserable failure.”

This is a quick and easy way to check if the pages on your website are included in Google’s search index. This tool will tell you if Google knows such web page exists and they have added it to their index, so it will be made visible in Google’s search results.

A term used starting in 2002 for the volatile period of time during which Google updated its search index, roughly every month.

A Google search algorithm that was officially announced in September 2013 after it had been in use for a month. The purpose of Hummingbird was to better understand the full context of queries (i.e., semantic search), rather than certain keywords, in order to provide better results.
Recommended reading:
How the Google Hummingbird Update Changed Search

The Google Index Checker is a free SEO tool offered by Linkody to check if a page or a website is indexed by Google. You can check up to 10 URLs at a time. If a page is not indexed, the tool will check if the domain is indexed.

Google Malware Checker is a program that has the ability to scan websites and provide users with web security reports. This free online website scanner analyzes if the website that you want to visit contain malicious content, suspicious scripts, and other web security threats that are hidden within the website content.

Google’s free tool for managing your Google Maps listing.

A free listing available to local businesses.

A major Google algorithm update that initially rolled out in February 2011, it was followed by numerous subsequent updates. The goal of Google Panda was to reduce the visibility of low-value content, often produced by “content farms. In 2016, Panda became part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.
Recommended reading:
A Complete Guide to the Google Panda Update

A major Google algorithm that launched in April 2012, it was followed by a series of updates and refreshes. The goal of Penguin was to reduce the visibility of overly-optimized sites, or sites that excessively abused certain spammy tactics (e.g., building low-quality links, keyword stuffing). In 2016, Penguin started running in real-time as a part of Google’s core algorithm.
Recommended reading:
A Complete Guide to the Google Penguin Algorithm Update

The name (given by the SEO industry, not Google) of a significant Google local search update launched July 24, 2014. The goal of Pigeon was to improve the accuracy and relevance of local searches by leveraging more traditional Google ranking signals and improving distance and locating ranking parameters.
Recommended reading:
How the Google Pigeon Update Changed Local Search Results

Published guidelines from Google detailing tactics that are forbidden because they are malicious and/or intended to manipulate search results.

A major Google algorithm change officially introduced in October 2015, although it had been in testing for months before this. With RankBrain, Google added machine learning to its algorithm and has been called the third most important ranking signal. In June 2016, it was revealed that RankBrain has been involved in every query and has an impact on rankings.
Recommended reading:
A Complete Guide to the Google RankBrain Algorithm

A theorized and debated (but never confirmed by Google) “waiting period” that prevents new websites from seeing the full benefit of their optimization efforts. Typically, this effect is witnessed most often with new sites targeting competitive keywords and can only be overcome when the site gains enough authority.

A free program provided by Google that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing in search.
A communication channel with Google allowing you to understand which keywords are driving traffic to your website, and how well the search engines are crawling and indexing your content.

Special text that can be appended to your query to further specify what types of results you’re looking for. For example, adding “site:” before a domain name can return a list of all (or many) indexed pages on said domain.

A single hub for managing multiple website tracking codes.

A website where you can explore data visualizations on the latest search trends, stories, and topics.
Visit: Google Trends
Recommended reading:
10 Ways to Use Google Trends for Better SEO

Google’s guidance on good website optimization practices, as well as “illicit” practices that can result in manual action. Simply:
Make unique, valuable, and engaging websites and webpages for users, not search engines.
Avoid tricks and techniques that deceive users and are intended only to improve search rankings.
Recommended reading:
Google Webmaster Guidelines

The web crawling system Google uses to find and add new websites and webpages to its index.

How major search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web; their “crawlers” or “spiders.”

A supposed “gray” area between techniques that adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but then add an element that bends the rules a little.

Often used as a link building strategy, guest blogging involves pitching an article (or idea for an article) to a publication in the hopes that they will feature your content and allow you to include a link back to your website. Just be careful though. Large-scale guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

A popular link building tactic that involves developing content for other websites in exchange for a backlink pointing at your own pages.
Also known as: Guest Posting.

Tags within a page’s content which define the header of a page and organize sections of content. Headers provide structure to your pages, and Google rewards structure. Headers are also important to website visitors, since they break your content into easy-to-read parts.

A popular keyword with high search volume that is usually difficult to rank for.
Also known as: Head Keyword, Short-Tail

An HTML element used to designate headings on your page.

Heading tags (H1-H6) separate content into sections, based on importance, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important. Headline tags should be used naturally and should incorporate your target keywords where relevant, as doing so may provide a small SEO benefit.

An H1 tag.

Influenced by the HITS Algorithm, and added to Google’s algorithm in 2003, Hilltop assigned “expert” status to certain websites or webpages published about a specific topic that also link to unaffiliated pages about that topic.
Recommended reading:
Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents (Krishna Bharat & George Mihaila)

Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search is a link analysis algorithm that assesses a value not just based on content and inbound links (authorities), but also its outbound links (hubs).
Recommended reading:
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment (Jon Kleinberg)

Forward-thinking, long-term SEO practices which position your website for success today and years down the road.

The default, or introductory webpage, of a website.

A tag that indicates to Google which language the content is in. This helps Google serve the appropriate language version of your page to people searching in that language.

The htaccess redirects generator tool is meant to be used when implementing URLs changes, Web migrations or when configuring your Website canonical URLs versions -those that are meant to be indexed and ranked-, while avoiding losing your former or non-canonical URLs traffic and rankings by referring your users.

Stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML tags are specific code elements that can be used to improve the effectiveness of SEO for webpages and websites.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is how data is transferred from a computer server to a web browser.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure uses a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data transferred between a website and web browser. HTTPS is a minor Google ranking factor.

An authoritative central resource (e.g., page or article), dedicated to a specific topic (keyword), that is continually updated and linked to, and also links out to topically-relevant webpages.

Image results in some SERPs that are scrollable from left to right.

The act of speeding up web pages by making image file sizes smaller without degrading the image’s quality.
Making image file sizes smaller without losing image quality. Often used to speed up a web page, a little like magic.

A sitemap containing only the image URLs on a website.

A link to a webpage that originates from an external website. For example, if Search Engine Journal were to link to Google, that would count as an inbound link on Google’s side; if Google were to link to Search Engine Journal, that would be an inbound link on SEJ’s side.

A huge database of all the content search engine crawlers have discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.
A database of all of the content the search engine crawlers have collected. Think of it like an old-fashioned Rolodex or a library.
The database search engines use to store and retrieve information gathered during the crawling process.

A report in Google Search Console that shows you the indexation status of your site’s pages.

How easily a search engine bot can understand and add a webpage to its index.

A webpage that has been discovered by a crawler, has been added to a search engine index, and is eligible to appear in search results for relevant queries.

The storing and organizing of content found during crawling.

How a website is organized and where various content and navigational elements are located on webpages.

The process of searching for information (e.g., text, images, video) from a large database and then presenting the most relevant information to an end user.

A query in which the searcher is looking for information, such as the answer to a question.

Instagram (commonly abbreviated to IG or Insta)[7] is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and originally launched on iOS in October 2010. The Android version was released in April 2012, followed by a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, a Fire OS app in June 2014, and an app for Windows 10 in October 2016. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users’ content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a feed, a function that seems to be discontinued as of September 2020.

In the context of SEO, intent refers to what users really want from the words they typed into the search bar.

Links on your website which point to other pages within your website.

An internet protocol (IP) address is a string of numbers that’s unique to each specific website. We assign domain names to IP addresses because they’re easier for humans to remember (ex: “moz.com”) but the internet needs these numbers to find websites.
An Internet Protocol Address. IP addresses can be:
Shared: Numerous websites share an address within one server or a group of servers (a.k.a., virtual hosting).
Dedicated: A website has its own address.
Neither will help you rank better; however, a dedicated IP address can increase site speed.

A programming language that makes it possible to dynamically insert content, links, meta data, or other elements, on websites. JavaScript can potentially make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl and index webpages and increase the time it takes for webpage to load for users.

JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring your data. For example, schema.org can be implemented in a number of different formats, JSON-LD is just one of them, but it is the format preferred by Google.

A scheduling system.

The word, words, or phrase that an SEO professional or marketer targets for the purpose of matching and ranking for what users are searching for. The words used on webpages can help search engines determine which pages are the most relevant to show in organic results when a searcher enters a query. Keywords usually represent topics, ideas, or questions.
Also known as: Keyphrase.

A type of self-competition that occurs when multiple pages from one website rank for the same query on a SERP. This can result in a lower CTR, diminished authority, and lower conversion rates than from having one consolidated webpage that ranks well.
Recommended reading:
How to Identify & Eliminate Keyword Cannibalization to Boost Your SEO

How often a word or phrase appears within the content of a webpage. At best, this unproven concept is outdated, if ever really mattered to search engines. There is no ideal percentage that will help a webpage rank better.

Keyword Density Checker is a tool built solely for the purpose of calculating the keyword density of any web page.
The dev team at Small SEO Tools created the tool after finding out that some marketers were still stuffing their content with loads of keywords even without realizing it. This left their websites suffering as Google does not want you to cram your content with keywords unnecessarily.
This tool solves that problem perfectly. It allows you to analyze either a whole web page using its URL or a piece of text by copying and pasting.

At Moz, Keyword Difficulty is an estimate, in the form of a numerical score, of how difficult it is for a site to outrank their competitors.

A Moz tool for in-depth keyword research and discovery.

A keyword position checker is an online SEO tool that lets you know the rank of a page based on its particular keyword by competing with other webpages or websites for that same keyword.This tool helps you know which position your website is on the search engines’ ranks.A Keyword Position tool is one of the most important seo keyword tools simply because it tracks your progress.

The process of identifying the words and phrases your audience uses to search for your products, services, or expertise.
The process of discovering any relevant topics, subjects, and terms searchers enter into search engines, as well as the volume and competition level of those terms. This practice is made possible by a variety of free and paid tools.

A spammy tactic involving the overuse of important keywords and their variants in your content and links.
An old-school tactic of placing too many keywords on one page. It makes for a poor reading experience, so avoid this.
Adding irrelevant keywords, or repeating keywords beyond what is natural, to a webpage in the hopes of increasing search rankings. This spam tactic is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in a manual action.

The words and phrases which users enter into the search bar. Keywords are also known as “search queries.” The search results for these words and phrases will direct people to your brand, products, and services.

Help You Identify Relevant Keywords
Something else that many marketers overlook is the importance of negative keywords, or search terms that should be excluded from your campaigns.

An entity database Google uses to surface facts and information on people, places, and things (a.k.a., entities) – and their connections – in a Knowledge Panel or carousel at the top of search results on relevant queries.

A box that appears at the top of, or on the right rail (desktop only), of Page 1 of Google’s search results for relevant queries. This panel contains facts and information on people, places, and things, as well as links to related websites or Google searches.

A “key performance indicator” is a measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.
Stands for key performance indicator. A measurement method businesses use to gauge whether marketing and business objectives, targets, and goals are being reached.

LCP measures loading performance and is focused on the largest element that loads in on the initial viewport, typically an image or video, but it could also be a large text field. It’s important to note this is different from first contentful paint, as that metric focuses on the first thing that’s loaded rather than the biggest.

Any page on your website that serves as the first page a person will view. Some landing pages have specific purposes, like supporting pay-per-click advertising.
“”Any webpage that a visitor can navigate to.
A standalone webpage that is designed to capture leads or generate conversions.””

An information retrieval method designed to help search engines identify the correct context of a word. LSI doesn’t play a useful role in SEO today.
See: Google Latent Semantic Indexing

A way of deferring the loading of an object until it’s needed. This method is often used to improve page speed.

A person who may or may not be interested in your product(s) and/or service(s). A lead willingly shares their email address (and usually other personal or contact information) in exchange for something they deem of value from the website.

A connection between two websites built using HTML code. A link enables users to navigate to websites, social networks, and apps. Links play a critical role in how search engines evaluate and rank websites.
Also known as: Backlink.

The ease with which a link can be found by human visitors or crawlers.

The link analyzer helps you determine the ratio between inner links and outgoing links for any domain. The tool is especially useful for researching other websites that link to you, since it provides information on the anchor text being used as well as nofollow tags which can impact the strength of a backlink.

Intentionally provocative content that is meant to grab people’s attention and attract links from other websites.

While “building” sounds like this activity involves creating links to your website yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site’s authority in search engines.
“”A process designed to get other trusted and relevant websites to link to your website to help improve your organic search rank and visibility. Link building can be done by:
Conducting outreach to media outlets, bloggers, influencers, and webmasters.
Attracting editorial links naturally, by publishing various types of high-quality or sensational content.
Paying for them. For example, you can obtain links via sponsored content, paid reviews, or paying for a specific type of link to appear on another website.
Forging partnerships.
Manually. For instance, you link together various properties you manage or own, or add your site to online directories or review sites.””

The value of inbound links, in terms of relevance, authority, and trust.

Also known as reciprocal linking, link exchanges involve “you link to me and I’ll link to you” tactics. Excessive link exchanges are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

Moz’s tool for link discovery and analysis.

When a group of websites link to each other, usually using automated programs, in the hopes of artificially increasing search rankings. A spam tactic.
Also known as: Link Network, Blog Network, Private Blog Network

A term you should never use in public or online.
Did you mean…: Authority or PageRank

Link Price Calculator has a unique algorithm that determines the website’s reputation based on ranking and age including backlinks among others. If you are a website owner, this Link Price Calculator will give you an estimate of how much you need to charge per month for a given URL or a text link.

A term used to describe all the inbound links to a select domain, subdomain, or URL.
Every type of link that points to a particular website. The quality of a website’s link profile can vary widely, depending on how they were acquired and the anchor text used.

How quickly (or slowly) a website accumulates links. A sudden increase in link velocity could potentially be a sign of spamming, or could be due to viral marketing or doing something newsworthy (either intentionally or unintentionally).

References to a business’ complete or partial contact information on a non-directory platform (like online news, blogs, best-of lists, etc.)

LinkedIn (/lɪŋktˈɪn/) is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003,[4] the platform is mainly used for professional networking, and allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. As of 2015, most of the company’s revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals.[5] Since December 2016, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. As of December 2020, LinkedIn had 760 million registered members from 150 countries.[3]

Structured data markup placed on a web page that helps search engines understand information about a business.

A pack of typically three local business listings that appear for local-intent searches such as “oil change near me.”
A group of (typically) three Google Maps listings representing local businesses and appearing on the search engine results page.

A query in which the searcher is looking for something in a specific location, such as “coffee shops near me” or “gyms in Brooklyn.”

Anything you do online to promote a business with a physical presence, such as a salon or an electrician. Local search begins with Google Maps.
Anything you do online to promote a business with a physical presence, such as a salon or an electrician. Local search begins with Google Maps.

A file that records users’ information, such as IP addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks.

The process of exploring the data contained in a log file to identify trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, gather demographic information, and understand how search bots are crawling the website.

Refers to pages that require login authentication before a visitor can access the content.

Highly specific multiple-word terms that often demonstrate higher purchase intent.
Less popular keywords that have low search volume that are usually easier to rank for.

Longer queries, typically those containing more than three words. Indicative of their length, they are often more specific than short-tail queries.
Multiple-word phrases that are entered into the search bar for a specific reason. These phrases make up 70% of the total online searches! For example, long-tail keywords such as “what are the best headphones for kids” or “wireless headphones for swimming laps” imply that the user wants to buy something. These keywords are often less competitive than shorter phrases, and tend to have higher conversion rates.

A subset of Artificial Intelligence in which a system uses data to learn and adjust a complex process without human intervention.

The major topics or subjects your website is focused on. For instance, on SEJ our Main Navigation consists of SEO, News, PPC, Content, and Social.

Google’s term for a penalty. Google will take manual action on a website after a human reviewer (i.e., a Google employee) manually reviews a website to confirm whether it has failed to comply with Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Penalized websites can either be demoted or removed entirely from search results. Manual actions can be assessed to the entire website or just certain webpages.

Refers to a Google “Manual Action” where a human reviewer has determined certain pages on your site violate Google’s quality guidelines.

A tag that can be added to the “head section of an HTML document. It acts as a description of a webpage’s content. This content isn’t used in ranking algorithms, but is often displayed as the “snippet that appears in the search results. Accurate and engaging descriptions can increase organic click-through rate.

HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. Google sometimes uses these as the description line in search result snippets.
A tag in the header code of each web page. The search engines often use these to display these in the description portion of the listings you see on a search engine results page. Meta descriptions directly contribute to the likelihood of a person clicking (or not clicking) on your listing in the search results.

Code snippets which live in the header code of each web page. These directives aren’t visible to website visitors, but they provide search engine bots with page-by-page instruction on how to index a page’s content.

A tag that can be added to the “head section of an HTML document. Adding a bunch of keywords here won’t help you rank – search engine algorithms have ignored this tag for ranking purposes for years due to abuse (in the form of keyword stuffing).

Pieces of code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.

META tag generators may be software-based or Web-based, bundled or standalone, simple or complex.Some designers do not understand META tags and benefit from having their tags automatically generated.Other designers may understand META tags, but use automatic generators to save time, especially when many pages are involved.

Information that appears in the HTML source code of a webpage to describe its contents to search engines. The title tag and meta description are the most commonly used types of meta tags in SEO.

The Meta tag analyzer tool is there to give website owners an inside and out analysis of their Meta labels and pages. This kind of Meta Tag checker breaks down the Meta labels as well as the catchphrases on the page, from the pictures, from the heading labels, and from the required URLs. Meta tags analyzer is a program that can be used to discover tags that appear in the content of an HTML page. It searches for those words or phrases that are associated with some specific website.

A way to measure activity and performance in order to assess the success (or lack thereof) of an SEO initiative.

To minify something means to remove as many unnecessary characters from the source code as possible without altering functionality. Whereas compression makes something smaller, minification actually removes things.

In 2018, Google started crawling and indexing your pages based on the mobile version of your website instead of the desktop version.

A plugin available for the Chrome browser that allows you to easily view metrics for the selected page, like DA, PA, title tag, and more.

Mozrank checker is a specialized tool which helps you to track SERP rankings of different web pages and your website as a whole. You can easily analyze the key parameters of your website, like Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Multimedia can set your content apart and get you visibility in web, image, and video results on Google.

An Internet Protocol address is a unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network. Want to know how to find your IP address? Well it is simple with this tool called: MY IP Address. The SEO Queen has launched this SEO tool to help clients to play out an Internet Speed Test, IP address query, intermediary recognition, IP Whois Lookup, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. 

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A list of links that help visitors navigate to other pages on your site. Often, these appear in a list at the top of your website (“top navigation”), on the side column of your website (“side navigation”), or at the bottom of your website (“footer navigation”).

A query in which the searcher is trying to get to a certain location, such as the Moz blog (query = “Moz blog”).

A rare but malicious practice where webspam techniques are used to harm the search rankings of another website, usually a competitor.
Recommended reading:
7 Tips to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO

The search engine adds a new algorithm to improve search quality. For example: Google Panda, Google Penguin.

A specific market or area of interest consisting of a small group of highly-passionate people.

A meta tag that tells search engines not to store a cached copy of your page.

Links marked up with rel=”nofollow” do not pass PageRank. Google encourages the use of these in some situations, like when a link has been paid for.

A meta tag that tells search engines not to follow one specific outbound link. This is done in cases when a website doesn’t want to pass authority to another webpage or because it’s a paid link. The nofollow attribute looks like this:
Anchor text goes here

A meta tag that instructions a search engine not to index the page it’s on.

A meta tag that tells search engines not to show a description with your listing.

Demand generation and brand awareness activities that take place outside of a website. In addition to link building, promotion tactics can include social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and even offline marketing channels (e.g., TV, radio, billboards).

This online tool allows you to generate the MD5 hash of any string. The MD5 hash can not be decrypted if the text you entered is complicated enough.

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This online pinging tool is helpful to notify the internet that your webpage or other digital assets are there. This ping application is an administrator tool that is used to check whether a computer is operating and the network is intact. Online ping uses the Echo function of ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) detailed in RFC 792. A packet is sent to a specific IP address through a network.

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These activities all take place within a website. In addition to publishing relevant, high-quality content, on-page SEO includes optimizing HTML code (e.g., title tags, meta tags), information architecture, website navigation, and URL structure.

Earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.

A component of Google’s core algorithm. It is a link analysis program that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it.

The free listings displayed on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
The natural, or unpaid, listings that appear on a SERP. Organic search results, which are analyzed and ranked by algorithms, are designed to give users the most relevant result based on their query.

Organic Search Results are the web page choices after paid ads on your search engine results page created from your keyword inquiry.

Any webpage that is not linked to by any other pages on that website.

A link that directs visitors to a page on a different website than the one they are currently on.

Similar to DA, Page Authority (PA) predicts an individual page’s ranking ability.

Website authority”” is an SEO concept that refers to the “”strength”” of a given domain.
Some people call this “”domain authority,”” which is not to be confused with the Domain Authority (DA) metric from Moz. When we talk about domain authority, we’re talking about a general SEO concept that’s synonymous with “”website authority””.
Here at Ahrefs, we have a website authority metric of our own called Domain Rating. It runs on a scale from zero to a hundred. The higher a website’s Domain Rating (DR), the stronger and more authoritative it is.

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The Page Size Checker Tool informs you about the average web page size of any URL. You need to enter the URL you want to check the size of, and the Page Size Checker will calculate webpage size of that particular URL in an instant.

Page speed is made up of a number of equally important qualities, such as first contentful/meaningful paint and time to interactive.
The amount of time it takes for a web page to load. There are many additional measurements within page speed — like First Contentful Paint (FCP),which measures perceived load time.
The amount of time it takes for a webpage to completely load. Page speed is ranking factor.

The tool will then list everything that loads on your website and how fast each element loads. By everything we mean every image, script, CSS, external element, and of course the HTML. This gives you an overview over not only how fast your page loads but also what might be slowing it down. It allows you to identify any problem areas your site might have so that you can solve them and give your visitors an even better experience!

Also known as title tags. Page Titles are tags in the header code of each web page. The search engines use these to craft the linked titles of the results you see on a search engines results page. Page titles influence the likelihood of a person clicking on your listing (the click-through rate).

A component of Google’s core algorithm. It is a link analysis program that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it.
“”According to Google: “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal.” The algorithm was named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
Recommended reading:
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web by Larry Page
The Anatomy of a Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Larry Page””

Also referred to as “page depth,” pages per session describes the average number of pages people view of your website in a single session.

PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps you improve speed, the score there doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the real world.

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A webpage is loaded in a browser.

A website owner can opt to split a page into multiple parts in a sequence, similar to pages in the book. This can be especially helpful on very large pages. The hallmarks of a paginated page are the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, indicating where each page falls in the greater sequence. These tags help Google understand that the pages should have consolidated link properties and that searchers should be sent to the first page in the sequence.

Pay-per-click advertisements that appear above (and often below) the organic results on search engines.

A Google algorithm update that targeted low-quality content.

Also known as PPC. A model of marketing where a marketer pays for website traffic on a cost-per-click or cost-per-visit basis.

Stands for Private Blog Network.
See: Link Farm.

Stands for Portable Document Format file. PDFs can contain text, images, links, videos, and other elements.
Recommended reading:
10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly

See: Manual Action

A block displayed on some search engine results pages, featuring questions and answers relating to the search query.

A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.

A fictionalized representation of an ideal website visitor or customer – their demographics, behavior, needs, motivations, and goals – all based on actual data.Also known as: Buyer Persona, Marketing Persona

Refers to the way a search engine will modify a person’s results on factors unique to them, such as their location and search history.
The ability of the search engines to customize the results you see based on factors such as your location or your past search history.

Hypertext Preprocessor is a scripting language used to create dynamic content on webpages.

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically “ideas”[4]) on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos,[5] in the form of pinboards.[6] The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp and had over 400 million monthly active users as of August 2020.[7] It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.

Search engines aim to reduce the organic search rankings of content that infringes on copyright. Google introduced a filter in 2012 that reduces the visibility of sites reported for numerous DMCA-related takedown requests.
Recommended reading:
An update to our search algorithms (Google)

Grammarly’s plagiarism checker can detect plagiarism from billions of web pages as well as from ProQuest’s academic databases. Free plagiarism check will tell you whether or not your text contains duplicate content. Premium plagiarism check highlights passages that require citations and gives you the resources you need to properly credit your sources.

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When, after entering a query, a searcher bounces back and forth between a SERP and the pages listed in those search results.
Also see: Dwell time

See: Rank

A type of advertising where advertisers are charged a certain amount (usually determined by bid, relevance, account history, and competition) every time a user clicks on the ad. Combining PPC and SEO can result in more SERP real estate, clicks, and conversions. Also, PPC data can inform your SEO strategy, and the reverse is also true.

Writing instructions in a way a computer can understand. For example, JavaScript is a programming language that adds dynamic (not-static) elements to a web page.

In the context of the local pack, prominence refers to businesses that are well-known and well-liked in the real world.

The “http” or “https” preceding your domain name. This governs how data is relayed between the server and browser.

In an SEO context, pruning typically refers to removing low-quality pages in order to increase the quality of the site overall.

Exchanging money, or something else of value, for a link. If a link is purchased, it constitutes an advertisement and should be treated with a nofollow tag so that it does not pass PageRank.

Stands for query deserves freshness, where a search engine might decide to show newer webpages in search results (rather than older pages) if a particular search term is trending, perhaps because a news event has resulted in a surge in searches on that topic.
Recommended reading:
Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine (New York Times)

If you use your website to encourage potential customers to contact you via phone call or form, a “lead” is every contact you receive. Not all of those leads will become customers, but “qualified” leads are relevant prospects that have a high likelihood of becoming paying customers.

When traffic is “qualified,” it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page, and therefore the visitor is more likely to find the content useful and convert.

Quality content that answer a legitimate question using your best keywords is critical. This will yeild maximum visibility on Google online to get your share of the 2 Trillion searches happening on Google annually.

Content that helps you successfully achieve business or marketing goals (e.g., driving organic traffic or social shares, earning top search rankings, generating leads/sales).

An inbound link that originates from an authoritative, relevant, or trusted website.

Words typed into the search bar.

Where a webpage appears within the organic search results for a specific query.

The machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm that adjusts ranking by promoting the most relevant, helpful results.
A machine learning aspect of Google’s algorithm which rewards the most relevant search results.

Ordering search results by relevance to the query.
The order of the search engine results, with #1 being the best and located at the top of the page.

An individual component which contributes to a complex series of algorithms that determine where webpages should appear with the organic search results for a specific query. For years, Google has said that its algorithms “rely on more than 200 unique signals” to help users find the most relevant webpage or answer.
Also known as: Ranking Signal.

When two websites agree to exchange links to one another.

A technique that sends a user (or search engine) who requested one webpage to a different (but equally relevant) webpage. There are two types of redirects:
301: Permanent
302: Temporary

When a URL is moved from one location to another. Most often, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).

Traffic sent to a website from another website. For example, if your website is receiving visits from people clicking on your site from a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as “facebook.com / referral” in the Source/Medium report.

URL data that identifies the source of a user’s webpage request.

Refers to keywords unique to a specific locale. Use Google Trends, for example, to see whether “pop” or “soda” is the more popular term in Kansas.

The process of asking a search engine to return a website or webpage(s) to its search index after de-indexing.

A tag in the code of a web page that tells the search engines which version of the page is the original, and which are duplicates or copies.

This area usually appears in the right rail or beneath content. It might be called “Most Popular,” “Most Read,” or “Trending Now.”

In the context of the local pack, relevance is how well a local business matches what the searcher is looking for
A way search engines measure how closely connected the content of a webpage is aligned to match the context of a search query.

The relevance of the content on your website to search queries. The more relevant your content, the more likely your web page will perform well (appear higher) in the search results.

A script that forces your browser to wait to be fetched before the page can be rendered. Render-blocking scripts can add extra round trips before your browser can fully render a page.

The process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.

The practice of crafting a positive online perception of a brand or person – including in search results and on social media – by minimizing the visibility of negative mentions.
Also known as: Online Reputation Management, Public Relations

Every niche is different. Every clientele has its own language, customs and conventions. Do your research. Understand and become “One” with your customer shoes. Be able top answer the question: How does my ideal client talk about my products and services.

Commonly used for the purpose of link building, resource pages typically contain a list of helpful links to other websites. If your business sells email marketing software, for example, you could look up marketing intitle:”resources” and reach out to the owners of said sites to see if they would include a link to your website on their page.

Google’s preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, responsive design allows the website to adapt to fit whatever device it’s being viewed on.
A method of building website layouts with content blocks that seamlessly reassemble depending on the size and orientation of the visitor’s screen.

A website designed to automatically adapt to a user’s screen size, whether it’s being viewed on a desktop or mobile device.

A way to measure the performance of SEO activities. This is calculated by dividing how much revenue you earned via organic search by the cost of the total investment, then multiplying by 100.

Reverse IP Domain Checker tool can be used to find for domain names hosted on the same IP address.This is common since most people use shared hosting which is very affordable because all websites share the same dedicated server with one IP address. Just enter a domain name or an IP address to get a list of domain names that share the same IP address.

RGB color code values are based on the number system we are most familiar with, the decimal number system. The decimal number system is a Base-10 system, meaning there are 10 unique characters used to define the numbers. The 10 characters used are the numbers 0 – 9.
Hex color code values, in comparison, are based on the hexadecimal number system. The hexadecimal number system is a Base-16 system, meaning there are 16 unique characters used to define the numbers. The 16 characters used are the numbers 0 – 9, and the letters A – F.

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A snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines show of URLs on its results page. A “rich” snippet, therefore, is an enhanced version of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by the use of structured data markup, like review markup displaying as rating stars next to those URLs in the search results.
“”Structured data can be added to the HTML of a website to provide contextual information to the search engines during crawling. This information can then be displayed in the SERPs, resulting in an enhanced listing, known as a rich snippet.
Recommended reading:
What Is Schema Markup & Why It’s Important for SEO
Getting Started With Schema Markup for SEO””

Files that suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn’t crawl.
A file on your website that tells the search engines where they’re not supposed to go.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol (or Standard) is a text file, accessible at the root of a website, that tells search engine crawlers which areas of a website should be ignored.

When a search engine crawls your website, the first thing it looks for is your robots.txt file. This file tells search engines what they should and should not index Keep in mind that robots.txt works like a “No Trespassing” sign. It tells robots whether you want them to crawl your site or not. It does not actually block access. Honorable and legitimate bots will honor your directive on whether they can visit or not. Rogue bots may simply ignore robots.txt.

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Code that tags elements of your website with structured information that the search engines can then extract and display on the search engine results pages. For example, schema powers the recipes that show up directly in the search results.
A form of microdata which, once added to a webpage, creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.

Code that “wraps around” elements of your web page to provide additional information about it to the search engine. Data using schema.org is referred to as “structured” as opposed to “unstructured” — in other words, organized rather than unorganized.

A technique used to copy website content or information using a computer program or script. Search engines, such as Google, scrape data in order to build a searchable index of websites.
Also known as: Web scraping.

Taking content from websites that you do not own and republishing it without permission on your own site.

A method of tracking how far visitors are scrolling down your pages.

A method of keeping track of tasks that need to be completed to accomplish a larger goal.

An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user. Examples: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
A computer program that enables users to enter a query in order to retrieve information (e.g., files, websites, webpages) from that program’s index (i.e., a web search engine, such as Google, indexes websites, webpages, and files found on the World Wide Web). A search index is built and updated using a crawler, with items being analyzed and ranked by a series of algorithms.
Also see: Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Yandex

An umbrella term for increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages, encompassing both paid and organic activities.

The process of optimizing a website – as well as all the content on that website – so it will appear in prominent positions in the organic results of search engines. SEO requires an understanding of how search engines work, what people search for (i.e., keywords and keyphrases), and why people search (intent). Successful SEO makes a site appealing to users and search engines. It is a combination of technical (on-page SEO) and marketing (off-page SEO).
See: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO

The page search engines display to users after conducting a search. Typically, search engines show about 10 organic search results, sorted by relevance. Depending on the query, other search features may be shown, including:
AdWords Ads (above and below the organic search results)
Featured snippets (a.k.a., Position Zero)
Images
Knowledge panels
Local Pack (with map)
News
Related questions
Related searches
Shopping results
Sitelinks
Tweets
Videos
Also known as: SERPs, when referring to multiple search engine results pages.

The Search Engine Simulator tool shows you how the engines “see” a web page. It simulates how Google “reads” a webpage by displaying the content exactly how it would see it.
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Refers to search functions or search bars on a website that help users find pages on that website.

Search engines track every search users conduct (text and voice), every webpage visited, and every ad clicked on. Search engines may use this data to personalize the results for signed in users.
Also known as: Web Browsing History.

Guidelines for human raters that work for Google to determine the quality of real web pages.

Visits sent to your websites from search engines like Google.

The number of times a keyword was searched. Many keyword research tools show an estimated monthly search volume.
The estimated average number of monthly searches completed using a search engine like Google. Search volume is measured separately for each keyword.

Refers to the popularity of keywords over time, such as “Halloween costumes” being most popular the week before October 31.

Topics related to the main navigation. For instance, on SEJ secondary navigation includes links to webinars, podcasts, guides, SEJ Summit, and other topics.

The term we use to describe the primary words that describe the product or service you provide.

How people feel about your brand.

Search engine optimization is the art and science of getting your website found using the free (organic) keyword space.

A Search Engine Results Page is what you see after you enter something in the search bar on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Results displayed in a non-standard format.
Stands for “search engine results page” — the page you see after conducting a search.

The Server Status Checker is a tool that takes up bulk input of up to 100 URLs. You can use it to check your server status response the moment your server is down. This is a convenient tool for when you want to collect data on a slow server. If the server has a very large response time, this should worry you because it will affect visitors as well as search engines. Pages load at a snail’s pace, prompting customers to close the page. This increases the Bounce rate on your website!

How many impressions a brand receives in the SERPs for search terms when compared to the total impressions that the brand’s competitors receive for those same search terms.

Approximately 30% of the searches performed online use short phrases — keywords like “headphones” or “headphones for sale.” This is called “the short tail of search” and the keywords used are called “short-tail keywords.” These keywords tend to be high in both volume and competition, so these phrases are often out of reach.

A measurement of how quickly a sample group of your web pages loads.

How your website content is organized. For example, the homepage is the top (most important) page, followed by those located in your main navigation. Often described by the number of clicks away from the homepage a particular page is located.

Up to six algorithmically-chosen links that appear below the listing for the same website of a top-ranked organic search result. Pages can be blocked from appearing as sitelinks within the Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
Also known as: Deep Links (Bing).

A  list of pages on a website. There are two types of sitemaps:
HTML: This type of sitemap, typically organized by topics, helps site users navigate a website.
XML: This type of sitemap provides crawlers with a list of webpages on a website.

A link that appears on every page of a website, typically in a sidebar or footer of blogs or websites that use templates.

Platforms (websites and apps) where users can interact with each other, as well as create, share, and consume content.

Any factors that demonstrate authority and influence on popular social networking websites. For example, the social authority of a user on Twitter.
Although many correlation studies have indicated that socials signals impact rankings (e.g., number of Likes/shares a piece of content receives), Google has publicly stated that social signals are not a direct ranking factor. Popular sites that have a lot of social media engagement tend to rank well for other reasons.

See: Webspam

A Moz metric used to quantify a domain’s relative risk of penalization by using a series of flags that are highly correlated with penalized sites.

Like “black hat,” spammy tactics are those that violate search engine quality guidelines.

See: Bot

A controlled experiment used to compare at least two webpages to measure the effects of a different variable on conversions. After the pages are shown for a long enough period of time to site visitors to gather an adequate amount of performance data, a “winner” can be declared.
Also known as: A/B Testing.

Like responsive design for images, SRCSET indicates which version of the image to show for different situations.

A “Secure Sockets Layer” is used to encrypt data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher.
Secure Sockets Layer encrypts the data that gets passed between a server and a web browser. It makes your website appear as HTTPS, which is more secure.

The response codes sent by a server whenever a link is clicked, a webpage or file is requested, or a form is submitted. Common HTTP status codes important to SEO:
200 (OK)
404 (Not Found)
410 (Gone)
500 (Internal Service Error)
503 (Service Unavailable)

The response codes sent by a server whenever a link is clicked, a webpage or file is requested, or a form is submitted. Common HTTP status codes important to SEO:
200 (OK)
404 (Not Found)
410 (Gone)
500 (Internal Service Error)
503 (Service Unavailable)

A frequently used word. For example: a, at, for, is, of, on, the. Search engines have, in the past, ignored these words to save time/resources when indexing. Search engines have evolved greatly since the early days, and stop words sometimes are meaningful, so this isn’t something to worry much about for SEO purposes.
Recommended reading:
New Google Approach to Indexing and Stopwords by Bill Slawski
How Google Might Ignore Insignificant Terms in Queries by Bill Slawski

A frequently used word. For example: a, at, for, is, of, on, the. Search engines have, in the past, ignored these words to save time/resources when indexing. Search engines have evolved greatly since the early days, and stop words sometimes are meaningful, so this isn’t something to worry much about for SEO purposes.
Recommended reading:
New Google Approach to Indexing and Stopwords by Bill Slawski
How Google Might Ignore Insignificant Terms in Queries by Bill Slawski

Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.
Snippets of code that give search engines precise information about a web page’s content. Structured data allows search engines to easily organize web pages in the search results. Did you ever wonder how Google quickly displays recipes, movie times or concert information? Structured data (Schema Markup) gets the credit.

A separate section that exists within a main domain. For example: http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/ is a subdomain that exists within the main domain of https://www.searchenginejournal.com/

The Suspicious Domain Checker is a free website malware scanner that looks at your website/domain and determines if it is suspicious or safe. Enter up to 20 websites to check for a variety of issues and find out if they are safe.

Organizing and categorizing a website to maximize content findability and help users complete desired on-site tasks.

Content that adds little-to-no value to the visitor.

Image thumbnails are a smaller version of a larger image.

The amount of time someone spent on your page before clicking to the next page. Because Google Analytics tracks time on page by when someone clicks your next page, bounced sessions will clock a time on page of 0.
An inexact estimation of how long a user spent looking at a particular webpage. Pages with high exit rates can greatly skew this data.

An HTML meta tag that acts as the title of a webpage. Typically, the title tag is the title search engines use when displaying search listings, so it should include strategic and relevant keywords for that specific page. The title tag should also be written so it makes sense to people and attracts the most clicks. Typically, title tags should be less than 65 characters.

Your H1, H2, H3, H4 and Meta Titles should utilize youe target keywords.

The extension of a given web address. These include:
.com
.org
.net
.infoThere are also many more industry and country-specific options.
Also known as: gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain); Domain Extension.

The people (and sometimes bots) who visit your website.

The searcher wants to take an action, such as buy something. If keyword types sat in the marketing funnel, transactional queries would be at the bottom.

Generally applies to the history of a domain (e.g., whether it cites or features expert sources, builds a positive reputation, adheres to Webmaster Guidelines).

A link analysis technique used to separate good “reputable seed pages” from web spam.
Recommended reading:
Combating Web Spam with TrustRank by Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface or its mobile-device application software (“app”), though the service could also be accessed via SMS before April 2020.[13] Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.[14] Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017.[15] Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.

When search engines pull data from multiple speciality databases to display on the same SERP. Results can include images, videos, news, shopping, and other types of results.
Also known as: Blended Search.

Any links Google identifies as suspicious, deceptive, or manipulative. An unnatural link can result in Google taking manual action on your website.
Google describes unnatural links as “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page.” This is a violation of their guidelines and could warrant a penalty against the offending website.

Uniform Resource Locators are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web.
A uniform resource locator is the specific string of characters that lead to a resource on the web. The term URL is usually short-hand for the letter-based web address (e.g., www.searchenginejournal.com) entered into a browser to access a webpage.

a simple online tool that does exactly what it says: decodes from URL-encoding as well as encodes into it quickly and easily. URL-encode your data without hassles or decode it into a human-readable format.

Sections of a website occurring after the TLD (“.com”), separated by slashes (“/”). For example, in “moz.com/blog” we could say “/blog” is a folder.

The values added to a URL in order to track where traffic comes from (i.e., which link someone clicked on to discover your website or webpage). Here’s an example of a URL parameter (bolded):
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/example-article-url/999999/?utm_source=share-back-traffic&utm_medium=desktop-share-button&utm_campaign=twitter
Also known as: Query String.
Information following a question mark that is appended to a URL to change the page’s content (active parameter) or track information (passive parameter).

Uniform Resource Locator(URL) Rewriting Tool are used to convert dynamic URLs into search engine friendly links. These search engine friendly SEO static URLs generally rank better in search engines and can attract more traffic as they always look more friendlier to the end users.

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How easy it is for people to use your website. Site design, browser compatibility, disability enhancements, and other factors all play a role in improving usability and making your site accessible for as many people as possible.

Web crawling software

The overall feeling users are left with after interacting with a brand, its online presence, and its product/services.

Any form of content – videos, blog posts, comments, reviews, etc. – that is created by users or customers.

An urchin tracking module (UTM) is a simple code that you can append to the end of your URL to track additional details about the click, such as its source, medium, and campaign name.

You want your content, and the links you obtain to your website to be from quality websites. Don’t use link farms. Get links from high quality websites.

A specialized type of search where the focus is only on a specific topic, type of content, or media. For example, YouTube (video), Amazon (shopping), Kayak (travel), Yelp (business reviews).

A bot that uses natural language processing to perform tasks, such as conducting web searches. For instance, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana.

The prominence and positions a website occupies within the organic search results.

A type of voice-activated technology that allows users to speak into a device (usually a smartphone) to ask questions or conduct an online search.

Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed, and perform well in search results.

A document that exists on the World Wide Web and can be viewed by web browsers.

Screen resolution plays a crucial part in the professional look and quality of a website. If the resolution is perfect for all type of formats like tablets, mobile, desktop, etc. then it is for Search Engine Optimization and search engines rankings. An online Screen Resolution Simulator assists you to adjust screen resolution consistent with all formats. This tool is one of the excellent tools that are provided by Dupli Checker.

A collection of webpages hosted together on the World Wide Web.

Use this “Links Count Checker” tool for fast and easy checking of links on your web pages
This free online tool is what you need if you want to count how many outgoing links are there on a given page. Website owners and webmasters must regularly check their external links on their web pages to ensure the quality of a website.

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How a website connects its webpages to help visitors navigate that site. Website navigation comes in a few different forms, including:

A website review is a process for checking your website’s performance against a number of parameters. A Website Review is the process of identifying all content currently live on your website. Reviewing each piece of content. Then identifying what content needs to updating, deleting or created.

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Website Screenshot Generator is an online tool that allows you to generate a screenshot of any website. It’s the simplest and fastest way to download the png image of any website. So you can save them in your device. Users can use this tool with any device such as Android, Windows, Linux, and IOS.

Any methods that exist solely to deceive or manipulate search engine algorithms and/or users.
Also known as: Black Hat SEO, Spam, Spamdexing, Search Spam

browser is a software application that lets you visit web pages on the Internet. Popular browsers include Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Currently, Google Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world, and is also considered one of the fastest and most secure.

Search engine optimization practices that comply with Google’s quality guidelines.
Tactics that comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Whois is a widely used Internet record listing that identifies who owns a domain and how to get in contact with them. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers regulates domain name registration and ownership.

The total number of words that appear within the copy of content. Too little (or thin) content can be a signal of low-quality to search engines.

Word Counter is a simple tool where you can count words, characters, sentences, sections and pages progressively, alongside spelling and language structure checking. Begin by composing legitimately into the content territory above or sticking in your substance from somewhere else. Word counting may be needed when a text is required to stay within certain numbers of words. This may particularly be the case in academia, legal proceedings, journalism and advertising.

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A popular blogging and content management system.

Redirect checker is a perfect tool to check the status of web links. If any web pages are redirected, this free tool can help you analyze the path with pre-defined status codes. With just a couple of clicks, anyone can perform advanced analysis of links.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a multi-dimensional tool that can find broken links, create a HTML sitemap, and a sitmap.xml for you. This is a great tool to crawl and study your website’s linking structure and more.

Extensible Markup Language is a markup language search engines use to understand website data.

A file on your website that tells the search engines what to explore. Similar to your website’s resume.
A list of all the pages on a website that search engines need to know.

In simple terms, an XML sitemap is a list of your website’s URL. It acts as a roadmap to tell search engines what content is available and how to reach it.

Like meta robots tags, this tag provides crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.

Yahoo was born in April 1994 and was an incredibly popular search engine and portal in the ’90s. Yahoo search was mostly human-powered, at least until June 2000 when a then-unknown search engine called Google began powering Yahoo’s organic search results. That deal continued until 2004, when Yahoo started using its own search technology. Since 2010, Yahoo’s organic search results have been powered by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

The most popular search engine in Russia, Yandex was founded September 23, 1997 by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich.

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform. You can get on Google Page 1 faster when you 1) Create a Video 2) Upload it to Youtube 3) Make sure you optimize your video file name, title, and video description with your target keywords.

Any text that can’t be seen by a user that is intended to manipulate search rankings by loading webpages with content-rich keywords and copy. This technique is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in a manual action. For example, adding text that is:
Too small to read.
The same color as the background.
Using CSS to push the text off-screen.

A digital certificate used for website identity authentication and to encrypt information sent to the server using Secure Sockets Layer technology.

Snippets of code that give search engines precise information about a web page’s content. Structured data allows search engines to easily organize web pages in the search results. Did you ever wonder how Google quickly displays recipes, movie times or concert information? Structured data (Schema Markup) gets the credit.

An inexact estimation of how long a user spent looking at a particular webpage. Pages with high exit rates can greatly skew this data.

Google describes unnatural links as “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page.” This is a violation of their guidelines and could warrant a penalty against the offending website.

The web address of an individual web page.

A uniform resource locator is the specific string of characters that lead to a resource on the web. The term URL is usually short-hand for the letter-based web address (e.g., www.searchenginejournal.com) entered into a browser to access a webpage.

Information following a question mark that is appended to a URL to change the page’s content (active parameter) or track information (passive parameter).

Tactics that comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

A list of all the pages on a website that search engines need to know.