Glossary of Basic SEO Terms

This is purely for very new starts with no experience so this is the basics that new staff doing the manual low level tasks needs to know.

Link Related Jargon

• Anchor Text – This is the text that the link displays for example (here Mike Litson is the anchor text)
• Brand Link – A link using the websites URL/Brand or variation of that as the anchor
• Compound Link – A link which contains a mix of Brand and Money terms.
• Money Term – Generic terms which you want to rank for, for example “SEO”
• Social Metrics /Signals – this just means shares, (on FB, Twitter etc) and potentially the value of the sharing account.
• Penguin – This refers to the Google update codenamed penguin. It was an update which related to penalising sites for poor quality links. To define a bad backlink see this post.
• OBL/Outbound links – A link which clicks through to a different website
• Internal Links – Self Explanatory
• No Follow – A link with a no follow tag (this has less value to rankings)
• PR/Page Rank – an outdated metric for measuring site value
• DA/Domain Authority – SEOmoz’s metric for measuring a site’s value – this is better than PR

Content Related Jargon

• Keyword – This is a word or term that you want to rank for, in gambling an example might be “online casino”.
• Keyword Density – The ratio of keywords to non-keywords on a page this needs to be reasonably low so as not to appear spammy.
• Panda – This refers to the Google update penalising sites with poor quality content.
• Thin Content – Content of little value to a user.
• Snippet – The thing you see in the Google search results describing a site.
• Meta data/description – This is data that is used by Google in the description it displays to users
• Title Tags – Again these are used in the snippet
• Rick Snippets – This is the description of snippets including images or other non-text based formats in the SERPs.

Other Jargon

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation
• CTRO – Click Through Rate Optimisation – this is the practice of optimising the snippet that appears in Google.
• SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Positions

This is by no means complete, I will add to this, it is simply a starting point.

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