SEO Glossary

Above the Fold is an English term whose direct equivalent does not exist in French and which means “Above the fold” in a literal way.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an open-source project launched by Google in February 2016. Its purpose is to improve the performance of web pages for mobile devices.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a type of programming that allows a Web page to send and receive data from a server in order to dynamically modify this page without reloading.

In SEO, an algorithm is a complex computer program that search engines use to retrieve data in order to provide results for a given query.

Search engines are constantly modifying their algorithms in order to improve them. While some changes go completely unnoticed, others designated as “major” have a major impact.

According to definitions-seo, “ A link anchor is the textual content of the link, which by default will appear blue and underlined in a web browser.

Search engines allow you to control the indexing of your website. Thus, you can authorize or prohibit the indexing of your website or the pages of your website by search engine robots.

App Store Optimization or the acronym ASO designates all the techniques put in place with the aim of improving the referencing of an application on the mobile stores of the Internet.

This is a function that allows search engines to automatically suggest queries as the user enters the search intent.

B2B marketing is a form of marketing that involves the sale of products and services to businesses, rather than to individuals.

A backlink is an inbound hypertext link from another website. If page A links to page B (on another site), we say that A is a backlink from B or that B gets a backlink from A.

Bingbot is the name of Microsoft’s search engine robot, Bing. Bingbot is launched in October 2010.

The Black Box is a complex computer program whose inputs and outputs can be observed, but whose internal process is not accessible due to its confidential nature

Black hat SEO technique is a practice against search engine guidelines. It include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using Private link network.

Originally, blogs were called “Weblogs”. But since a server’s log files were also called “weblog”, it caused confusion and the abbreviation “blog” was created, becoming the most popular term.

The bounce rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who leave without having visited another page apart from the one they consulted.

Broken links (Link rot) are links to webpages that no longer exist. They may be due to the website being moved, or due to it being renamed or shut down.

Designed by Google, Bing and Yahoo in 2009, the canonical tag somehow avoids the problem of duplicate content.

This is the version of a web page that the search engine owns and shows in its results. This version is not necessarily the one that is available at a given time on the web page.

Caffeine is a program that renewed the search engine’s old indexing system with a new, more robust and faster structure.

Camel Case is a practice that consists of writing an expression by putting the initial of each term that composes it in capital letters.

This is a violation of Google’s guidelines to display different content or URLs to people and search engines.

Clustering, in the field of information retrieval, designates above all two things: on the one hand, the fact for the engines to arrange a site or a web page in “clusters” (thematic ) different: sports, politics, e-commerce, etc.

Content spinning or spinning is a practice that aims, in a technical way, to create texts from an original text using software.

Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.

The crawl refers to the action of search engine robots to explore a website in order to know all the pages of the site.

The crawl budget represents: ”the limits in terms of the number of pages that bot will crawl on a website taking into account several criteria: site size, exploration speed, frequency update rate, content quality and a number of clicks.

A robot is a program used by search engines to collect data from the Internet. When a crawler visits a website, it selects all content from the website and stores it in a database.

Click through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on your ad or link. It can be measured by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions in a given period.

De-indexing is an SEO practice that consists of indicating to search engines the content that should not be considered.

Disallow is a directive that tells search engine robots not to crawl a page or website.

Direct traffic as visits to a website that arrived at your site either by typing your website’s URL into a browser’s search bar or by using browser bookmarks.

A dofollow link is a normal link that directs to a web page indicating that it is useful and should be taken into account, which increases its value in the eyes of search engines.

DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine that draws its data from several general search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Duplicate content generally means large blocks of content, belonging to the same domain or spread across multiple domains, that are identical or substantially similar.

Dwell time is the average time a user spends on a web page before they move on.

In order to be better referenced in search engines, SEOs use several methods that include in the domain name keywords representing the main theme of the website.

The term “entities” refers to the unique terms, phrases and names that Google uses to identify websites.

Entity SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to rank highly in Google search results.

The favorites or bookmark is a good sign that indicates that a user has saved your website or a link to your site in his browser to come back to it soon in a much faster way. 

Also known as “position 0” or featured snippet according to Google, the featured snippet is a feature that allows Google to display a direct response to a query without the user having to click on a link.

Geotargeting is a technique for targeting users based on their geographic location.

Google is the most popular search engine in the world with 94.2% of the global market share. It has been the undisputed leader in its field for several years and this position is reinforced by the many services and tools it offers.

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is the metric by which Google determines the quality of a website, and its ability to rank.

It is software that allows you to easily analyze your website by collecting valuable information, with the aim of taking action to improve your performance.

Onebox is a box that appears on the top of the SERP and it shows you the top results from Google when you search for something.

Google Alerts is a service developed by Google to notify content that may be of interest to the user.

Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to see how well your site is performing in Google.

Google Business Profile is a free business listing from Google. It allows you to provide details and photos of your business, including your location, services, and products.

Guest blogging is a method of promoting a business, brand or product that involves posting content on other blogs and websites.

Hreflang is a URL which identifies the language and country of origin of the website. It helps search engines to understand the language and country where the website is targeted.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol used on the World Wide Web to transfer data from a server to a client.

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP that protects the communications between your browser and server from being intercepted and tampered with by attackers.

Heading tags are tags used in the to range of headings on a webpage.

Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page to another within the same webpage.

This is an XML file that includes all the images on your website that you want crawled and indexed by search engines.

Image SEO refers to the various practices of optimizing a website’s images with the aim of increasing content relevance, search engine visibility, and screen accessibility.

Indexing is the process of including a site or web pages in search engine indexes.

Impressions are the most basic form of online advertising. They are used to promote products and services by displaying them in a user’s browser window or on their computer desktop.

JavaScript SEO is a part of Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that seeks to make JavaScript-heavy websites easy to crawl and index.

A keyword analysis is a process of analyzing the search terms that users enter when they are searching.

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages of your website rank for the same search query on Google and other search engines.

Keyword competition is the measure of how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword.

Keyword proximity refers to the distance between two keywords. The closer the keywords are to each other, the more likely it is that they will be associated with each other.

Keyword stuffing is the use of excess keywords in a web page’s title tag, meta tag, or body text. This can be achieved by adding multiple times the same keyword in each of these locations.

Landing page optimization (LPO) is the process of improving elements on a website to increase conversions.

LSI keywords tend to be more relevant to the topics on your site, which makes them more likely to get you clicked on when someone searches for something related to your site.

Lead generation is the process of gaining the interest of potential customers in order to increase future sales.

Link bait is a term used to describe content that is created specifically to attract links.

Link building is a technique that includes increasing the quality and number of backlinks to a given site.

Link farming and Link schemes is a technique that aims to manipulate search engines by using a group of websites that are all linked.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website to receive more organic traffic from local users.

Long tail keywords are those that are longer than two words, but aren’t very long.

Meta tags are HTML tags that provide information about the content of a web page.

Mobile SEO is the process of optimizing your website for smartphones and mobile devices.

A manual action is a penalty given to a website when it fails to meet Google’s quality guidelines.

A mobile-friendlier website is one that is optimized for the use of mobile devices.

This practice is used by people who want to destroy the e-reputation of their competitors.

This is an attribute that is added to a meta robot tag. Thanks to it, search engines are informed that the page should not be indexed in their database.

The NO FOLLOW link is a link that will not be followed by the Google robot.

Off-page SEO is an SEO technique external to the website because it consists of acquiring links (backlinks).

Organic traffic is the sum of all visitors who arrived at a website through organic search results.

On-page SEO refers to optimization of the content on your website so that it is optimized for search engines to understand and index properly.

Online reputation management (ORM) is a process that aims to protect, preserve and improve the reputation of an organization or person while they are online.

PageRank is an algorithm that makes it possible to evaluate the popularity of a web page in order to index it properly before its presentation to Internet users.

The Private Blog Network is as its name suggests a network of interconnected sites that are all linked to the main website called the money site.

Paid traffic refers to users who come to your website through paid advertising on the Internet.

Pogo-Sticking is a term that designates the action of the Internet user who will click successively on each link found on a web page and who will always return to the starting page using the “back” button on his browser.

RankBrain is a machine learning (AI) algorithm that Google uses to sort the search results.

Referral traffic is measured by users who come to your website through external links clicked from other websites outside of search engines and social media.

The goal of 301 redirect is to provide a permanent move for users that are looking for your site. A 301 redirect tells search engines that this content has moved permanently and should be treated as new content.

A 302 (temporary) redirect is a temporary redirection that sends visitors from one Web page to another.

The robot.txt represents computer data. More specifically, it is a text file that is used at the website level to indicate to crawlers (mainly those of search engines) how they should explore the pages of websites.

Schema markup is a way of describing the structure or content of your web pages.

SERPs are the pages that appear on search engines such as Google and Bing when you search for something.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.

A silo structure in SEO is the best approach to organize content on a specific topic.

Social media marketing is a process used by businesses to promote their brand presence through various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Social traffic is the type of traffic that comes from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Technical SEO is a specialized form of search engine optimization that focuses on improving the quality and performance of your website’s pages through optimizing them for search engines.

Thin content refers to content that is of little or no interest to the Internet user.

The uniform resource locator is a unique text that the user fills in the bar of a browser to access a website.

User-generated content is any type of content posted by users. These can be comments, reviews, images, videos and social media posts and many more.

User engagement refers to the level of involvement and interaction that users have with a website, app, or other digital platform.

Voice search is a new kind of search engine. It uses your voice to find information instead of typing it into the search box. This means that you can ask questions and get answers without having to type anything in.

White-hat SEO is a method of search engine optimization that does not violate the guidelines of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The XML sitemap is an XML type file that includes all the URLs of a website with some additional information called metadata.

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) is a Google search guide that offers diverse advice on: Finances, Happiness, Health, Children’s education, Nutrition.

The zero position is the result offered by a search engine above the first result of the SERP.