SEO Glossary

Rollover a term to find the definition on the other side.

Title Tag

Considered to be one of the most important elements with regards to natural search optimization since search engines tend to give those keywords a lot of weight within the ranking algorithm.

Title Tag
Meta Keyword Tag

The purpose of the Keyword tag is to define the keywords that summarize the content of the page. Search engines place little value on this tag but it should still be used.

Meta Keyword Tag
Meta Description Tag

The text in the Meta Description tag is very important because search engines use this tag to determine the description with the natural search results.

Meta Description Tag
Image Alt/Title Tags

The Image Alt/Title tag defines the text that is to be displayed for a graphic if the user has graphics turned off, or if the user hovers the mouse cursor over the graphic.

Image Alt/Title TagsBlack Hat SEO
Comment Tag

HTML supports the programming of comments into the code that is not displayed by the browsers, but can be read by search engine spiders.

Comment Tag
Keyword Frequency

Keyword Prominence is how close to the start of the copy that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top will have a higher prominence.

Keyword Frequency
Link Relevance

Link Relevance is a highly important metric for Google natural search, and refers to the content of any pages linking to your target page.

Link Relevance
CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.

CSS
Link Title Tags

The goal of the link title is to help users predict what will happen if they follow a link.

Link Title Tags
Session ID

A session ID is a unique number that a Web site's server assigns a specific user for the duration of that user's visit (session).

Session ID
Relative URL

A relative URL points to a file/directory in relation to the present file/directory.

Relative URL
URL Redirect

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.

URL Redirect
Meta Robots Follow Tag

You can use a special HTML tag to tell robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow.

Meta Robots Follow Tag
Parameterized URLs

Parameterized URLs contain data called parameters to specify a site's behavior. It is important to avoid parameters to have a cleaner URL.

Parameterized URLs
JavaScript

JavaScript is a scripting language widely used for client-side web development. It is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions.

JavaScript
Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are used to display important information by highlighting structured data that is embedded in web pages.

Rich Snippets
Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence is how close to the start of the copy that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top will have a higher prominence.

Keyword Prominence
Link Popularity

Link Popularity measures the amount of pages linking to the target page, and is especially important when optimizing for natural search.

Link Popularity
DOCTYPE

A DOCTYPE Declaration is mandatory for most current markup languages and should be the very first thing in an HTML document. Without one, it is impossible to reliably validate a document.

DOCTYPE
Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file is uploaded into the root directory of a site to “allow” or “disallow” certain URLs to be crawled by search engine bots, thus preventing unwanted page indexation.

Robots.txt File
Breadcrumbs

The Breadcrumbs, usually found at the top of a page, is a series of links that follows the hierarchy of the visitor's navigation throughout the site.

Breadcrumbs
Canonical tags

When several versions of a page with similar content exist, Canonical tags are used to tell Google which is the preferred version of the page, therefore preventing duplicate content issues.

Canonical tags
White Hat SEO

White hat SEO involves following strict webmaster guidelines and using ethical techniques to avoid being penalized by Google, thus improving long term stable rankings.

White Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO involves using unethical spammy techniques to quickly improve short term rankings in search engines. These techniques are quickly detected, then penalized by Google.

Black Hat SEO