Basics & Search Engines

Black hat SEO means optimization techniques that violate the guidelines of a search engine in order to improve rankings through deception.

Enterprise SEO is search engine optimization for large organizations.

Grey hat SEO is industry slang for optimization tactics placed between white hat SEO (within search engine guidelines) and black hat SEO …

Off-page SEO covers activities and signals outside your own website that affect how a site performs in search.

On-page SEO covers all optimizations made directly on the pages of your own website, including content, HTML elements, structure and …

Programmatic SEO is the automated creation of many pages from structured data and a page template, for example one page per city, per …

Search everywhere optimization is a marketing term for making content findable wherever people search, not only on Google.

SEM stands for search engine marketing, meaning the promotion of a website through search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of improving a website so it is found more often in the unpaid, organic results of search …

Technical SEO is the part of search engine optimization that makes sure search engines can fetch, render and index a website.

White hat SEO is search engine optimization that stays within the guidelines of search engines.

Google Search is a fully automated search engine that uses software called web crawlers to find pages for its index.

Information retrieval (IR) is finding material, usually documents, of an unstructured nature, usually text, that satisfies an information …

A metasearch engine sends a query to several other search engines at once and merges their results into one list.

Organic search refers to the results a search engine ranks on its own and that nobody pays to place.

A search algorithm is the set of rules a search engine uses to select pages for a query and put them in order.

A search engine is a program that finds documents for a query and sorts them by estimated relevance.

Search engine submission means registering a website with a search engine so that it appears in results.

Search intent (also user intent) is the goal a person has when typing a query into a search engine.

Search operators are characters and keywords, such as quotation marks or site:, that narrow a query in a search engine.

A search query is the input a person gives a search engine to find information, usually typed words, but also spoken questions or images.

SERP stands for search engine results page, the page a search engine such as Google or Bing shows in response to a query.

A web directory is an online catalog of websites organized into categories and subcategories.

Organic traffic is the visits to a website that come from unpaid links in search results.

Ranking in SEO is the order in which a search engine such as Google lists results for a query.

Ranking factors are the signals search engines use to order pages for a query.

Search visibility (also SEO visibility) describes how often and how prominently a website appears in search results for relevant queries.

A zero-click search is a search that ends without a click on any result.

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's platform for site owners to monitor how their website performs in Bing.

Google Search Central is Google's official source of guidance for people who build and maintain websites for Google Search.

Google Search Essentials is the name of Google's guidelines for websites in web search.

The Google Search Status Dashboard is a status page where Google reports widespread issues and ranking updates affecting Google Search.

A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites.

The customer journey is the sequence of touchpoints a person has with a brand, from first contact through research and purchase to the …

A niche keyword is a specific search term for a narrow topic or a small audience.

A seed keyword is a short, broad term that a keyword research process starts from.

An SEO audit, also called an SEO analysis, is a systematic review of a website that checks how well search engines can crawl, index, and …

SEO governance describes the rules, roles and checks an organization uses to keep SEO requirements in place while many teams change the …

SEO KPIs (also called SEO metrics when no goal is attached) are measurements that show whether search optimization is reaching a defined …

SEO ROI is the return on investment of search engine optimization: the revenue attributed to organic search, minus the cost of SEO …

An SEO strategy is the plan that defines how a website will improve its visibility in search.