A – Anchor

The Anchor text or clickable link text is called anchor text. The A element that makes a hyperlink is called the anchor.

ALT Text

Alternative text or Alt text is the image attribute alternative text. This is an important SEO consideration and it is used like Anchor Text for images.

AJAX

AJAX is a term used to describe the technology combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, not actually a programming language in its own right, but more clever use of technologies that brings web pages to life!

Backlink

Backlinks are extremely powerful, they are one of the main driving factors in where a site ranks.

BERT

BERT  or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This is actually a major advancement in search technology.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is a term given to techniques used to manipulate search engine rankings that typically violate the search engine’s terms of service.

Bot

A bot or bots are another name used for search engine crawling programs such as robots or spiders.

Canonical

A canonical URL is considered the original source or the primary content. It is related to paginated content. Where there are several URLs that return essentially the same content the original or primary source should be designated a canonical URL.

Captcha

A captcha is a technique used to determine if a user agent or site visitor is a genuine person or an automated program such as a bot or robot.

CDN – Content Delivery Network

A CDN or Content Delivery Network makes optimized copies of all different screen sizes and device combos and makes them available at local nodes so a requesting device can get the best-optimized version of your site delivered very quickly.

CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift

The CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift is a metric for the visual stability of a page during loading. It is part of the CWV (Core Web Vitals) parameters which is a subset of the Page Experience analysis that Google uses to feed into its algorithm.

CPA

Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action (CPA) is the amount of spend an advertiser pays to achieve a specific goal, usually to convert a customer but also to drive down a funnel such as sign up for an email newsletter or enter an email address to download a white paper etc.

CPC

Cost Per Click (CPC) is a PPC metric that is the amount paid for a single click.

Some keywords are highly competitive and have very high competition and cost per click. These keywords are often not the best to target. Thorough keyword research can help identify opportunities that provide much greater ROI.

Crawl

A crawl is when a search engine spider or robot comes to visit your site and goes through your pages. This is what we call a crawl.

Usually, we want a search engine to visit and crawl a site thoroughly and frequently.

Crawl Budget

The crawl budget is how frequently and how in depth a search engine visits crawls your site. It is usually measured in pages crawled per day.

A large crawl budget is a sign of a healthy site. A high crawl budget helps to get new content indexed and see the effect of changes happens in a short space of time.

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of making the traffic that arrives at your site convert more effectively.

CRO can be very effective if done correctly.

CRO should be something that is looked at in combination with an SEO strategy to make sure you are making the most out of your traffic.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are formating instructions that tell web browsers how to apply certain styles to HTML elements. CSS can make a dull looking plain web page look really sharp.

CTR

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of total searches to clicks to a search result. The click-through rate is pertinent to both organic and paid search results.

It is affected by the title, description and url in the result. There are other factors that can enhance a search result and influence CTR too.

The position of the result on the search page is a major factor. Improving CTR can have an indirect effect on the position of the result.

DA – Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric used by Moz to assign a score to a website. This is intended to mimic the page rank (PR) metric used internally in Google’s algorithm. It is a useful metric and servers almost as currency in the SEO world, with high DA sites being prime candidates for links. Relevance of the link and contextual and topical relevance of the site are still far more valuable than an unrelated high DA link.

DoFollow

A DoFollow link as it is commonly referred to is a reference to a link that has no particular attribute specifying rel=”nofollow”. It should be noted that there isn’t actually such a thing as DoFollow but it is in common SEO terminology. A Dofollow link is just a regular link that passes link weight.

EAT

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) are all factors and concepts that apply mainly to YMYL sites. There are no known direct parameters but there are many guiding principles by which EAT can be improved or better associated to your site.

External Link

An external link is as the name suggests, one that originates out side of your web site. An external link pointing to your site is a backlink and a link on your site to another domain is an external link on your site.

Follow / DoFollow

Follow / Dofollow are terms referred to for links that do not have the rel=”nofollow” attribure applied.

FID – First Input Delay

First Input Delay is a metric that shows how long it takes for the first response from a web server.

GA – Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is another great free SEO tool from Google. This gives useful analysis of the traffic to your web site and how it interacts with your site.

Major performance and usability issues can be detected and marketing campaign performance can be measured.

GMB – Google My Business

Google My Business is a tool that Google gives you to promote and control your site appears on the web. 

GMB gives you multiple options to improve your search appearance and promote your business.

This is important for all businesses but critical for local businesses.

Make sure you have claimed business listing

GSC – Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is one of the most valuable SEO tools available – and it’s free! 

This tool gives you a window into Google’s search index and shows valuable info on how Google sees and shows your site in its search engine.

GTM – Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a useful tool when you have lots of complex integrations, tracking code and pixels that you want to run. It gives you one place to manage them and doesn’t require any developer skills or coding to add and integrate a multitude of code and capabilities.

H, Heading, Header Tag – H1, H2 etc

Header or heading tags are the different headings and subheadings you see on different web pages. Their purpose is to help users and search engines read through large pieces of content and understand the text better.  The main heading or the page is called “H” or “H1.” Webpages can feature H2, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 as different subheadings under the main title.

HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the language used to mark up and display a web page. It is sometimes referred to as code, although in the strict sense it is a markup language not code. It tells a web browser how to load and interpret the page.

HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the standard for computers to transfer the hypertext (HTML – web pages) over the internet.

HTTPS

This is the secure version of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the s is for Secure (S) for HTTPS. All modern websites are expected to run under the secure HTTPS version. Web browsers and search engines may mark sites down or even warn about visiting them if they are not running HTTPS.

Index

An index is a database term for a set of results or information. The index is Google’s copy or data of the pages they return when a searcher makes a query.

You want to make sure that your site is in the index if you want to rank.

There are lots of technical issues and reasons a site might not get fully or properly indexed.

Internal Link

Internal Link – this is a link on your web site to another page on your web site.

JS – JavaScript

JavaScript (JS) is a programming language usually executed on the client side (read as your web browser not the web server) which makes the web page more dynamic and interactive.

Jump To Link

A Jump to link is an anchor link where the link jumps to a specific anchor location on a page.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is a percentage showing how frequently a word is used on a page. For example if a keyword is used 3 times within 100 words the keyword density is 3%.

Keyword density used to be considered an important factor and many people debated the optimum value. The real solution was and always has been to produce great content that people want to read, not something that is designed for an algorithm.

KD – Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty as the metric used in SEO tools that help to score the ranking difficulty of every keyword on a scale starting from 0 to 100. If you get a higher score, that means it is quite difficult to rank for the keyword.

In some tools, the difficulty scores of the keywords are differentiated by using color to help navigate the keyword lists rather easily. 

KPI – Key Performance Indicator

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is an important business metric that tracks the critical factors that affect your business.

In digital marketing these are usually organic searches, conversions, revenue generated and ad spend.

LCP – Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics, focusing on loading performance. It measures the time it takes for the largest content element on a page (e.g., an image or text block) to become visible in the viewport.

LTV – Life Time Value

Life Time Value (LTV) is the amount of money generated by a single customer for the entirety of the customer’s business. 

Retaining customers and increasing repeat business significantly increases LTV which in turn means you can increase ad spend to improve customer acquisition.

Link Wheel

A Link Wheel is a black-hat SEO link-building technique that creates tiered links intended to increase your website’s rankings and traffic. 

LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing

ML – Machine Learning

Machine Learn (ML) is a subset of AI but is in its own right a specific technology. Machine learning is a technique that allows a machine to understand a situation and usually form or adapt a model to fit the underlying system. This then allows a machine to learn a system, model or environment such that it can then predict outputs or understand outcomes based on certain inputs and criteria.

Meta Tag

Meta Tag

NAP

Name, Address, Phone number (NAP) is especially important in local search.

Having consistent business details across multiple profiles, platforms and listing sites is important.

NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a growing area of content marketing and SEO whereby a machine can understand what entities and items certain text is talking about. Seeing Nlp identify sections of text graphically can open up a window into how Google may see certain web pages and display certain search results. NLP is an acronym for other things too but in the context of SEO it is referred to Natural Language Processing.

PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the term for the sponsored (non-organic) search results and typical uses a model focused around a charge per click.

This model is attractive because it provides quick results.

PPC and SEO combined under the banner of SEM can be a very effective combination.

PR

Page Rank (PR) is Google’s signature metric for assigning a value to a page and it forms the basis for their algorithm. Page Rank is based on links, with links being seen as votes for a page. A seed set of high PR rank 10 sites is established as a trusted set and this link value propagates throughout the web.

PS

Page Score (PS) is another metric similar to DA by Moz to assign a score or weighting to a web page.

PA

Page Authority (PA) is another metric similar to DA by Moz to assign a score or weighting to a web page.

QDF

Query Deserves Freshness

QS

Quality Score (QS)  is another metric similar to DA by Moz to assign a score or weighting to a web page.

Redirect (301, 302 etc)

Redirect (301, 302 etc)

Response Code

A web server response code

Robot

A robot or spider is a program that search engines use to crawl your site. There are many different varieties of robots – for example, Google’s is called Googlebot. Many of these programs first look for the robots.txt file on your site to understand what they can and can’t look for in your site.

Robots.txt

The Robots.txt protocol was introduced to give instructions to a search engine on what it was allowed to crawl and what it should not crawl. The intent was to avoid indexing of private or nonpublic information.

ROI

Return On Investment (ROI) is possible the most important business metrics and a key KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Return on Investment is the amount generated from a spend.

In digital marketing this is usually how much revenue and profit comes from one particular channels ad spend. For PPC we look at the total number of clicks multiplied by the CPC to get the total ad spend. Then we look at the conversions from that add – usually with UTM tracking code and determine how much revenue was generated from that ad spend.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broader digital marketing term that covers SEO and PPC. This focuses on the process of marketing a business or a brand through any available media found via search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Optimization depending on which side of the pond you are on. This is actually an important consideration when keyword targeting for SEO companies.

This is the process of adjusting on and off-page factors to improve a website’s rankings.

SEO is a process, not an event. The process takes time to conduct and requires careful execution with extensive research. SEO provides the best long-term ROI.

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the pages of results you see in a search engine for a search term. The goal is always to be high up on page 1 as the CTR falls off quickly after the first few results.

SPAM

Sites Placed Above Mine

Well OK – this one is a joke that’s not really an SEO acronym but I think it’s pretty appropriate

Spider

A spider is another name for a robot. This is the program that search engines use to crawl and visit your site.

TBT – Total Blocking Time

TBT – Total Blocking Time

TF-IDF

Term Frequency / Inverse Document Frequency is a metric that looks at how related a page is to a keyword when compared to a set or corpus of pages and documents.

It is used in keyword research and content marketing.

There is some controversy over the use and applicability to SEO. We consider it to be useful to understand contextual relevance.

TTFB

Time To First Byte (TTFB) is the amount of time it takes to receive the first byte of information required to render a web site.

This metric is useful to understand the latency and response times of the infrastructure used to access your site. This is part of the page speed equation which is import for rankings and user experience.

TS

Trust Score (TS)  is another metric similar to DA by Moz to assign a score or weighting to a web page

UGC

User Generated Content (UGC) has recently become more of a commonly used acronym as it is now an attribute to an anchor link on a web site. rel=”ugc” is now something that can be applied to links to identify the as user generated content. UGC in general refers to any content that is produced by a web sites users and not directly by the website publisher.

URL

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the reference to a particular resource on the internet. A web page in the form of https://stolber.com is a URL. An individual image is also a URL.

This is the format used to reference files and pages on the internet.

UTM

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) are tags and tracking parameters used in URLs to aid in tracking campaign performance. Google analytics was Urchin before Google purchased it and turned it into Google Analytics. 

UTM tags are often used in digital marketing campaigns to understand PPC, ROI and KPIs.

UTM tags give you the ability to fully understand where a site visitor came from, how they interacted with your site, and there retention after conversion. They help to understand good and poor-performing ad channels and keywords.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a description for basically the prevalence and use of AJAX and other modern browser-based technologies that enabled a greater level of interactivity and dynamism from websites.

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is related to the decentralization of contents and resources from a central singularly controlled entity. It is also heavily related to blockchain technology and the metaverse.

XML

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a strict and structured form of data. It is often used for configuration files or relatively small databases that can be used with portable web applications.

YMYL

Your Money Your Life (YMYL) is a designation given to certain types of sites that deal with things that effects your money or your life. These include financial and health-related niches mainly.