Glossary

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. 301 redirects send site visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally typed into their browser or selected from a search engine results page. With a 301 redirect you avoid that visitors get a 404 not found error.

A 302 redirect let search engines like Google know that a website or page has been moved temporarily. A 302 redirect is used if you’re planning on eventually bringing the old page back. You could also use a 302 redirect if you want to test out a new page and get some consumer feedback without hurting your rankings from the original page.

A 404 is a HTTP status code indicating that the page you are trying to access does not exist at that location. Often these pages are still found in search results and when visitors click on these pages they get a 404 error.

Anchor or link text is the visible text that a user clicks on to follow a link. Important for SEO in link building as search engines like Google use anchor text to indicate the content relevancy of both the referring site and the referred landing page.

Any link to a website from another website, social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines, used to get a website ranking higher in the search results. These unethical tactics often end in a penalty from search engines like Google. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking and using private link networks.

The percentage of website visitors that do not proceed beyond the page they initially land on. Instead they ‘bounce’ away to a different site. Often this is the web page they were on previously by using the back button.

Or dead link: a web link that now points to a non-existent page or resource. Covers outgoing links to other sites, backlinks from other sites or internal website links. These are bad for your site’s search engine ranking so fix or remove them.

A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or duplicate content appearing on multiple URL’s. In practice, the canonical tag tells Google which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.

Displaying different content to search engines like Google as opposed to human visitors. This is considered a Black hat technique designed to fool the search engines into giving an inflated ranking. Definitely not recommended as your site will be severely penalized and might even be banned from the search indexes.

When a visitor to your website completes a desired goal, this is called conversion. A conversion occurs when someone changes from a passive visitor to an active, interested visitor or customer. Conversion is most likely a sale, but can also be filling in a template, looking at a video, subscribe…

Conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors that convert on your site.

A crawler, bot or spider is a program that search engines (and others) use to gather information on your website.

It’s the part of a webpage, advertisement or piece of content that encourages the audience to do something. A call-to-action is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action”.

In online marketing, CTR stands for the number of clicks advertisers receive on their ads per number of impressions. Clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.

The level of trust (so ranking) that a site is credited with for a particular search query by the search engines like Google. Derived from a large series of factors including visitor traffic, backlinks, social media shares and bounce rate.

A backlink from another website which targets a content relevant page of your website rather than the front page. Ideally, the link will be from a content relevant page on the outgoing website also.

“Dofollow” backlink passes the authority (link juice) from the referring website to the linked website. Crawlers count these links and their anchor texts. Therefore, “dofollow” backlinks directly influence your backlink profile because they send a signal to Google what the linked website is about. 

“Nofollow” backlink does not pass the authority because a tag in the HTML code of the website tells crawlers not to follow these backlinks. Google does not transfer the authority or anchor text across nofollow links.

Similar or exactly the same content on another page or website. Avoid unless you have the canonical URL set. If you use too much duplicate content on your website search engines will consider it as spam.

This is an outgoing link to another website. Although the recipient is normally considered the primary beneficiary, there can be SEO benefits for the giver if the link is a ‘good’ quality editorial link to a page with related content.

A favicon – short for favorite icon – also known as shortcut or bookmark icon, is a small 16×16 or 32 x 32 pixel icon that serves as branding for your website. Its main purpose is to help visitors locate your page easier when they have multiple tabs open. Due to their tiny size, favicons work best as simple images or one-to-three characters of text. Favicons are not to be confused with  logos but are sometimes the same. Due to its small size and resolution, the favicon may need to be an even smaller sizer or part of a company’s original logo.

Adding new quality content to your website helps with the ranking. The key word here is quality.

These are the guidelines provided by Google to help you build a good presence in their search engine.