SEO Glossary Part 1

Do you often hear about SEO terms that don't understand? In this glossary, I'll give you a list with some of the most important SEO concepts so you can master this subject and improve your site's ranking. Keep this guide near, so you can use it each time you have any doubt.

Alt Tag

The term “alt tag” is a commonly used abbreviation of what's actually an alt attribute on an img tag. Every time you have an image in your text, the alt tag should describe what’s on the image. Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and thus make your image accessible.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible text in a link or hyperlink that provides information about the content you want to redirect users and search engines.

Search engines have improved over time and increased the factors that they use to create their rankings positions. One of these metrics or factors is the link’s relevance.

Link’s relevance depends on the authority of the page where the link comes from, as the visible text of the anchor text. The link must always be as natural as possible or Google will see it as a bad practice.

Backlinks

Backlinks are those inbound links from other sites pointing to yours. The number of backlinks you get are important, because the more you get, more notoriety you’ll gain in the eyes of Google. Make sure those are natural and convenient links, always quality over quantity.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is called to attempt to improve search engine rankings of a website using unethical techniques or guidelines that contradict Google’s rules, It's basically cheating. These practices are increasingly penalized by Google. Examples of Black Hat SEO are:

• Cloaking
• Spinning
• SPAM in forums and blog comments
• Keyword Stuffing

Bread Crumbs

This is a section of your Website which helps users understand their location within the whole website. It is coded by the webmaster and usually appears close to the top of the page.

An example can be seen on this page where the breadcrumbs are:

Home > SEO Glossary > What are Breadcrumbs?

This states that the route to the page (from the home page) is via the SEO Glossary page.

Breadcrumbs are extremely helpful to internet users in very large websites and especially in shopping sites where they can confirm they are browsing in the right area

Canonical issue

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

Canonical Tag

The Canonical tag was introduced by Google, Yahoo! and Bing in 2009 to solve the problem of duplicate or similar content in SEO.

If there is no canonical tag in your code in a set of pages with duplicate or similar content, search engines will have to decide which is the URL that best fits what you are specifically looking for the user.

However, if we introduce this label, we’re the ones who indicate to Google and other search engines what is our favorite page. This will improve the process of indexing and positioning of our website in SERPs.

Example Canonical tag: <link rel = "canonical" href = "http://www.mywebsite.com/principal" /> "

Cloaking

Cloaking is a technique widely used in Black Hat SEO, which is to show different content depending on whether a user or a search engine robot who reads it.

Google is very hard on this practice and even years may have yielded results, forget it, it is beyond what searchers are looking with updates: a more natural, ethical and more focused SEO users.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). In principle is not penalized, unless a high percentage of your page have duplicate content.

There are two types of duplicate content: internal duplicate content and external duplicate content.

Although not involving a penalty, duplicate content can generate a potential loss of positioning because search engines do not know which are the most relevant pages for a given search.

Follow

Google created a metric called PageRank to calculate the link points. Many SEO folks refer to link points as “link juice.”

The link juice flows through sites and into new sites through hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, or best pagerank have, the bigger boost of link juice the linked-to site gets.

Follow links are links that count as points, pushing SEO link juice and boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the SERPs as a result.

Google’s Algorithm

Google’s Algorithm is the way that the search engine positions the different pages or websites based on the search, i.e, is what decides whether you came up first, second or on the second page.

This algorithm changes 500 times a year and it is hard to keep it the track. Therefore it is better to be aware of all the important changes like Panda & Penguin, how they affect SEO and how to recover from them.

Google Panda

Google Panda is a change in Google’s algorithm that was published in the United States in February 2011 and in Europe in April of the same year. On his way, it affected more than 12% of all search results.

Panda maximum not to be penalized is to be sure that your content is completely original and adds great value to your user, you keep the date or even looking for new formats to enrich your contribution to the user page.

The most actionable metrics, in this case, will bounce rate, CTR in your search results, the time spent and the number of page views.

Google Penguin

Penguin is the official name for the Google algorithm update designed to fight webspam. This update was released in April 2012.

It focuses on factors off-site from a web, rewarding those sites that have a profile links with links domains of high quality and unmanipulated, and trying to punish those pages that have violated the guidelines of Google, which have profiles unnatural links, too many links on low quality sites, etc.

Headings: H1, H2, H3

The different headings are important to structure your information. The most important keyword should be in your H1 and at least in one of your H2.

In classic HTML, there would be 1 H1 tag on each page, maybe a couple of H2’s etc and these would all combine to form an outline of the entire document.

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.