Technology Glossary: Terms and Definitions

A directive given to crawl bots to permanently redirect all incoming traffic from one page, or folder(s) to another page, folder or domain.

An error message given when a user or web browser, attempts to visit a page but could not return any content. E.g. The page no longer exists.

A/B testing is the process of testing variations of web pages, which are shown at random to a group of users, and using statistical analysis to determine which variation performed best.

Account based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy where sales and marketing work together to target specific contacts, leads or customers known by the business.

The product activation rate is the number of users who do something specific to extract value out of your product.

An ad group is a collection of one or more ads organized according to a certain criteria. Each paid advertising campaign contains at least one ad group.

Ad impressions are the number of people who saw your advert, but didn’t interact with it. You can often find this metric in paid advertising channels.

Ad variations test and create different versions of your Google ads to see how well they perform with each variation.

Advertising research is the investigative process of market research to optimise the success of your advertising strategy.

An alt tag is a type of HTML text that contains information telling users and crawlers that there is an image present on the web page, and information about that image.

Anchor text, also known as a link title or link label, is the clickable phrase or keyword that embeds a hyperlink within it. It can link internally or externally. It often stands out from the rest of the text as a coloured link.

Article spinning, also known as content spinning, is where a piece of content, like a blog post, is rewritten hundreds of times, often with the help of ‘spinning software’. It is considered a black hat SEO technique as it usually produces poor quality and unhelpful content for the end user.

Auto-generated content is programmatically created content via code for the purpose of publishing and indexing large amounts of pages in SERPs. Not all auto generated content is inherently "black hat"

Backlinks are external hyperlinks used to link from one website to another. They form an integral part of search-engine optimization, often touted as the main ranking factor search engines use to rank pages.

A bid strategy determines the way you bid in paid advertising platforms for your ads to show up in available spaces.

Black hat SEO, is a form of search engine optimization where a website uses ill practices in order to artificially improve their rankings for search queries. These practices often break service agreements and can lead to penalties.

A blog post is a piece of content in written form, published on a blog. Blog posts can often contain multimedia including, images, audio and video.

Bottom of Funnel Keywords

Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who view a single page on your website. In layman’s terms, bounce rate refers to people who land on a page on your website and leave afterwards without navigating to other pages.

Brand reputation management is the process of monitoring and improving the perception people have of that brand. Some benefits of effective brand reputation management include; higher customer NPS, increased retention and higher profits.

A breadcrumb trail is a tool that helps users navigate a website and appears in the form of a menu or single line at the top of the page. Breadcrumbs notify the user of the structure of the website, enabling them to return to the homepage after exploring the site’s pages.

A call to action (CTA) is a prompt on a website that urges visitors and prospects to take a specific action. It often comes in the form of a statement or a text line within a sales pitch and it encourages an immediate response from the person reading it.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel or don’t renew their subscription to your service within a given time period.

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who clicked through to an offer, after seeing it via an advertisement or campaign. Your click-through rate can be calculated by dividing the number of clicks by impressions and multiplying that by 100.

Clicks is a marketing metric which represents the number of people who clicked, visited or interacted with your marketing campaigns.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique whereby a website presents different content to the crawler, in an attempt to index better and rank higher in SERPs. The user experience is very different and sites often appear unreadable.

The process of analysing the competitive landscape of a business to seek opportunities which could lead to business growth.

Process of analysing the performance of all content produced by a business, to make decisions and form new strategies.

Content decay is a piece of content that has been decreasing in organic traffic over a long period of time.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) refers to a group of web servers which are dispersed globally to provide a speedy delivery of content. This is much more efficient than using a central server and is typically used for websites that attract a lot of traffic.

A content farm is a website or company that creates vast amounts of content that is usually duplicated and low-quality, written specifically to fulfil algorithms and rank highly in SERPs.

A content gap can be defined as the space between what users are seeking out on the web, and the results they receive. It is essentially a gap in the market that needs to be filled in order to fulfil search intent.

Software that provides tools for users to create, manage, host and share content.

The process of distributing, promoting and marketing content to reach a business’ target audience.

Content optimization in SEO involves ensuring content is written and presented in a way that search engines can understand and serve it to your target audience. 

A strategy for creating, publishing and promoting content to achieve specific marketing and business goals.

The act of writing content to convince people to take action. This content can come in the form of emails, sales pages, one-pagers, landing pages, blog posts and more.

Cost per action, or cost per acquisition, is a metric that measures how much it costs to generate an action through advertising.

A metric used to measure how much it costs to acquire a conversion (such as a customer). It is calculated by taking how much money is spent on an ad campaign, divided by the number of conversions (customers) over the same time period.

A measure of how much it costs to generate an action. An action can be determined to be a click, form completion, review, conversion, or any action at all.

An advertising model that charges advertisers on a per click basis.

A budget assigned to a website by Google bots. Your crawl budget determines the number of URLs a Google bot is able to crawl.

Day Parting

Disavow backlinks is the process of instructing Google to ignore unwanted backlinks in order to positively impact ranking in SERPs. This can be done using Google’s Disavow Tool.

Any link that is not assigned a nofollow is a dofollow link. This is a HTML attribute assigned to a backlink that allows users and crawlers to discover and access the website.

Domain Authority or DA is a search engine score created and developed by SEO platform MOZ to determine how well a website will rank on SERPs.

Duplicate content refers to content that is similar or identical to content elsewhere on your domain or other domains.

Dwell time is the duration of time a searcher spends on a web page after clicking on the link in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), before then returning to the list of search results.

The practice of buying and selling products, physical or digital via an online marketplace.

The percentage of users who opened an email campaign. Open Rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens, by total emails sent, multiplied by 100.

The activity of creating and sending email marketing campaigns to specific individuals to get them to take a positive action.

The percentage of users who reply to an email campaign. It is calculated by dividing the number of replies by the total number of emails sent, multiplied by 100.

Software used to run email marketing campaigns at scale. Can also refer to email clients like Gmail and Outlook.

Exact Match Keywords is a filter used in paid advertising campaigns to target users who only use these exact search queries.

An external link is a hyperlink that points from one website to another, also called an outbound link.

Flexible sampling is a markup that enables Google crawlers to crawl an entire website in order to index all of its content.

The freshness factor is a part of search engine algorithms that gives priority to newer more recently updated content for some search queries.

Gated content is a type of content online locked behind a form that requires visitors to fill in their information. The form often requires users to enter their names and email addresses. But it may go further into asking for more precise details such as industry and job title.

A gateway page is a page that redirects a user to a new page without fulfilling their request or answering their search query.

The General Data Protection Regulation is an EU law all businesses who capture data on web users from the EU have to abide by.

Goal tracking is the process of tracking core business and marketing objectives. They’re most commonly used in website analytics software to track the effectiveness of channels, pages and campaigns.

A Google Crawler is the name of the automatically programmed internet robot that Google uses to find, review and track new content. It discovers new content through jumping from internal and external links. Google’s lead crawler is the Google Bot.

EAT is an acronym from Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in ‘Page Quality’ and stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust. It is the metric by which Google determines the quality of a website, and its ability to rank.

The Google Panda Update was first launched in 2011 and named after Google Engineer, Navneet Panda, when content farms rose in popularity. It was developed to decrease the number of low-quality websites appearing in SERPs and boost the rankings of websites that adhered to guidelines. It is now integrated into Google’s core algorithm.

A Google penalty is an action of penalisation placed on a website for using ill practices to artificially increase their rankings on Google’s search engine.

The Penguin Update was launched in 2012 and named the ‘Webspam Algorithm Update’. It was created by Google to help reduce the number of sites appearing in SERPs that were using black hat seo techniques to manipulate results with link schemes. It is also now part of Google’s core algorithm.

HTTP Status Response Codes

Header tags, or HTML tags are used to divide up the different headings in a page’s content. They are hierarchically structured from H1- H6 with H1 being the main header and the subsequent tags being the subheadings.

Inbound marketing refers to any marketing that's based on creating valuable content to attract new leads. Customers looking for solutions will then find that content and consume it voluntarily.

Indexing is the process by which Google crawlers store and categorise information and content they find on websites, ready to be displayed in SERPs.

Internal links or inbound links are hyperlinks on a web page that link to another web page in the same domain.

Interstitial Webpage

Keyword cannibalization, or topic duplication, refers to the phenomenon of having multiple pages targeting the same keyword. This can occur by accident, or can be a deliberate tactic.

Keyword clustering refers to the process of creating a group of keywords that are semantically linked to target a page, rather than one targeted keyword.

Keyword difficulty is the metric by which website owners can measure how much competition there is for a particular keyword, and in turn determine how difficult it is to rank for it in SERPs. It is scored from 0-100, and the lower the score the easier it is to rank for a keyword.

Keyword research is a market research based activity often used to identify words and phrases most appropriate to target, in order to generate brand awareness and attract a specific target audience.

Keyword stuffing is the process of inserting as many keywords as possible into the content of a web page in hopes of optimising it for higher rankings in SERPs.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is used by search engines to discover terms related to keywords within content so they can provide search results that accurately reflect searcher intent.

A landing page or lead capture page is a page where users land to complete a specific action. Here's how to create an effective landing page.

Lead generation is the process of using marketing channels, software and strategies together to attract leads (also known as prospects) into the sales and marketing funnel.

Link building is an SEO-based marketing activity of generating backlinks from a set of websites to your website in order to rank pages higher in search engines.

Link equity, also referred to as “link juice”, is a search ranking signal based on the idea that a link can pass authority from one page to another.

Local SEO is the practice of increasing search visibility and brand awareness of local businesses to users who are searching for their product or service right now.

The process of using software to automate marketing activities focusing on pushing leads further down the funnel.

A short description search engines use to categorise web pages in their index. Length can range from 120-160 characters.

Meta tags are descriptive tags which search engines use to place web pages in their index.

A descriptive title of a web page which search engines use in their index. Maximum of 60 characters.

Middle of Funnel Keywords

Mobile responsiveness refers to whether a website is optimised to be functional and aesthetically pleasing on devices of different sizes.

Search queries, advertisers use to prevent their campaigns from attracting unwanted attention.

Negative SEO or Google Bowling is the practice of employing black hat SEO techniques against other websites, in an effort to get them penalised and lower their ranking in SERPs.

Nofollow is a HTML attribute that instructs Google crawlers not to follow a hyperlink. It first made an appearance in 2005 and was created with the intention of combating comment spamming.

Noindex is meta tag that can be attached to the HTML code of a web page, which instructs Google crawlers not to index a specific page to ensure it doesn’t show up in SERPs.

The process of optimising web pages for search engines and end users. Making it easier for search engines to figure out what a web page is about.

The opposite of paid traffic. Organic traffic is traffic generated to a website through organic channels only. SEO and social media are examples of organic traffic channels.

Orphan pages are pages on a website that don’t have any outgoing links. This means they don’t link to anywhere else on the website for further navigation or exploration and are effectively a dead end.

Page Authority or PA is a score which was created and developed by marketing analytics company Moz, to indicate where a specific page will rank on SERPs. Page authority is different to domain authority, which measures the authority of an entire website.

Paid advertising is any form of internet advertising that a marketer or company pays for. With paid ads, advertisers are basically renting a space on a platform with their target audience and advertising their offer.

Paid Search is a type of online marketing which search engines like Google leverage to show ads on their SERPs.

Paid traffic is traffic that is generated through paid means only. Paid traffic from search engines is directed to a website when a user clicks on an ad placed on a search engine results page for a particular search query.