Top 501 SEO
& marketing terms

A type of digital advertising that mirrors the look and function of the website it appears on, so that it feels more integrated with the on-page content.

This is where website owners or bloggers link to your content, because they believe it will add value for their users.

Navigation on a website refers to the internal link architecture or more simply, how the webpages on a website link together to make it easier for users to find stuff.

An internet search aimed at finding a specific website or webpage.

A malicious ‘black hat’ SEO practice aimed at sabotaging a website’s search rankings.

In marketing this is advertising cost terminology referring to rate card price minus any discount, minus agency costs.

A customer loyalty and satisfaction metric. It is calculated by subtracting the percentage of brand detractors from the percentage of promoters.

A list of the most recent content published on a website or social media platform.

Niche marketing is selling or promoting specialist products or services to a small segment of the marketplace.

A HTML directive aimed at search engines, to prevent them from presenting a cached version of a webpage.

A HTML instruction to search engines to ignore crawling and indexing specific links.

A HTML instruction to search engines to ignore crawling and indexing specific links.

A HTML instruction to search engines to ignore crawling and indexing specific links.

An meta tag that instructs a search engine to avoid indexing a page.

An meta tag that instructs a search engine to avoid indexing a page.

A meta tag that instructs a search engine to avoid showing a snippet (short description) under your listing.

A marketing or sales offer is a proposal to a prospective customer to take up a specific action, such as buying a service or product at a discounted price.

In SEO, this is all actions that can be taken outside of a website to improve its position in search rankings.

All actions that can be taken outside of a website to improve its position in search rankings.

Omnichannel marketing is a method of creating a seamless customer experience and journey from the first communications touchpoint to the last.

The process of introducing a new customer to your products or services.

All actions that can be taken on a webpage to improve its position in search rankings.

All actions that can be taken on a webpage to improve its position in search rankings.

All actions that can be taken on a website to improve its position in search rankings.

Open rate is the percentage of people that open an email you send to them.

The number of times a listener will have the opportunity to hear an advertisement.

The number of times an individual will have the opportunity see an advertisement.

A form to capture consent from an individual to take specific action e.g., permission to pass on their contact details to a third-party.

Placement in search results that is achieved without the help of paid adverts.

Internet traffic that occurs without being driven by paid advertising.

Website pages that are not linked to or from any other page on a website.

Outdoor advertising, such as billboards or bus advertising.

Falling outside of the specified remit, objectives, outputs or outcomes of a project.

An external link from your website to another website.

A metric that predicts how well a web page will rank on a search engine result page.

A metric that predicts how well a web page will rank on a search engine result page. See page authority.

A measurement of how fast a webpage and its content loads.

The title of a webpage that features at the top of a browser and on a search engine results page.

A website analytics metric showing total number of views of a page or pages on a website.

The number of pages on a website viewed by a user in a single session.

Sometimes called a page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file of a website.

The division and layout of content on a website or printed document.

This typically refers to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engine results pages using advertising platforms such as GoogleAds or Bing.

A Google algorithm update aimed at lowering the search rankings of website with low quality content. (Released in 2011).

A type of digital advertising where advertisers are charged a fee based on the number of times their advert is clicked on.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a common file format used for documents, formatted text and images.

A Google penalty is enforcement issued by Google for breaking their guidelines. A Google penalty typical results in a website no longer being listed in search results, or a significant drop in rankings.

A feature box that appears on Google search engine results page that answers questions related to the user’s search query.

in marketing a persona is a description of a businesses’ ideal or typical customers.  They are generally defined by demographics, behaviour, location, jobs, interests or needs.

Modifying your marketing activity to meet the individual needs and preferences of your target audiences.  By tailoring your customers experience, they are more likely to buy from you.

Digital communications aimed at fraudulently obtaining sensitive data such as usernames, passwords or bank details.

Short for Hypertext pre-processor, a common, open-source scripting language suited to web development.

A popular image and video sharing social media platform aimed at helping people discover and share information on the internet.

Digital piracy is the unauthorised copying of protected content and then selling or distributing it at a lower price or for free.

In SEO this is when a user quickly bounces back and forth from a search engine results page to a destination site or websites due to them not being able to find what they are looking for.

In SEO, ‘position’ refers to search engine ranking for a specific page or pages.  E.g., No1 position on Google, is the first organic search result that is displayed after a specific keyword search.

Whatever appears at the very top of the organic search results, often a Featured Snippet.

A Private Blogging Network is the linking together of websites in order to build link authority and manipulate search engine results.  This is a black hat SEO technique and should be avoided.

Sometimes referred to as Ansoff’s Matrix, this is a marketing planning model that helps determine product and market growth strategy.

Programming languages are a series of instructions used to instruct computers to implement algorithms and perform specific tasks.

In SEO, this refers to the prominent placement of keywords or phrases on a webpage.

In web development, a protocol details how a web browser should retrieve and display information.

SEO pruning is the process of removing or editing underperforming webpages to enhance the strength and performance of a website.

The buying of links from a third party in order to increase search engine ranking potential. Also known as paid links.

Query Deserves Freshness’ is a Google ranking algorithm. Most searchers are looking for up-to-date content and QDF relates to how current or newsworthy specific queries are.

Quick Response (QR) code is a matrix barcode able to communicate a wide range of information instantly using a mobile device scanner.

A lead whose behaviour, action and engagement with a brand or website indicate that they are more likely to convert to a customer. See Marketing Qualified Lead.

A lead whose behaviour, action and engagement with a brand or website indicate that they are more likely to convert to a customer. See Marketing Qualified Lead.

Visitors to your website that have previously shown interest in your products and services and are therefore more likely to convert to customers.

Content that adds value to your business and has a measurable success factor associated with it.

In SEO a ‘quality link’ or high-quality link is one that is natural, reputable, and relevant. Its impact is typically measurable.

Search words, terms and phrases entered into a search engine.

The order of relevant search results in response to a search engine query.

A machine learning element of Google’s core search algorithm.

A webpage’s position on a search engine results page.

Any aspect that has a direct impact on a website’s position on a search engine results page.

In marketing and advertising, rate card is a list of prices and descriptions for a business’s products and services. Rate card is typically the standard price without any discount applied.

In advertising and marketing, reach is the total number of people who see your advert or content.

Real-time bidding is a method for buying and selling digital advertising. Advertising impressions are sold by means of an online auction process in the split second it takes for a webpage to load.

A reciprocal link is a set of hyperlinks between two websites that point both ways.

An automated instruction that directs a browser from one URL to another URL

Also referred to as URL forwarding, this is a technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address.

Website visitors that arrive on a website from another website without using a search engine.

The webpage that sends users to your website using a link.

The data transmitted by a browser when navigating from one website to another.

Keywords that are unique to a geographic area. Eg Regional colloquial terms such as ‘barm cake’ in the North West of England.

In SEO, reinclusion is the term used for contacting Google and appealing to have excluded content put back into search engine results.

Also known as a canonical tag is a HTML tag that informs search engines that a URL represents the master version of a webpage.

In SEO this can refer to links, keywords, or content.  In basic terms it is how closely your assets meet the needs and requirements of customers, stakeholder, or search engine users.

Code that prevents a webpage from loading quickly. They may not be essential for immediate user experience, so they can be removed or delayed until the browser needs them.

The process where a search engine crawler retrieves a webpage, runs code, and analyses its content and structure. In digital photography, rendering refers to the application of algorithms to manipulate a digital image file.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the practice of shaping and protecting the public perception of an individual, brand or organisation by managing the information that is published on the internet and social media.

A page on a website that provides useful links, resources, or contact details related to a specific subject, product, or service.

Responsive web design is design and development that responds to a user’s behaviour and environment, based on platform, orientation, and screen size.

A website designed using Responsive Webs Design that renders well on a wide range of devices, platforms, and screen sizes.

A term used in advertising to describe adverts and campaigns that target prospective customers after they have browsed your website.  A tracking pixels or cookie is used to follow a user and present adverts to them on different platforms apps and websites after they leave.

Return on investment is a financial measure analysing the relationship between net profit and the cost of investment. It is a ratio that compares the gain or loss from an investment relative to its overall cost.  Calculated by dividing the profit by the cost and can be expressed as a percentage.

A Retweet is the action of re-posting a ‘Tweet’ on popular social media platform, Twitter.  I.e.. Sharing another person’s post.

Rich snippets are enhanced organic search results that have been highlighted by Google to give them prominence on a search results page.  They typically have a higher click-through rate than regular snippets.

A file that informs a search engine bot which pages or files it can and can’t access on a website.

A feed on a website that provides visitors and applications access to the latest updates and news.

A lead that has been identified as being suitable to be contacted by a company’s sales team.

A semantic vocabulary of data tags that can be added to a webpage’s HTML code to improve the manner in which search engines read and present the page in a search.

Website code to help the search engines return more informative results. See Schema.

Website containing code and other resources to help developers and webmasters to create, maintain and promote schemas.

Using bots to extract content and data from a website.  Search engine scraping is the process of collating URLs, descriptions, and other information from search engines.

Content gathered by scraping a website. Lifting original content from one website and publishing it to another without permission is in many cases copyright infringement and should be avoided.

A Google Analytics plugin that tracks how far down a webpage user are scrolling.

A visual project management tool used in Agile Project Management. It is essentially a task board that helps teams manage project management sprints. Commonly used in software development.

A software system designed to carry out searches and find items and content, particularly on the world wide web. E.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go.

Digital marketing aimed at increasing traffic to a website. SEM strategy can involve social media, search engine optimisation, PPC, Google Ads, Google shopping and a range of other digital marketing tactics.

Digital marketing aimed at increasing traffic to a website. SEM strategy can involve social media, search engine optimisation, PPC, Google Ads, Google shopping and a range of other digital marketing tactics.

SEO is the process of improving the amount and quality of organic traffic driven to a website or webpage by a search engine.

The webpage displayed after conducting an internet search.

A search box, field or bar used in computer software, web browsers, and on websites so that users can enter information into it to carry out a search.

A record of webpages visited by a user over a set time period.

A campaign strapline coined and trademarked by UK based digital marketing agency, Aqueous Digital www.aqueous-digital.co.uk

These are guidelines given to Google employees for the purpose of rating websites. Google’s raters are spread across the world and are trained to give feedback and suggestions on how search could be improved.

The word or phrase a person types into the search engine search bar or asks a search engine to find results for.

Refers to users that visit a webpage or website from a search engine results page.

The number of times a specific search is carried out by a search engine over a set period. E.g. the number of times the same keyword is entered into Google per month.

Seasonal marketing involves adjusting and adapting your marketing campaigns and activity to respond to and take advantage of ongoing events or trends. E.g.  Christmas holidays, or demand for certain products and services in warmer or colder seasons.

These are short keywords that have been condensed down into their shortest form and could just be one word such as ‘watch’.

In email marketing this is a numerical representation of an organisations sending reputation. Typically expressed on a scale of 1 to 100.

The process of analysing content to assess the emotional tone of the author (e.g. positive, negative or neutral). Both Google and Bing search engines have algorithms to detect sentiment and apply this to search results.

Search Engine Optimisation.  The process of improving the amount and quality of organic traffic driven to a website or webpage by a search engine.  [link to AD services page].

Search Engine Results Page. Essentially, this is the webpage you will see after doing an internet search.

The different elements that appear on a search engine results page.  E.g. Featured snippets, Google Ads, Related Questions, Local Packs etc.

A formal or informal contract between a supplier and a customer detailing the level of service expected, the way the service will be measured and any penalties, remedies or contingencies that will be implemented, should the service not meet with expectations.

A measure of the proportion of the overall market a brand owns in comparison to competitors.

These are search queries comprising of only one or two words.

How fast a browser can load webpages from a website.

How a website’s content is organised and displayed.

These are links to webpages or sections of pages that feature in the results of a search engine’s results page.

A directory or guide that provides information about the pages, content and assets of a website and how they are connected.

A file containing a list of all the pages of a website. They provide information to search engines about the structure of a website.

A link that appears on almost all of a website’s pages.

In the US a small to medium sized business is defined as follows: 0-100 employees are considered a small-sized business.  100-999 employees are considered a medium-sized business. Typical turnover of a SMB $5-$10million.

In the UK, this is a business with less than 250 employees.  In the European Union SME is a business with between 101 and 500 employees.

Integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business.

A multimedia messaging app that allows users to   send photos and videos (called snaps) to other users.

A search result Google shows to the user in the search results page.  It typically consists of a title, URL, and a description of the webpage.

Websites and software applications that allow people to create and share content or take part in social networking.

The number of times content is shown in a social media feed.

Social proof is an approach used in marketing where psychology is used to assume the actions and behaviour of others in a given situation.

A webpage’s total shares, likes and social media visibility as interpreted by search engines. This is a contributing factor in search engine ranking.

Occasionally referred to as software-on-demand, this is a software licencing model where the right to use the software is sold on a subscription basis.  Examples include Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Creative Suite.

Unwanted and unsolicited digital communications that are typically sent in bulk.

A metric indicating the likelihood of an email or webpage being detected as having low quality content and being registered as spam.  Typically expressed as a numerical scale of spamminess from low to high.

Unethical practices that go against search engine quality guidelines.

A search engine spider is a program used by search engines to collect data from the internet. Also known as a crawler or bot.

Also known as A/B testing or multivariate testing is a process of showing two variants of the same web page or email to different target audiences in order to analyse differences in performance.

An attribute that details different types of images for different displays, screens, and orientations.

A digital certificate that demonstrates ownership of a domain and provides authentication for an encrypted connection.

In HTTP, Status Codes are short messages from a server indicating how the request to view a page went.

This is a word that search engines are programmed to ignore when crawling and indexing content.

Standard formatted information that allows search engines to understand the content of a web page.

A domain that is a part of another domain but below it in system hierarchy.

A word or phrase that you predict a customer could use to find your website using a search engine query.

Website taxonomy is the way a website is structured.  It is essentially a logical classification that makes it easier for users to search and find content on your site.

The process of optimising a website to improve organic search rankings.  Important technical aspects addressed during this process include load speed, rendering, website architecture and search engine crawling and indexing.  [Link to AD services].

Poor quality content that has very little value for the end user.

Through the line marketing is marketing strategy that uses both paid for mass media formats and earned media such as SEO and media relations.  It is a mix of using both above the line and below the line tactics.

Reduced sized versions of images and videos that serve as placeholders. They visually aid searching and finding content.

The length of time a visitor spends on a webpage.

HTML that states the title of a webpage. In SEO, the title tag should contain all the keywords you want that page to rank for.

A name that describes your webpage.  See Title Tag.

An abbreviation used to describe the values of UK Digital Marketing Agency, Aqueous Digital. It stands for Trust, Loyalty and Collaboration. [link to AD values page]

Top of the funnel in marketing is the first touchpoint of a customer journey.

Domains at the highest level of the Domain Name System i.e. in the DNS root zone of the Domain Name System.

These are bad links that can damage your search engine ranking and result in penalties being applied. They can occur organically, or as a result of black hat SEO tactics and spammers.

Small snippets of code that enable you to collect information about a webpage’s visitors.

A metric stating the search ranking of a website compared to all other websites on the world wide web.

The number of visits to a webpage, website or from a specific link or location.

A search query that shows a clear intent to make a purchase.

A search engine’s interpretation of the integrity and trustworthiness of a website.  The quality of website links combined with quality content are important factors influencing domain trust. See Domain Trust [hyper link].

A Google algorithm that analyses websites to distinguish between those featuring high-quality content and links and those that are deemed spam or low quality.

A TVR is a metric used in TV that indicates the popularity of a programme, ad break or advert by comparing its audience to the whole population. 1 TVR = 1% of a target audience.

A microblogging and social networking service where users publish and interact with short messages known as tweets.

A metric that indicates how many individuals have visited your webpage or website as opposed to the total number of times the page or site has been visited.

Also known as Blended Search or Enhanced Search, this is when a search engine draws information from multiple sources and presents them on the search engine results page as a mix of images, local businesses and rich snippets.

Unnatural links (or bad links) are typical bought or created by spammers.  They are artificial links that are designed to manipulate search ranking. See Toxic Links.

Short for Uniform Resource Locator, is a web address that specifies a location on a computer network and a way of retrieving it.

URL folders or URL directories are where URLs are stored hierarchically for every webpage. The individual files of a website are created in these folders.

URL parameters, also known as string queries or URL variables inform search engines how they should deal with a website based on its URLs. They are the portion of the URL that follows a question mark.

Any piece of software that performs the function of retrieving and displaying a webpage for a user such as a web browser.

An individual’s feelings, perceptions and emotions when using a system, product, or a website. UX web design is a process that focuses on developing the best possible, relevant experience for a website user.

Is the point at which human interaction with a machine or software system occurs. A graphical operating system or Graphical User Interface (GUI) such as Microsoft Windows or Apple iOS are good examples of a User Interface.

Any media created by individuals rather than by organisations, companies, or brands.

Short for Urchin Traffic Module code, this is a simple snippet of text that is added to the end of a URL so that you can easily track the performance of a digital marketing campaign or track where website traffic is coming from.

This is a search engine dedicated to searching a specialised or niche subject area.

Viral content is any media, text, images or video that becomes popular very quickly by being shared and distributed across the internet using social media or website links.

A virtual assistant or AI assistant is a software application that understands voice commands and carries out tasks in response to spoken instructions from a user. E.g. Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Amazon Alexa.

SEO Visibility is a percentage measurement of how much organic traffic a website is getting from a search engine for any given keyword.

The process if using a website or app that allows the user to search the internet using spoken voice commands.

An advertising metric indicating the total number of completed views of an advert over the number of impressions. It is essentially the percentage of people who viewed the advert fully.

Regulations issued by search engines that give details of how best to optimise a website so that it can be easily found using a search.

An individual page on a website. It generally hosts content of a similar theme and can be displayed in a web browser.

A family of web pages and content that is grouped together under a common domain name and published on one or more web servers.

Desirable website navigation refers is how a user moves from one webpage to another, finding all the information they need with ease and leaves having had a good experience.

Webspam or search spam are webpages that have been created to artificially manipulate search engine ranking. They typically pretend to host quality content on a subject, but often have useless or thin content.

Ethical search engine optimisation practices that meet with a search engine’s quality and good practice guidelines.

The total number of words on a webpage, or within a specific piece of content.

Word of mouth marketing is where customers actively talk about your brand, products or services to their friends, colleagues, family, followers, or their own target audience.  This can be face-to-face, or by other communications channels such as social media and blogs.  It can be an extremely powerful tool for promoting a brand, which is why many marketing strategies aim to facilitate and encourage it.

A popular free open-source website content management system.

A sequence of tasks that processes a data set.

Extensible Mark-up Language. A computer language similar to HTML.

A file containing a list of all the pages of a website. They provide information to search engines about the structure of a website.

A HTTP field in a webpage response header that gives permission for search engines to crawl the content of a URL.

A search engine and web service provider based in California. Yahoo was one of the early pioneers of internet search in the 1990s.

The most popular search engine used in Russia. It is the fifth most popular search engine in the world.

An online video sharing social media platform owned by Google.