Glossary of SEO Terminology

An SEO Glossary of common terms, acronyms and related web terminology.

We have provided this glossary of search engine optimisation terms to help both, newcomers, and the more experienced SEO'rs out there. It is by no means complete though we have tried to include as much as we can.

Help us improve the glossary by submitting new terminology here.

Link

A link is the clickable part of a web page that sends you to another webpage. Links play a major part in SEO as a link to your website is like a vote that your website/webpage is of good quality. Linking is a major factor in the Google algorithm.

Landing Page

A landing page is a page a website visitor goes to once the visitor clicks a link. Landing pages are often referred to as the pages that you are optimising for in the search engines for your chosen keyphrases.

Link Exchange

A link exchange is when two websites place each others links on their website. This can be helpful in gaining more traffic to your website if the link is placed on a website that is relevant to yours. This tactic is used to improve search engine listings, however Google devaluated links that where of a reciprocal nature as they where seen to be used only to gain rankings in the search engines.

Long Tail

long tail refers to a search query for example "TV" would be a broad search query where "Sony 32" HD TV" would be a long tail query. These can often be far more targeted and can be a good keyphrase to optimise your website for as there may be less competition.

Link Building

A search engine optimisation technique to increase incoming links to your website. This can result in higher search engine listings and increased PageRank.

Link Text

Link text (see also anchor text) is the text that is clickable in a webpage that takes you to another webpage either on another website or within the current website.

LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and is part of the search engines algorithm to identify text relevancy. The text surrounding links will be analysed to see if they are associated with a particular keyphrase or search query. For example for the search query "SEO" the surrounding text may be searched for words like "company", "services" and "Professional".

Link Love

A link that forwards trust to an external source, for example a webpage that can pass link love is a webpage that is relevant to your website and may have a high PageRank or be from a website that is seen as an authority within your industry.

Link Popularity

Link popularity refers to the measure of how popular your website is based on the number of incoming links.

Link Hoarding

This means when a website does not link out to any external
sources and in the process does not send any of its link juice
to another website.