SEO Glossary – Making Sense of SEO

A domain is the web address of a website. It consists of two parts: the name of the website and the domain extension. These are all examples of domains with the “.com” part forming the Top Level Extension. In the early 80s, if you wanted to access files on a server that was connected to…

What is black hat in SEO? Using techniques and methods to manipulate and trick the search engines into giving your website a higher ranking. Sometimes people refer to black-hat SEO as being illegal. This is not true, there is nothing illegal about black-hat SEO unless you start hacking third-party websites for your own means –…

What are permalinks in SEO? Permalinks are what WordPress calls URLs that are search engine friendly and human-readable. The naming of Permalink is a bit misleading because it actually refers to a URL and not a link, so it probably should have been called PermaURL. Before there were content management systems (CMS) most web pages…

What is PBN in SEO? Private Backlink Networks, or PBN, are websites owned by the same person or entity. The sole purpose of these websites is to artificially build backlinks to other websites, either by trading links (link exchanges) or selling links. Some people might even run PBNs for their own money websites. Google takes…

What are 301 redirects in SEO? A 301 redirect is a server-level method to automatically and instantly redirect a user from one URL to another URL. It also tells search engine bots like Googlebot that the indexed URL has permanently moved to a new URL. When accessing a URL, servers have a number of different…

What is SERPs in SEO? SERPs is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s the page that a user sees when they do a search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine. The Google SERPs are constantly evolving and are unrecognizable from the first version of the results page that…

What is Technical SEO? Technical SEO refers to the optimization of the website speed, page experience, and managing search engine crawl budgets and crawl paths. It covers the ranking factors that are separate from keywords, which is what on-page optimization and off-page optimization (often referred to as backlink building) are responsible for. Google has made…

What is a backlink in SEO? A backlink in SEO simply means another website has linked to one of your web pages. This is important because one of the biggest ranking factors that Google considers is how many third party websites link back to yours. This is the foundation of Google PageRank. Each backlink is…

What are broken links in SEO? A broken link is a link on a web page that does not take the user to the intended page if they clicked on it. This could be because the web page no longer exists, or it is on a new URL without a 301 redirect, or the website…

What is a URL in SEO? URL is an abbreviation for universal resource locator, or URL for short. It tells the computer where a web page or file is located on another computer. When you type in www.example.com/ebooks/seo-strategy-ebook.pdf then you are telling your computer to find the server (a server is just a computer that…