SEO Terminology Bulletin - Austin Marketing

Alternative text: A word or group of words used in the HTML telling users and Google what the contents of an image is
Anchor text: A link within text is made up of two parts; the destination URL (www.austinmarketing.co.uk/seo-terminology) and the anchor text (SEO Terminology Bulletin). The anchor text is usually the clickable part of the text which will link to the destination URL. The anchor is good for SEO as we can include a keyword of our choice.
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. Code used to make up a webpage.
Backlinks: Links placed on different websites linking to your site demonstrating your site's authority
Bots: Web crawler, spider or robot - automated program browsing the internet to gather information
Bounce rate: The percentage of sessions in which there was no further interaction with the website other than on the landing page
Channels of traffic: Organic, Direct, Referral, Social and Paid traffic are different traffic channels/sources of traffic to the website
Crawled/Re-crawled: The process of Google's bots making their way through different websites and taking in all the content and URLs. Google uses data from crawls to make decisions on the relevance of the website and the content for its search engine users.
Direct traffic: sessions generated by users directly typing the site's URL address in the URL address bar
Focus keyword: keyword which the given page is optimised for
Impressions (AdWords): number of times the ad was served/seen by users in the results
Impressions (Website Page): number of times the page appeared within search results
Index: The index is a database used by search engines and contains all information available from your site. If your site is not in the search engine's index it will not show in the search results.
Internal links: Links placed on your website linking to other pages within your website
Keywords: Keyphrases, search terms, search queries - in the case of tracked keywords these will be the terms we track ranking positions for. Regarding the Google search, the search terms or search keywords are the terms search engine users use when searching.
Landing page: The page in the website that a user enters the website from, most often the home page
Meta description: Descriptive text for a website page appearing as part of search result
Meta title/SEO title: Page title which will appear at the top of every search result
Organic traffic: Also referred to as organic visits, traffic from organic search, organic search traffic. Visits coming from search engines.
Pages/Session: Number of pages viewed per session
Paid traffic: Sessions coming through online advertising such as Google, Bing etc.
Ranking: Ranking/Rank/Position - in relation to keywords means a position of a page in the Google search results for a given keyword
Redirects/redirecting: The action of redirecting traffic from one URL to another, often used to point pages that no-longer exist to live pages with similar or related content
Referral traffic: Also referred to as 'referrals' - sessions coming from links placed on different websites (referring domains)
Referring domains: Domains linking to your site
Search results: The list of web pages appearing after searching using a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo...)
SERP: Search Engine Ranking Pages - the pages that show in the search engine results
Session duration: The average length of a session
Sessions: Also referred to as 'visits'. A sessions is a period of time when a user is engaged with the website.
Slug: Part of an URL identifying the specific page
Social traffic: Sessions coming through social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc.)
Spam traffic: traffic generated by computers, usually bots, not users also referred to as 'ghost traffic'. Spam traffic can affect both referral and direct traffic.
Technical SEO: Includes following: focused keyword, meta title, meta description, alternative text, slug
Traffic: Visits to the website
URL: Universal Resource Locator - the address of www. page
XML Sitemap: A file that provides Google with a list of URLs on your website allowing it to index your site quicker