Important SEO term meanings explained in plain English by Perth’s SEO expert. SEO word/phrase definitions are explained in this SEO glossary by an Australian SEO expert. Demystifying SEO jargon. See the list below of words and acronyms used in SEO and some web development.

SERP	Search Engine Results page.
SEO	Search engine optimisation. Read what does SEO do?
SEM	Search engine marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) to search engines. Google’s brand of SEM is Adwords.
URL	Web address. See it in the address line of web browsers.
SMO	Social Media Optimisation or Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Digital marketing	Online marketing, web marketing, internet marketing including: SEO, SMO, online advertising, email marketing, map marketing, video marketing online, CRM marketing, SEM
Address line	Where you can type/paste a URL near the top of a web browser to get to a web page.
httpS	Secure website protected by encryption. Shows as a black padlock after you arrive at the web site.
Impressions	How many times your listing shows on SERPs
CTR	Click Through Rate. How many times your link was clicked versus time.
Organic SERPs	Your unpaid listings showing on search engines. With Google organic listings start under Google Business Profiles.
GMB	Google My Business. Previously named Google Places.
GBP	GMB’s latest renaming to Google Business Profile.
GSC	Google Search Console emails tips and stats to website owners
GA	Google Analytics
Google Insights	Simplified version of GA. Available via GBP.
DoFollow link	Confers link juice to the target URL.
NoFollow link	Blocks search engine spiders from following a link. No link juice. Most social sites only provide nofollow links.
H tag	Hierarchical level of headings on a web page for page structure. Every web page should have only one H1 tag, preferably for good SEO at the top of your page. Used incorrectly by many web designers for formatting only. Eg They’ll use a h1 tag for a big font for non-keyword rich tex in the middle of the page. Also used incorrectly by many copywriters for persuasion by using my pet hate word “welcome” in H1 tags at the top of web pages.
Backlink	A link from another website web page with a link to your page.
Link building	The campaign of getting more, hopefully, quality backlinks to your web pages. Natural link building is best done by having quality, interesting content on your web pages that inspire webmasters to link to your pages. Paid link building if caught out is a search engine penalty.
Absolute link	Same as above. A link from another website web page with a link to your page.
Relative link	A link from one of your web pages to another one of your web pages.
Image alt tag	Originally invented in the HTML of images for visually impared people so that computers could read out a description of the image. Used by search engines to confirm that image alt tags support the copywriting for SEO and other SEO ranking signals.
UX	User experience.
Page load speed	The speed at which your web page loads. A UX that is an important search engine ranking signal
Canonical URL	Best representative page from a group of duplicate pages
hypertext	The words linking from. In the old days by default, it was blue and underlined.
hyperlink	Link from hypertext
PR	Page rank. A term dropped by Google. Page authority. Power/performance potential of a web page in SERPs.
DR/DA	Domain Rating (by aHrefs.com)/Domain Authority (by MOZ.com). The authority of a whole website. Websites with a high DR usually perform better in SERPs for every phrase.
UR	A web page rating index by aHrefs. Similar to PR
CMS	Content Management System. Software in the cloud used for making websites. The most popular brand of CMS is WordPress.
HTML	The behind a web page code that displays a page on a web browser. It’s what search engines and I look at. It’s the end result that CMS and purist HTML editors produce. How to see HTML? Right-click this web page in a plain white area. Select/left-click “view page source”.
Page title	The most important SEO factor. Should be limited to 60 characters. In Google SERPs page titles show in bold fonts on top of each listing description.
cPanel	Brand name of a popular web hosting management system.
Description meta tag	After page titles in HTML, it’s the second most important SEO factor. Should be limited to 156 characters. In Google SERPs it shows under bold page title words.
Web hosting service provider	A business that hosts your website in their hopefully secure, reliable data centre.
Exact match domain name	Look in the address line of your browser to see a domain name between forward slashes. An exact match domain name contains exactly the words people search for. Eg hotelmarketingasia.asia or seoperth.expert
Web page schema	Web page schema is a way of providing search engines with additional information about the content on your web pages. Using Schema markup, also known as structured data, you can provide semantic vocabulary (code) that helps search engines identify and classify the elements on your page. This allows them to better understand the content and provides more accurate search results for users.
Web server	A hopefully secure and reliable hard drive in a data centre with your web content, eg pages and images, which are served to the world wide web www.
cPanel	A popular web hosting control panel brand. Use it for all sorts of things like file management of content on your web server.
Content Marketing	Content marketing is best done with SEO. Adding content online, usually on a web page and driving people to experience it. Examples of content are words, images, sounds, videos, charts, spreadsheets, forms, maps, etc. Besides SEO other types of marketing including traditional marketing can be used to send visitors to your content.

Contact me if you want an explanation of an SEO term not explained on the SEO glossary web page.