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. |

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