A SEO term based on "user experience first" design.

When creating websites, it is important to take the user experience into account, and keep it at the centre of your entire process. A great user experience will lead to more time spent on your website, lower bounce rates and higher conversions.

It is important to keep these three things in mind:

• The access to content must be easy, that means clear and legible fonts, sensibly placed elements and a clear path to your content.
• Ensure that your website loads fast, and has no layout shifting.
• No dark patterns. That includes pop-ups, even on exit intent. A happy user is a converting user, and bothersome pop-ups directly lead to unhappy users.

Both a SEO term and an algorithm created by Google for ranking pages.

While your pages official PageRank score can no longer be obtained, as Google retired the official testing tool in 2016, most SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush and many more, create their own version of PageRank, usually in an effort to attribute a weighted value of authority to a website or domain.

PageRank, the algorithm, appears to still be in use to this day, likely still using inbound and outbound links, and the PageRank of those pages, to weigh and rank pages across the internet.

Note: If you would like to read the original 1997 paper on the algorithm, written by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, you can find it on Stanford University's website: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Results provided by a search engine, based on a search query.

Organic results are the results returned based solely on the websites ranking factors and their SEO efforts, as opposed to the Ads often found as the first set of links.

As an example, Google searches often include Ads powered by their own ads platform; Google Ads. These are paid for, and are not part of the organic results.

A site map is complete list of all pages within a whole website.

These site maps are often formatted as an XML file, structured in a way to help web crawlers easily find all pages to look through.

XML site maps can be styled with CSS, in order to be more both more visually pleasing, but also much more readable to humans.

Some websites also include a dedicated page for a human-friendly overview of the entire site.

Site maps are critical to SEO.

A link that directs to a page or content that no longer appears to exist.

Errors like 404, various server errors and even changed URLs can lead to broken links.

Many SEO tools offer scans to look for broken links. Make sure to keep an eye on any broken links, and to fix or replace them as soon as possible, as they can negatively impact both your link profile and directly affect your search engine rank.

The ratio of users who successfully click on a specific link, compared to the total number of users who have received or seen the link, often used to measure the relative success of a Call to Action link on a website, other online marketing and the like.

You can technically calculate a CTR on every link on your website, but choosing which ones to monitor is important. You don't want to miss valuable data, but you also don't want to receive so much data it becomes meaningless.

A set of keywords that directly include a business or brand name.

These are often less competitive, but rely on brand awareness to be effective.

An algorithm is by definition "a finite sequence of well-defined instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems", in the case of SEO, that problem is website ranking.

When most SEO professionals refer to "the algorithm" or "Googles algorithm", we're typically talking about the math behind Google's (and others) ranking factors.

These algorithms take the data gathered by millions of web crawls, look at all the data points and calculate page ranking based on those and several other factors, like backlinks and domain authority.

Google has a whole page dedicated to talking about how their algorithm works, should you wish to learn more.

A third party looking through your website for content, such as pages, images, and other files.

These are typically performed by search engines like Google and Bing for indexing purposes, and other applications like SEO and performance tools, for testing and validating page content.

A web crawler is a type of automated script that "crawls" the web, looking at pages, images and other content, usually run by search engines like Google and Bing, to find and index your content. These automated scripts, often referred to as a "bot", can technically be run by anyone.

SEO and performance tools like Ahrefs, SEObility, Morningscore, and many more, use web crawlers for many purposes such as testing page performance, detecting index status, finding page relationships and more.

Most crawlers identify themselves when crawling a site.

You can use a robots.txt file on your server to manage which folders and file types bots are supposed to look for.

A system for gathering visitor data and statistics.

The most commonly used analytics tool is Google Analytics. Google's analytics tools come in a few flavours, the modern "Google Analytics 4" and venerable "Universal Analytics".

Google's approach gathers lots of information, and will in most cases violate GDPR, requiring you to gain visitor consent before you can start tracking. It is also vulnerable to ad-blockers, as they may entirely block the code from running.

There are several GDPR and privacy friendly alternative tracking tools, like Plausible Analytics or Matomo.

We recommend using Plausible, and offer it as part of our AfterCare packages.

Plausible offers largely the same metrics as Universal Analytics, but can be made resilient to ad-blockers and other tracking blockers, due to it not gathering a single identifiable marker.

Tips:

• There's nothing preventing you from having more than one analytics tool.
  • You can run both Google Analytics for advanced remarketing for visitors that have accepted your GDPR policy, and a friendly tracking script like Plausible to get a more accurate representation of total visitors.
• Tracking code can either be placed directly on your website via code or a SEO plugin, or injected via Google Tag Manager if you have that configured.
• Be sure to monitor your sites performance when enabling analytics, as it may adversely affect your sites performance if not properly configured.

A penalty applied directly to the ranking of certain pages with certain keywords, typically after a breach of Google's guidelines.

It can be difficult to detect when you've been penalised, as most actions are taken quietly. Best way to notice is to keep an eye on your traffic, and look out for any unexpected, drastic drops.

Penalties typically only occur when clear breaches take place, such as duplicate content and plagiarism.

Google (and others) change their search algorithms and ranking systems every so often. This is to include new rules, update existing or out of date ones and to reduce the risk of people "gaming the system".

These updates are often quiet small, frequent and go very unnoticed by most people.

Some SEO tools like Rank Math keep an eye on it for you, and alert you in their interface.

Many search engines, like Google, post these updates to the public. You can find Google's on their Search Engine Central Blog.