Digital Marketing and SEO Dictionary

Acronymn for Content Delivery Network, process of putting the assetts of a website on a de-centralized server network allowing for people in different geographic locations to access those assets as quickly as possible from servers near them.

When performing black hat SEO tactics, a website may suffer from a penalty so bad that Google de-indexes the entire site.

When links are generated on external websites, an inherent value is passed to the recipient website that helps increase the overall ranking.

The strength of a website based on a number of factors which make it’s position stronger in the search engines.

Text wrapped with <h1></h1> in code, often used to highlight major sections of content and regularly contain important keywords or phrases for the page.

See Link Juice.

Code related optimization, universally recognized coding standards by all search engines, used to specifically identify different parts of your website (ie Company Name, Logo, Address, etc).

A link that exists on another website that points to a url on your site that no longer exists.

Any content or links generated in an attempt to provide a quick boost to seo rankings without providing real value.

Ranking strategies used to clearly manipulate the search engine results pages so that the site you are optimizing shows up higher in the results.

By abiding by the “rules” of ranking a website the natural way, while supplementing with strategies to help organically push the ranking along.

No manual work to help increase the amount of content or links talking about your site, letting it all happen naturally.

If Google discovers any manual manipulation of ranking factors that would likely increase your rankings, and deems that work as innappropriate, you may suffer a decrease in ranking because of it.

As the engineers at search engines refine the different weight placed on the many ranking factors, they release those updates to the search results. As machine learning improves, these updates will happen less frequently and will constantly happen in real time.

Placing an abundance of unneccesary links on a single page in an attempt to increase the ranking of a website.

Work done on the content and code of the website which is trying to be ranked higher in the search results.

Work done on the content and links that exist on other websites that talk about or link to the site trying to be ranked higher in the search results.

Cleaning the code and content of a site to be more in line with website and search engine best practices.

Outdated tactic of placing a link on your site to another site in white font color on a white background so that the link is invisible to the naked eye, but indexed by the search engine. Doesn’t work.

Outdated tactic of repeating the same word or phrase multiple times on your website in order to tell the search engine the keyword you want to rank for.

The number of times your keyword is mentioned in your content. The ideal keyword density is in the 1-2% of all your content should contain text related to your keyword or phrase.

Acronym for Name, Address, Phone and sometimes URL. Used when speaking about directory listing rankings, mostly important for a brick and mortar business. Usually a business will use a directory service like Moz Local to manage this information across the web.

Often used as a tool for search engine optimization, the location of articles created by you as the site owner are aggregated on the blog. WordPress is a platform that is often used for blogging.

Link and text displayed on the search result pages of google that are placed at the top of the search results in exchange for compensation.