Shopify SEO Glossary: Terminology

Before we jump into learning about SEO, let’s learn the most important terminology and their meaning.

That way you can understand this in-depth SEO guide.

• Search engine
  • Website or application (like Google or Bing) that collects a directory of all the worlds useful websites. When someone searches a keyword or “search query” (see below) it uses an algorithm to show the most relevant and high-quality website to answer the user’s question.
• Algorithm
  • A set of steps search engine applications take to chose which website is the best to show to help with the user’s question.
• SERPs
  • SERPs or search engine results pages are the pages you see on search engines like Google when you type in a keyword. Normally you see the webpages title, URL and description. So the user can learn more about each website and page before clicking.
• Keyword
  • Your SEO keywords are the words and phrases in your website that make it possible for users to find your store using search engines.
• Search query
  • A keyword that a user types into a search engine to find websites, webpages and information to answer their question.
• Sitemap
  • A list of the pages on a website for search engines to read and add to their directory.
• Index
  • An index is another name for the database or directory collected and used by search engines to recommend people websites. Helping them answer questions.
• Crawl
  • The process of searching through websites pages and technical information to add it to a database or directory.
• Backlink
  • A backlink is simply a link from one webpage to another webpage.
  • An external backlink is a link from one website to another website.
  • An internal backlink is a link from one webpage to another webpage in the same website.
  • The anchor text is the text string the backlink is wrapped around.
  • A “do follow” link passes the SEO link power from one page to another page.
  • A “no follow” backlink tell search engines not to pass the SEO link power between pages.
• CTR
  • CTR or click-through rate in SEO, is the percentage of people that click on a website in a search engine results page.
• Black / white hat SEO
  • Black hat SEO is a collection of SEO strategies that do not follow search engine best practices.
  • White hat SEO is a collection of SEO strategies that follow search engine best practices and focus on the user experience.
• Meta tags
  • Meta tags are HTML tags in the code of your webpages. The two most important are title tags and meta descriptions. The text in these tags are visible in search engine results pages.
• URL
  • A URL OR uniform resource locator is simply a web address link https://myshop.com that points to a unique webpage.
• Analytics
  • Are a system for recording and measuring a set of data. In SEO we use analytics to record data like traffic, traffic source, traffic volume, revenue and user behaviour. We can analyse this data to improve our store’s traffic and sales.
• Conversion / conversion rate
  • A conversion happens when a user completes an important action on your website. Like completing a purchase or joining your email list. Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete an action.
• SEO vs SEM
  • SEO is search engine optimization, improving your organic search engine listings. SEM is search engine marketing, paying to be at the top of search engines with ads.
• Domain authority and PageRank
  • Originally created by Google to rank the quality and quantity of backlinks to a page to help decide which websites to show in SERPs. Now many popular SEO tools like Ahrefs/Moz use a score out of 100 to show the power of a website (domain authority/rank) and a score out of 100 to show the power of each individual webpage.