Glossary [A–C]   [D–J]   [K–M]   [O–R]   [S–Z]

Keywords: The words or phrases a user enters when conducting a search. Also referred to as search terms or queries.

Keyword Density: The number of times a keyword appears on a web page in relation to the page’s total content.

Keyword Popularity: How frequently a search is conducted on a particular keyword within a given time period.

Keyword Research: Identifying the best keywords, or search terms, to target for a website’s search engine rankings based on the popularity of relevant keywords.

Keyword-Rich: A web page with a high density of keywords that users are likely to query in relevant searches.

Keyword Stuffing: Attempting to boost a web page’s ranking by putting excessive keywords in the copy and source code. This can include using tactics like hiding keywords by making the background the same color as the text. Keyword stuffing can detract from a page’s readability and usability and can also be considered spamming by search engines.

Landing Page: The web page by which a user enters a site when clicking on a search engine listing.

Listings: The results produced by a search engine in response to a query.

Meta Tags: Descriptive text within a web page’s HTML source code that provides content information to search engines but is invisible to visitors.

Meta Description Tag: Invisible text within the HTML source code that provides a description of the web page when it is returned in the results of a search. Meta description tags are not used by all search engines.

Meta Keywords Tag: Invisible text within the HTML source code that allows web authors to list keywords related to the page’s content. Meta tags have become largely irrelevant to search rankings, due to widespread abuse. Many web page authors filled meta tags with popular keywords unrelated to page content to drive traffic to their sites, so most search engines have stopped using meta tags to rank sites. 

Meta Robots Tag: A tag that sets permission for whether a web page may be indexed by search engines, allowing web page authors to exclude certain pages from searches.