Chapter 4: On-Site Optimization

Alt text: Alternative text is the text in HTML code that describes the images on web pages.

Anchor text: The text with which you link to pages.

Auto-generated content: Content that is created programmatically, not written by humans.

Duplicate content: Content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain.

Geographic modifiers: Terms that describe a physical location or service area. For example, “pizza” is not geo-modified, but “pizza in Seattle” is.

Header tags: An HTML element used to designate headings on your page.

Image compression: The act of speeding up web pages by making image file sizes smaller without degrading the image’s quality.

Image sitemap: A sitemap containing only the image URLs on a website.

Keyword stuffing: A spammy tactic involving the overuse of important keywords and their variants in your content and links.

Link accessibility: The ease with which a link can be found by human visitors or crawlers.

Link equity: The value or authority a link can pass to its destination.

Link volume: The quantity of links on a page.

Local business schema: Structured data markup placed on a web page that helps search engines understand information about a business.

Meta descriptions: HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. Google sometimes uses these as the description line in search result snippets.

Panda: A Google algorithm update that targeted low-quality content.

Protocol: The “http” or “https” preceding your domain name. This governs how data is relayed between the server and browser.

Redirection: When a URL is moved from one location to another. Most often, redirection is permanent (301 redirect).

Rel=canonical: A tag that allows site owners to tell Google which version of a web page is the original and which are the duplicates.

Scraped content: Taking content from websites that you do not own and republishing it without permission on your own site.

SSL certificate: A “Secure Sockets Layer” is used to encrypt data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher.

Thin content: Content that adds little-to-no value to the visitor.

Thumbnails: Image thumbnails are a smaller version of a larger image.

Title tag: An HTML element that specifies the title of a web page.

Chapter 5: Technical Optimization

AMP: Often described as “diet HTML,” accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are designed to make the viewing experience lightning fast for mobile visitors.

Async: Short for “asynchronous,” async means that the browser doesn’t have to wait for a task to finish before moving onto the next one while assembling your web page.

Browser: A web browser, like Chrome or Firefox, is software that allows you to access information on the web. When you make a request in your browser (ex: “google.com”), you’re instructing your browser to retrieve the resources necessary to render that page on your device.

Bundling: To combine multiple resources into a single resource.

ccTLD: Short for “country code top level domain,” ccTLD refers to domains associated with countries. For example, .ru is the recognized ccTLD for Russia.

Client-side & server-side rendering: Client-side and server-side rendering refer to where the code runs. Client-side means the file is executed in the browser. Server-side means the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.

Critical rendering path: The sequence of steps a browser goes through to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a viewable web page.

CSS: A Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is the code that makes a website look a certain way (ex: fonts and colors).

DNS: A Domain Name Server (DNS) allows domain names (ex: “moz.com”) to be linked to IP addresses (ex: “127.0.0.1”). DNS essentially translates domain names into IP addresses so that browsers can load the page’s resources.

DOM: The Document Object Model (DOM) is the structure of an HTML document — it defines how that document can be accessed and changed by things like JavaScript.

Domain name registrar: A company that manages the reservation of internet domain names. Example: GoDaddy.

Faceted navigation: Often used on e-commerce websites, faceted navigations offer a number of sorting and filtering options to help visitors more easily locate the URL they’re looking for out of a stack of thousands or even millions of URLs. For example, you could sort a clothing page by price: low to high, or filter the page to view only size: small.

Fetch and Render tool: A tool available in Google Search Console that allows you to see a web page how Google sees it.

File compression: The process of encoding information using fewer bits; reducing the size of the file. There are many different compression techniques.

Hreflang: A tag that indicates to Google which language the content is in. This helps Google serve the appropriate language version of your page to people searching in that language.

IP address: An internet protocol (IP) address is a string of numbers that’s unique to each specific website. We assign domain names to IP addresses because they’re easier for humans to remember (ex: “moz.com”) but the internet needs these numbers to find websites.

JSON-LD: JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring your data. For example, schema.org can be implemented in a number of different formats, JSON-LD is just one of them, but it is the format preferred by Google.

Lazy loading: A way of deferring the loading of an object until it’s needed. This method is often used to improve page speed.

Minification: To minify something means to remove as many unnecessary characters from the source code as possible without altering functionality. Whereas compression makes something smaller, minification actually removes things.

Mobile-first indexing: Google began progressively moving websites over to mobile first indexing in 2018. This change means that Google crawls and indexes your pages based on their mobile version rather than their desktop version.

Pagination: A website owner can opt to split a page into multiple parts in a sequence, similar to pages in the book. This can be especially helpful on very large pages. The hallmarks of a paginated page are the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, indicating where each page falls in the greater sequence. These tags help Google understand that the pages should have consolidated link properties and that searchers should be sent to the first page in the sequence.

Programming language: Writing instructions in a way a computer can understand. For example, JavaScript is a programming language that adds dynamic (not-static) elements to a web page.

Rendering: The process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.

Render-blocking scripts: A script that forces your browser to wait to be fetched before the page can be rendered. Render-blocking scripts can add extra round trips before your browser can fully render a page.

Responsive design: Google’s preferred design pattern for mobile-friendly websites, responsive design allows the website to adapt to fit whatever device it’s being viewed on.

Rich snippet: A snippet is the title and description preview that Google and other search engines show of URLs on its results page. A “rich” snippet, therefore, is an enhanced version of the standard snippet. Some rich snippets can be encouraged by the use of structured data markup, like review markup displaying as rating stars next to those URLs in the search results.

Schema.org: Code that “wraps around” elements of your web page to provide additional information about it to the search engine. Data using schema.org is referred to as “structured” as opposed to “unstructured” — in other words, organized rather than unorganized.

SRCSET: Like responsive design for images, SRCSET indicates which version of the image to show for different situations.

Structured Data: Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.

Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority

10x content: Coined by Rand Fishkin to describe content that is “10x better” than anything else on the web for that same topic.

Amplification: Sharing or spreading the word about your brand; often used in the context of social media, paid advertisements, and influencer marketing.

Brand Authority: Brand Authority™ is a score (1-100) developed by Moz that measures the total strength of a brand. With Brand Authority, Moz makes the elusive but powerful idea of brand into concrete and actionable data.

DA: Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz metric used to predict a domain’s ranking ability; best used as a comparative metric (ex: comparing a website’s DA score to that of its direct competitors).

Deindexed: When a URL, section of URLs, or an entire domain has been removed from a search engine index. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as when a website receives a manual penalty for violating Google’s quality guidelines.

Directory links: “Directory” in the context of local SEO is an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business’s name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website. “Directory” can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google’s guidelines: “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.”

Editorial links: When links are earned naturally and given out of an author’s own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.

Follow: The default state of a link, “follow” links pass PageRank.

Google Analytics: A free (with an option to pay for upgraded features) tool that helps website owners get insight into how people are engaging with their website. Some examples of reports you can see in Google Analytics include acquisition reports that show what channels your visitors are coming from, and conversion reports that show the rate at which people are completing goals (ex: form fills) on your website.