SEO Glossary – The Basics

On-Page SEO
Def: Edits you make to your website to improve search
rank. Example: Adding text, headings, pages.

Off-Page SEO
Def: Things you do on platforms outside your website to
improve search rank. Example: getting links to your site,
getting Google Reviews

Tag
Def: A label for a specific piece of website code.
Different tags have different purposes. There are tags for
images, tags for links, tags for headings, tags for page
descriptions, etc. In SEO you are concerned with only a
few tags.

Title Tag
Def: The main, and most senior descriptive label for a
web page. Every web page has a title tag. They should
all be unique, under 70 characters long, and not be
spammy. Search engines place a lot of weight on your
title tag. Search engines use your title tag when they
display your site in the search results pages. See figure 1
for an example of the title.

Description Tag
Def: A descriptive label for a web page. It can be 100+
words in length. Each page should have a unique
description tag. Search engines place little weight on
your description tag. Search engines use your description
tag when they display your site in the search results
pages. See figure 1 for an example of the description:

Figure 1

Heading Tags
(H1, H2, H3, H4…)
Def: Headings for paragraphs. In MS Word you’ve seen
them as: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. They format
and style headings, making the bigger, bolder, etc.
Search engines pay attention to headings because they
tend to ‘summarize’ paragraphs. Search engines place
a small amount of weight in your H tags. See figure 2
below

Figure 2

Keywords
Def: a word or series of words you want to rank near the
top for when searched on a search engine.

White Hat
Def: optimizations that are in accordance to the
guidelines published by search engines. Opposite of

Black Hat
These are optimizations that are in violation of
guidelines. Websites that have black hat optimizations
can be penalized and removed completely from search
engines.