Schema
Microdata is added to the website to provide the search engines with additional information behind the scenes that can help your website get displayed in Rich Snippet mentions in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Local Business Schema is a schema that is added to a website so that the search engines are given more information about your business.
Scraping
The process of copying data or content off of a website for your own personal use. The copying of data or content can violate copyright protection laws and is viewed with disapproval eye. Although search engines use scraping techniques of websites to help them determine where to index and rank them.
Scroll Depth
This is a measurement that shows how far people scroll on a page of your website to help determine if it holds their interest or not. You can get actual video recordings of visits to your website through the use of programs like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar.
Search Boxes
Search boxes found on websites are mini-search engines that are used to search for information on that website alone. If the website does not have a search box you can use Google’s Advanced Operator site:thewebsite.com.
Search Engine
A search engine is a computer program online is used to help internet users find what they are looking for from millions of websites online. Examples of search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Baidu.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is the marketing process where you market your website through paid ads and organic rankings to help get your website found online.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a marketing process (search engine optimization) where it concentrates more on the technical aspect of helping your website get found, indexed, and crawled by search engines. The end results will be higher rankings and more traffic to your website.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
This is the list of websites that appear when you do a search (query) in a search engine. The SERPs can include ads, maps, video recommendations, featured snippets, suggested images, related questions, shopping listings, and organic search results. These additions can take away valuable SERP real estate space in your rankings where the above-the-fold (SERP results that you see without scrolling) listings are reduced in size.
Search Engine Results Pages Features
The different avenues of how SERPs (search engine result pages) are displayed when someone does a search in a search engine. Images, videos, news, etc. are examples of this.
Search History
The search history is a record of all of the websites that you have visited on your computer. A website can place a ‘cookie’ on your computer so that the website can remember you when you visit the website again. The search history is also a ranking factor in Google where it will examine your search history to help it determine what websites to show you in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Search Quality Rater Guidelines
These are done when people that work at the search engines manually view and rate web pages for quality. Often used when they are testing out new search engine algorithms.
Search Volume
The estimated number of times a keyword phrase is searched for each month by the SEO software that you are using. Some are more accurate than others.
Searchers Intent
Digital marketers have to think about the intent that a searcher has when they use the search engine so that they can come closer to marketing what they want. Recently SaaS (software as a service) has been trying to add searcher’s intent in its keyword research tools to help digital marketers.
Seasonal Trends
Some keyword phrases and sales depend upon the date. For example, searches and sales related to Christmas will go up around Christmas time. This is known as seasonal trends and that is why it is important to see how well you are doing by comparing the stats of the month with the stats of the same month the previous year.
SEO Tools
SEO Tools are tools that help you do the research to help your website rank in the search engines. They can help you with keyword research, link building, competition analysis, etc.
Server-Side Rendering
This means that the code of a website is rendered on the server and then sent to the browser for faster page loads. This is important for technical SEO. See also, client-side rendering.
Shopping Listings
When you do a product search in a search engine the search engine will display other products that are the same or similar to the one that you are searching for. This display takes away valuable above-the-fold real estate of organic listings.
Silo Content
This is the practice of categorizing your web pages into parent pages and children pages where the main content goes to the parent (hub) pages while the children pages are located linked from the parent pages to provide more detail of references from the parent page.
Adding the children’s pages as sub-pages of parent pages helps with the navigation structure for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are an organized category of links that help users and search engines find content on your website. Sitelinks of your website are sometimes shown in the SERPs (search engine result pages) underneath the direct link to your website.
Sitemap
This is a file that is included in the root directory of your website to help the search engine find, crawl, and index your website. A sitemap can also be submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help them as well. The HTML version of a sitemap helps website visitors find pages on your website. The XML version of a sitemap is used to help the search engine find, crawl, and index your web pages.
Sitewide Links
Links that appear on every page of a website are called sitewide links. An example of a sitewide link is your navigation menu. Sitewide links hold lower value in Google’s algorithm than links that are located in the content of only certain pages.
Social Media
Social media platforms are websites where people get together to converse. Examples of social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. The number of times your website is liked, shared, recommended, and linked to from social media platforms plays an important factor in ranking in search engines.
Quick Note: Google denies that social signals are a direct ranking factor but I believe that it is and is a good source of traffic whether this is true or not.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
This is a digital marketing process where marketing is concentrated on social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. where you promote yourself on these social media websites and provide like, share, pin, and recommend links to these social media accounts from your website to help promote yourself in the social media world.
Social Signals
Social signals are factors that show the authority of a website or social media user through the use of upvotes, likes, shares, etc. Despite Google saying that social signals are not a direct ranking factor, but I believe them to be.
Spam
Spam is unwanted advertising that appears to you in emails, website pop-ups, website pop-unders, etc. The term ‘Spam’ is said to originate from a Monty Python skit.
Spider
The term spider refers to the robot search engines use to crawl and index your website.
Split Testing
Split testing refers to the practice of running two very similar web pages with minor differences to help determine which direction to go for marketing. An example of this is changing the color of the purchase now button to see which page receives the most clicks on that button. This is also called A/B Testing.
SRCSET
SRCSET (source set) is an attribute that tells which image to display under different circumstances. Here is an example of how this attribute is used. Using this can help increase your page load speed.
<img srcset="seo-symbol-480w.jpg 480w,
seo-symbol-800w.jpg 800w"
sizes="(max-width: 600px) 480px, 800px"
src="seo-symbol-800w.jpg"
alt="An image of an SEO symbol">SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate is required on a website that shows or asks for sensitive data such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information. Through the use of this certificate that is installed on the web server, it encrypts this sensitive data. When you see an open or closed padlock on your browser it is letting you know if the web page you are visiting is secured with an SSL Certificate. Another indication is whether it says HTTP: (unsecured) or HTTPS: (secured) in the website URL. It is a good practice to glance up there looking for the padlock or HTTPS before entering your credit card number online.
Status Codes
Status codes are generated by the server when it encounters your web page to help you identify any potential problems with your website. Here are some examples. The ones in bold are the ones to pay the most attention to.
- 1xx informational response – the request was received, continuing process
- 100 – Continue
- 101 – Switching Protocols
- 102 – Processing
- 103 – Early Hints
- 2xx successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
- 200 – Okay
- 201 – Created
- 202 – Accepted
- 203 – Non-Authoritative Information
- 204 – No Content
- 205 – Reset Content
- 206 – Partial Content
- 207 – Multi-Status
- 208 – Already Reported
- 226 – IM Used
- 3xx redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
- 300 – Multiple Choices
- 301 – Moved Permanently
- 302 – Found (Previously “Moved temporarily”)
- 303 – See Other
- 304 – Not Modified
- 305 – Use Proxy
- 306 – Switch Proxy
- 307 – Temporary Redirect
- 308 – Permanent Redirect
- 4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
- 400 – Bad Request
- 401 – Unauthorized
- 402 – Payment Required
- 403 – Forbidden
- 404 – Page Not Found
- 405 – Method Not Allowed
- 406 – Not Acceptable
- 407 – Proxy Authentication Required
- 408 – Request Timeout
- 409 – Conflict
- 410 – Gone
- 411 – Length Required
- 412 – Precondition Failed
- 413 – Payload Too Large
- 414 – URI Too Long
- 415 – Unsupported Media Type
- 416 – Range Not Satisfiable
- 417 – Expectation Failed
- 418 – I’m a teapot
- 421 – Misdirected Request
- 422 – Unprocessable Entity
- 423 – Locked
- 424 – Failed Dependency
- 425 – Too Early
- 426 – Upgrade Required
- 428 – Precondition Required
- 429 – Too Many Requests
- 431 – Request Header Fields Too Large
- 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
- 5xx server error – the server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request
- 500 – Internal Server Error
- 501 – Not Implemented
- 502 – Bad Gateway
- 503 – Service Unavailable
- 504 – Gateway Timeout
- 505 – HTTP Version Not Supported
- 506 – Variant Also Negotiates
- 507 – Insufficient Storage
- 508 – Loop Detected
- 510 – Not Extended
- 511 – Network Authentication Required
Stop Words
Stop words are common, like a, at, is, of, on, and the. These words used to be ignored by search engines to speed up their indexing time.
The exclusion of these types of words does not affect the search queries. Look at the two following examples.
- Restaurants in Spalding Michigan
- Restaurants Spalding Michigan
In the first example, “Restaurants in Spalding Michigan” is more likely to be used on laptops.
In the 2nd example, “Restaurants Spalding Michigan” is more likely to be used on mobile phones.
Mobile SEO took these examples into factor when doing SEO that was geared to mobile phones only.
Structured Data
A format to organize data on a web page is described as structured data. An example of this would be a recipe page where you have the ingredients, directions, and food info organized on a page.
Schema is a way to structure data on a website.
Subdomain
A subdomain is the child domain (child.parent.com) of a parent domain (parent.com).
Suggest Images
The display of images that Google displays that are close to the image that you are looking for.