SILVERTOAD SEO GLOSSARY
SERP features are elements on the Google search results page, in addition to the organic search results, that enhance the user experience or provide supplemental information related to a user’s search query.
Featured Snippet
When Google wants to answer a question that isn’t in the core Knowledge Graph, they may attempt to find that answer in the index. This creates a special class of organic result with information extracted from the target page.
Featured Snippets have higher CTRs than regular organic results.
Local Pack
For keywords that Google deems to have local intent (think ‘gastroenterology specialists in Seattle’ or ‘gastroenterology specialists near me’), the SERP will often contain a Local Pack containing the three physical locations Google deems most relevant to the keyword.
These features dominate the SERP, especially on mobile.
News Packs
Time-sensitive and newsworthy topics may generate a block of results from Google News. Since the “In the news” update in late 2014, a wider variety of sites are eligible to rank in the news block.
Image Pack
Image packs are results displayed as a horizontal row of image links, which click through to a Google Images search. Image packs may appear in any organic position.
Tweet Pack
In 2015, Google began displaying tweets directly in SERPs, mixed in with organic results. Unlike Google+ results, Twitter results do not seem to require, or be affected by, personalization
Related Questions
The Related Questions card shows algorithmically-generated questions that Google believes might relate to your search. Each question expands to something that looks like a Featured Snippet. Related Questions are mixed into organic results and their location in the SERP may vary.
Knowledge Panel
Knowledge Panels (aka Knowledge Graph), like Knowledge Cards, extract semantic data from a number of sources including human-edited sources like WikiData, data extracted from the Google index, and private data partnerships.
They typically appear to the right of the organic results for a desktop search.
Video Pack
Video results (especially YouTube) may display a thumbnail. They used to be a true vertical but are now more of an organic enhancement.
Site Links
When someone searches for an exact domain (suggesting clear brand intent), Google may display an expanded pack of up to 10 sitelinks. The full pack of sitelinks occupies five organic positions, dominating the SERP.
Site Links can benefit your site by:
- Generating higher CTR from the SERP
- Getting users to the page they are looking for faster
Reviews
Review stars and rating data are sometimes displayed for products, recipes, and other relevant items. Review/rating data is shown between the destination URL and snippet.
Results with review stars get higher CTR.
Adwords (Top)
Traditional AdWords ads come in many flavours now, but the most common type appears at the top and/or bottom of the left-hand column, above and below organic results. Each ad has a coloured [Ad] label next to it.
Ads push organic results down the page and can impact CTR (especially on mobile browsers)
Adwords (Bottom)
Traditional AdWords ads come in many flavours now, but the most common type appears at the top and/or bottom of the left-hand column, above and below organic results. Each ad has a coloured [Ad] label next to it.
Ads push organic results down the page and can impact CTR (especially on mobile browsers).
Shopping Results
Paid Shopping results or Product Listing Ads (PLAs) sell products directly with rich information, such as images and pricing.
Inbound link (Backlink) report
Backlinks are still considered to be the most important part of an SEO campaign.
We use industry leading software, not available to the general public, to report on all inbound links (backlinks) to your website. You can view how many backlinks which are resolving to your website below. We achieve all of your backlinks using our unique link exposure system.NB. We build between 100 and 300 links per quarter. However, we report on all backlinks resolving to your website, so sometimes the back link growth can be more than 300 per quarter, but this is nothing to worry about.
Search Terms (Keywords)
Please note, all Search Term positions in the Search Engines are gathered without being signed in to an account (such as Gmail for google search) as to avoid any bias towards the results by our search engine history. It is recommended if you are going to test any of these yourself, the same principle be used.
Keywords / Search Terms List These search terms are the ones used across our SEO Service to increase popularity and traffic to the website. It is recommended that the not be changed frequently as each time a search term is changed the work behind has to be started from the beginning. For example editing or adding a search term will require all linked services to be started from fresh for it.
Position 1-10 = Page 1 // Position 11-20 = Page 2 // Position 21-30 = Page 3 // Position 31-40 = Page 4 // Position 41-50 = Page 5
| Alt text | Is text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image. |
| Anchor text | The visible, clickable text in a hyperlink |
| Back end | The part of the website that the user doesn’t ‘see’. This could be server side elements, a database or a content management system like WordPress. |
| Backlink | A link from another website to your website. |
| On Site Score | An overall score out of 100 based on your website performance. |
| Page/Position | The page number and how far down you appear on that page in the Google results. |
| Page Analytics | The number of times any URL from your site appeared in search results viewed or clicked by a user. |
| Search Analytics | The Google Search queries that generated impressions of your website URLs in Google organic search results. |
| Blog | A personal website or part of a company website, that contains separate posts on which an individual writes opinions, links to other sites and more on a regular basis. |
| Bot | Crawls the world wide web, also called a spider. |
| Bounce rate | This represents the percentage of visitors who enter a page on a website and ‘bounce’ (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same website. |
| Internal link | Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. |
| Keywords | Words describing what people are looking for on Google, and used as the main word on a web page; the word the page is optimized for (also: focus keyphrase). |
| Landing page | A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. |
| Meta description | HTML attribute that provide short explanations of the contents of web pages. In SEO, it is the invitation to your website you want a search engine to show below the title of your website. |
| Meta keyword | HTML attribute that lists keywords relevant to the page’s content. Not used by the major search engines. |
| Permalinks | The permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink. |
| KEI | The KEI essentially helps point out which keywords are the most effective and valuable. KEI stands for “Keyword Effectiveness Index”. |
| CTR | Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing your ad. |
| CPC | The term cost per click means how much the search engine charges advertisers each time a visitor clicks on a sponsored link. |
| Black hat | Black Hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience. Usually, black hat SEO does not obey most search engine’s guidelines. |
| White hat | White hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies. |
| SERP | The search engine results page (SERP) is the webpage that a search engine returns with the results of its search. |
| Sitemap | Sitemap is a hierarchical visual model of the pages of a website. |
| Long tail search | A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words |
| Short tail search | Short tail keywords are search phrases with only one or words. |
| SEM | SEM is a type of Internet marketing associated with the researching, submitting and positioning of a website within search engines to achieve maximum visibility. |
| Crawl | When a bot is on a webpage or website. Search engine bots will ‘crawl’ a website in order to index the site. |
| CSS | The CSS of a site will determine how elements in a the html code will be displayed. |
| Google Algorithm | A program used by Google to determine which websites to rank in the search results for a given search term. |
| HTTPS | A procedure by which information is exchanged securely between users and websites on the internet. HTTPS works to authenticate websites and encrypt any information |
| Impressions | The amount of times something has been seen on the internet. |
| On site SEO | Work conducted on the pages of a website to help with its SEO. |
| Off site SEO | See ‘onsite optimisation’ for a comparison. Describes the work conducted outside of the website in question to improve its rankings on search engines. |
A full guide on SERP features can be found here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/serp-features
A visual guide on SERP can be found here:
https://moz.com/blog/mega-serp-a-visual-guide-to-google
