Glossary of Terms
Glossary of terms
A
Avg. Pages/Users
The average number of website sessions to users visiting your website. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Avg. Session Duration
The average length of a Session.
B
Bounce rate
The percentage of sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 15 seconds.
Broken links
A broken link is a link that doesn’t work, often resulting in an error page. Links that are broken will effectively stop search engines from completely indexing your website.
D
Direct (Traffic)
Traffic to the website from a user typing the domain name directly into the ULR bar. Or any traffic where the user or source is unknown (i.e. private browsing).
Domain authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a score (on a 100-point scale) that predicts how well a website or subdomain will rank on search engines. There are many factors that contribute to this calculation.
E
Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures the level of interaction audiences have with your content. (this is a new GA4 property that replaces bounce rate)
G
GDPR Compliant
The General Data Protections Regulation (GDPR) is a set of rules that your website must abide to protect the data of visitors to your website. As of May 25, 2018, heavy fines will be levied against any business who does not meet the guidelines set forth by the GDPR.
H
H-tags
The H-tags gives the user and search engines a strong sense of what that particular website is about. Keywords contained within a H-Tag has a better chance to rank in SERP’s
I
Image alt attributes
The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it (because of slow connection or if the user uses a screen reader).
Image optimise
Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page. As a result, optimising images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements for your website.
K
Keyword
The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.
Keyword research
Keyword research is a core SEO task that involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines. It is used to better understand the demand is for certain keywords and how hard it would be to compete for those terms.
M
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide explanations of the webpages content. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets.
N
New Users
The number of first-time users during the month.
O
Organic (Traffic)
Traffic to the website from Search Engine Result Page (SERP’s). Often from a page rankings through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This includes rankings in SERP’s, Maps, Knowledge-snippets and image results.
P
Page authority
Whereas Domain Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains, Page Authority measures the strength of individual page. Page Authority is also measured on a 100-point scale.
Page view
Page views is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Page mozRank
MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.
Paid Search (Traffic)
Traffic to the website from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google AdWords or another paid search platform.
R
Ranking report
A ranking report shows the current rankings positions of your keywords in search engines (i.e Google, Yahoo and Bing) optimised during a campaign. The ranking report will often show evolution of the ranking positions of the keywords optimised during the campaign.
Redirects
Redirection is the process of forwarding one URL to a different URL. Redirections on landing pages add delays to the page load and while the redirections are occurring, nothing is shown to the user.
Referral (Traffic)
Traffic to the website that occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine (i.e. a directory).
Robots.txt
A file in the root directory of a website used to restrict and control the behaviour of search engine spiders.
S
Sessions
A session is a group of interactions one user takes. Meaning whatever a user does on your website (e.g. browses pages, downloads resources, purchases products) before they leave equals one session.
SERP
This stands for Search Engine Results Page. These are web pages served to users when they search for something online using a search engine, such as Google.
Sitemap
A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.
Social (Traffic)
Traffic to the website from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
SSL Certification
An SSL certificate is a digital public document, which verifies that the appropriate, legitimate company owns the website which is being accessed. This SSL activates the padlock (https) and allows secure connections from a website to visitor. There is a yearly fee for this certification.
T
Title tags
Title Tags define the title of a webpage. Title tags are used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display who the page is by and what it contains.
U
Users
The number of individual users that have visited the website.
V
Viewport configuration
A viewport controls how a webpage is displayed on a mobile device. Without a viewport, mobile devices will render the page at a typical desktop screen width, scaled to fit the screen.