46 Terms
Digital PR & Link Building Glossary
Plain-English definitions for every backlink, outreach, and SEO term you'll run into building a link-building or digital PR strategy.
Core SEO Concepts
Keywords
The words and phrases people type into search engines, forming the foundation of keyword research and content targeting in SEO strategy.
Off-Page SEO
Optimization activities that happen away from your own website — primarily link building, brand mentions, and digital PR — as opposed to on-page factors.
On-Page SEO
Optimization of individual pages' content and HTML source code — titles, headers, keyword usage, internal linking — to help that page rank and improve user experience.
PageRank
Google's original algorithm for ranking web pages, based on the idea that links act as votes, with pages linked to by many high-quality pages themselves considered high quality.
Rankings
A page's position in search engine results for a given query, with higher positions typically correlating with more organic traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The overall practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in organic search results, encompassing technical, on-page, content, and off-page work.
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
The pages displayed by a search engine in response to a query, including organic listings, ads, and features like featured snippets and knowledge panels.
Traffic
The volume of visitors coming to a website, often segmented by source, with organic traffic growth typically the core goal of SEO efforts.
Link Building
Anchor Text
The visible, clickable words in a hyperlink, which help both users and search engines understand what the linked page is about.
Backlinks
An incoming hyperlink from one website to another, functioning as a vote of confidence and remaining one of the strongest ranking factors in most search engines' algorithms.
Domain Authority
A third-party metric that scores a website's overall likelihood of ranking well in search results, on a scale of 1 to 100, based largely on its backlink profile.
Editorial Links
Backlinks earned naturally because a publisher genuinely found content valuable enough to reference, as opposed to paid or arranged links.
External Links
Hyperlinks pointing from one website out to a different domain, the mirror concept to a backlink from the linking site's perspective.
Link Building
The practice of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own, through tactics like outreach, guest posting, or creating link-worthy content.
Link Profile
The complete collection of backlinks pointing to a website, evaluated in aggregate for quantity, referring domain diversity, anchor text distribution, and quality.
Linking / Referring Domains
The count of unique websites that link to a given page or domain, distinct from total backlink count, and often a stronger authority signal than raw link volume.
Page Authority
A predictive, third-party metric estimating how well a specific page is likely to rank in search results, scored 1–100, based on link and on-page signals specific to that URL.
Link Quality & Risk
Dofollow Links
The default type of hyperlink, which passes link equity (ranking value) from the linking page to the destination page.
Link Exchange
An arrangement where two site owners agree to link to each other, sometimes called reciprocal linking, which can look manipulative if done excessively.
Link Schemes
Any link-building tactic designed primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than earn links on merit, which search engines explicitly penalize.
Nofollow Links
A hyperlink with a rel="nofollow" attribute, telling search engines not to pass ranking credit to the destination page.
Paid Links
Hyperlinks placed in exchange for payment intended to influence search rankings, which violates most search engine guidelines unless properly disclosed.
Reciprocal Links
A mutual arrangement where two sites agree to link to one another — see Link Exchange for the full explanation.
Spam
Low-quality or manipulative content and links created purely to game search rankings rather than serve genuine user or reader value.
Sponsored Link / Sponsored Posts
Paid placements — a single link or a full article — published in exchange for compensation, which should be disclosed with a rel="sponsored" attribute.
Unnatural Links
Backlinks that appear to have been created specifically to manipulate rankings rather than occurring organically, which can trigger search engine penalties.
Outreach & PR
Brand Mentions
A reference to a company, product, or website name in text, with or without an accompanying hyperlink.
Email Templates
Pre-written, reusable email structures used in outreach campaigns, typically personalized with merge fields before sending at scale.
Guest Posts
Articles written by someone and published on a different site than their own, typically for exposure, authority-building, and often a link back to the author's site.
Link Reclamation
The tactic of finding unlinked mentions of your brand or content online and requesting a link be added, turning an existing mention into a backlink.
Open Rates
In email outreach, the percentage of recipients who open a sent email, a key metric for judging subject line and sender-name effectiveness.
Outreach
The practice of proactively contacting other website owners, bloggers, journalists, or influencers to build relationships, request links, or pitch content.
Unlinked Mentions
Instances where a brand, product, or piece of content is referenced by name on another site without an accompanying hyperlink.
On-Page & Content
Alternative Text (Alt Text)
The descriptive text attached to an HTML image tag, telling search engines and screen readers what an image shows.
Blog Content
Regularly published articles on a website's blog, used to target keywords, answer audience questions, build topical authority, and create link-worthy assets.
Content Marketing
A strategy of creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain an audience and indirectly drive business goals.
Evergreen Content
Content that stays relevant and useful long after publication without needing frequent updates, steadily accumulating traffic and links over time.
Internal Links
Hyperlinks that connect one page to another page on the same website, distributing ranking authority and helping users and search engines understand site structure.
List Post / Listicle
An article structured as a numbered or bulleted list, popular for shareability, skimmability, search snippets, and link-worthy content.
Technical SEO
Broken Links
Hyperlinks that point to a page which no longer exists, commonly resulting in a 404 error, wasting link equity and hurting user experience.
Crawlability
How easily search engine bots can access and navigate a website's pages, affected by site architecture, internal links, and robots.txt configuration.
Duplicate Content
Substantial blocks of text that appear identically or near-identically across multiple URLs, which can confuse search engines about which version to rank.
Google Bot
Google's web-crawling software that discovers new and updated pages by following links, then sends content back to be indexed.
Redirect
A technique that automatically sends users and search engines from one URL to another, most commonly a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect.
Sitemaps
An XML file listing a site's important URLs, submitted to search engines to help them discover and crawl pages more efficiently.
URLs
Uniform Resource Locators — the web addresses used to identify and access specific pages, where clean, descriptive structure is a minor but common on-page SEO consideration.