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SEO Glossary - S
SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS) are services (usually web based) that you can subscribe to and provide a service, such as calendar management, keyword research, image editing, almost any type of software can now be found as a SaaS.
The benefit of a SaaS over traditional locally installed software is that it is constantly updated, you don’t need to install or update as new versions are released, and you can use it on any device you have access to. Initial setup costs are also lower than outright software purchase.
Schema
Schema is structured data that is designed to be machine readable and is used by Google to understand various types of content such as Breadcrumbs and product data. You can find more on the types of Schema available at schema.org.
Scraping
Scraping (also known as Web Scraping) is the process of using software to download and retrieve data from other websites at scale.
At KeywordsPeopleUse we use software to download pages from Google and scrape People Also Ask data, Autocomplete data, Ranking data and all sorts of other information from the SERPS.
Google themselves download and scrape data so they can build their index and search results pages.
Scrapers often use Proxy Services when scraping to evade detection.
Search Features
Search Features are all the possible elements that can make up a Google search results page in addition to the basic search results.
Google frequently launch, trial and discontinue search features over time. Some examples of search features are People Also Ask, Related Searches, Featured Snippets, Local Map Pack, Top stories and Videos.
Search Generative Experience (SGE)
Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a search feature introduced in 2023 by Google that provides answers to users queries by using generative AI instead of directing them to a third party website or using a featured snippet.
Search Intent
See Intent.
Search Volume
See Keyword Volume.
Semantic Keywords
Semantic keywords are those words and phrases that are related to each other by common concepts. So “chillies” and “India” are semantically related to “curry”.
When creating content it’s useful to try and find and include semantically related keywords as this will help increase the relevance to the target topic of your page.
Semantic SEO
The concept of Semantic SEO is to create content that is not just keywords phrase specific but which covers a topic with natural language and topical relevance. The shift to Semantic SEO came with the 2013 Hummingbird Google update that allowed it to consider the context of related words on a page. This means that Google can work with synonyms rather than relying on exact keyword matches when choosing which pages to rank for a query.
SEO
The acronym for Search Engine Optimsation as a process, or Search Engine Optimiser as a role.
The aim of SEO is to increase the visibility if websites and pages in Google's Search Engine Results Pages
SEO Testing
SEO Testing involves making changes to your site and testing what the effects of these are on SEO. This can be hard to work out if changes you have made have caused any changes in traffic levels that you then detect or whether it was just changes that have occurred because of ranking algorithm updates or other outside factors that would have happened anyway.
You can do more scientific SEO testing if you have large numbers of very similar pages, such as if you are an e-commerce site and have large numbers of product pages that have the same core template design and page features. In this case you can create new product page designs and content and only apply them to a subset of your pages and keep the rest the same as the original. You can then monitor the two sets of pages over time and how they perform in the SERPS and in terms of how much traffic they receive. This can then give you data that is much more statistically significant as to how well changes you have tried have performed.
SERP
The acronym for Search Engine Results Page.
SERP Clustering
SERP Clustering is a method of Keyword Clustering that clusters keywords based on them having organic search engine results in common.
The basic process is to search Google for every keyword you wish to cluster in a list of keywords. You record all the webpages that each keyword ranks for on the first page of the results.
After you have the ranking data for every keyword you then compare each keyword against every other keyword and see how many ranking web pages in common. If two keywords have x or more keywords in common (3 is usually a good number for x) then you can consider them to be clustered.
You can cluster keywords using this method using the Keyword Clustering Tool at KeywordsPeopleUse.
Server Logs
Server logs refer to the logs that your web server will keep on the server. There are usually access logs and error logs.
Access logs record all requests made to your webserver. Error logs record any time your web server encountered an error.
Access logs are a great source to see how and where users and crawlers like Googlebot are accessing and exploring your website.
Short Tail
See Head Term.
Sitelinks
Additional links to other pages on a site which appear under some search results.
Sitemap.xml
A sitemap.xml is a list formatted in XML of all the pages on your website that you’d like Google to index. You typically will provide a link to your sitemap.xml in your robots.txt file and you can also submit it via Google Search Console.
Most CMS systems, like Wordpress, can create and update Sitemap.xml files for you.
Sitewide link
A sitewide link is an identical link on every page of a website that points to a third party site. Google doesn’t like these if they are paid for, or there as payment in kind, such as a web developer putting a “designed by” style link on the footer of every page of their client's site.
Unless there is a very genuine reason for the link then they are usually best avoided.
Snippet
A snippet in Google is the description or short summary that Google uses anywhere it lists your site in the SERPs.
Sometimes Google will use your page meta description for the snippet, other times it will make its own snippet, most often from the page content.
Soft 404
A soft 404 is a page that looks and acts like a page not found 404 page but actually returns a 200 status code. Try to avoid soft 404s as Google may index the pages and spend time crawling them when you’d rather have it spending time on the parts of your site you do want indexed.
S-P-A-M (Search Position Above Mine)
Search Position Above Mine is the tendency of some website owners to consider some sites that rank above them as Spam, when the actual truth might be that the higher ranking sites are there on merit.
Spam
Spam is content solely designed to manipulate search engine rankings and which does not provide any value to end users. Spam is a catchall term to cover things like cloaking, keyword stuffing, spam links, thin content, etc.
Spam techniques are commonly associated with Blackhat methods.
Spider
Spider is another name for a Crawler, software such as Googlebot which crawls and downloads pages on the web for future indexing.
Split Test
A Split Test is where you create a new version of a webpage that you are looking to improve how people interact with it (usually looking to improve the Conversion Rate). You send a percentage of traffic to the original page and a percentage of traffic to the new page. You then measure over time which version performs the best.
Split Tests are the foundational building blocks of Conversion Rate Optimisation.
Sponsored link
Sponsored is an attribute introduced by Google that can be attached to a link that allows people to link to web pages where there is a commercial link (e.g. an affiliate relationship or a paid link) that said to Google “this is a commercial sponsored link, do not count it for ranking purposes”. It protects sites from being penalised for having commercial relationships involving links as the links will not contribute to ranking the destination page.
Squeeze Page
A Squeeze Page is a very specific type of landing page designed to capture a visitors email address, most often in return for access to some gated content or other lead magnet such as an ebook.
What makes squeeze pages unique is that usually have lots of the usual supplementary content of a page removed, so as not to detract from the email capture request, you really give the page visitor nothing else on the page to distract them from the offer and the email capture form.
Structured Data
See Schema.
Subdomain
A subdomain is a subdivision of a domain, e.g. blog.domain.com. There has long been arguments in the SEO community as to whether you should or should not split sites up into subdomains. Google has repeatedly said it’s fine, but the arguments still persist.
Subfolder
A subfolder is a folder within the URL of a webpage, such as: exampledomain.com/subfolder/page . Subfolders allow you to sort content into categories and subcategories.
Supplementary Content (SC)
The Supplementary Content (SC) of a web page is that content which helps a webpage deliver a good user experience but which is not part of the main content of a page.
The most common item of Supplementary Content is site navigation links.
Supplementary Content is one of the three types of page content as defined by Google together with Main Content (MC) and Ad Content (Ads).
Supplementary Content is covered in detail in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines.
Social Traffic
Social Traffic is traffic to your site that is generated by content and links on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and any other social networking platform.