Local Search & SEO Glossary

LocalClarity's glossary with nearly 600 terms and definitions will quickly get you up to speed with both historic and current industry jargon.

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WordPress

Originally released as a blogging platform, WordPress has become a popular platform for the development of whole websites

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webmaster guidelines

These are guidelines are published by search engines, describing behaviors and practices which the search engine considers to be acceptable. Failing to comply with those guidelines can result in a loss of rankings or punitive action.

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website clicks

The number of clicks on the website link provided in your client�s business profile. This new metric has been added to the �Interactions� section of the Performance page and it doesn�t include clicks on the website from Google Business Profile websites, so this number may be different from what you see on the Insights page or in Performance reporting.

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WYSIWYG

Stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Usually refers to interfaces in content management systems that allow someone who doesn't know computer code to create and edit webpage information. See also: HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CMS (content management system)

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webpage navigation

How a website connects its webpages to help visitors navigate that site. Website navigation comes in a few different forms, including: Main Navigation: The major topics or subjects your website is focused on. For instance, on SEJ our Main Navigation consists of SEO, News, PPC, Content, and Social. Secondary Navigation: Topics related to the main navigation. For instance, on SEJ secondary navigation includes links to webinars, podcasts, guides, SEJ Summit, and other topics. Footer Navigation: Typically this includes links to pages that contain important informational resources about a brand or business. These pages usually aren't important for ranking purposes. For example, SEJ's footer navigation links to our About Us page, privacy policy, and our various social profiles. Related Links: This area usually appears in the right rail or beneath content. It might be called Most Popular, Most Read, or Trending Now. Content Links: Links that appear within your main content (e.g., articles, landing pages). Breadcrumb Navigation: This type is less popular than it once was. Essentially, each webpage shows a trail to help quickly tell visitors where they are on your site. For example: Home > SEO > Link Building > What Is Website Navigation? Also known as: Internal Links (or Internal Linking), Site Architecture

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XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

Bare-bones computer code that is very easy for search engines to read. XML is similar to HTML but is not really intended to be read by humans. Sitemaps are usually uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools and are in XML format.

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XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is the list of pages and resources in an .xml file that you submit to Google.

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X-Robots-Tag HTTP header

The X-Robots-Tag allows you to control how individual pages are indexed in Google. Using the HTTP header you can define these settings, as needed when you create individual pages in HTML.

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XHTML

eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language. A language which reformulates HTML 4.0 in XML syntax.

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Yelp

Founded in 2004, Yelp has become a dominant player in the world of local business reviews. Most local business owners will wish to create a Yelp profile. Yelp has earned both considerable popularity and a measure of criticism for marketing practices which have resulted in legal settlements.

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Yandex

Yandex is a technology and Internet services company in Russia. It is the most popular website and search engine in Russia, with traffic close to or surpassing Google.Yandex started as a Russian search program for MS-DOS called Arkadia, written by Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky. In 1997, they launched the search engine Yandex.ru and today offer search and other services.

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Yahoo! Local

The local business listing center of Yahoo.com. As of 2020, it is being managed through a Yext.com partnership.

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YMYL

YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life" pages and is comprised of pages that are important enough that, were they low-quality, they could have a potential negative impact on a person's life, income, or happiness. As a general rule, the pages that Google requires to be written by experts are known as YMYL pages. Google thinks of the following categories as examples of YMYL pages: Shopping or financial transaction pages: webpages that allow users to make purchases, transfer money, pay bills, etc. online (such as online stores and online banking pages).Financial information pages: webpages that provide advice or information about investments, taxes, retirement planning, home purchase, paying for college, buying insurance, etc. Medical information pages: webpages that provide advice or information about health, drugs, specific diseases or conditions, mental health, nutrition, etc. Legal information pages: webpages that provide legal advice or information on topics such as divorce, child custody, creating a will, becoming a citizen, etc. News articles or public/official information pages important for having an informed citizenry: webpages that include information about local/state/national government processes, people, and laws; disaster response services; government programs and social services; news about important topics such as international events, business, politics, science, and technology; etc. Please use your judgment and knowledge of your locale. Keep in mind that not all news articles are necessarily considered YMYL. Other: there are many other topics that you may consider YMYL, such as child adoption, car safety information, etc. When it comes to these pages, Google has incredibly high page quality rating standards. This is Google's effort to protect Google users from low-quality complex content that doesn't possess the needed levels of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

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Yodle

Founded in 2005, Yodle offers a paid lead generation and advertising service to local businesses.

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YouTube

A video sharing platform owned by Google and cited as the second largest search engine in the world. Local business owners may invest in the development of video content which can be published via YouTube as a social media tactic and form of advertising.

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YP.com

An Internet Yellow Pages website to which local business listings can be added. See also: IYP (Internet Yellow Pages), citation

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Zomato

A major source of international reviews for the restaurant industry. Zomato is an Indian restaurant search and discovery service founded in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. It currently operates in 24 countries, including Australia and United States.As of November 2021, Zomato has stopped almost all its international businesses, including the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Singapore and now Lebanon. Zomato has identified three geographical segments as reportable segments, as per Zomato's quarterly financial statements released on November 10.The geographical segments comprise:I) India2) United Arab Emirates (UAE)3) Rest of the World (ROW) (such as Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, USA, Lebanon, Turkey, Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Qatar, Ireland) Link:https://www.businessinsider.in/business/corporates/news/zomato-has-closed-all-international-operations-in-uk-us-singapore-and-lebanon/articleshow/87639773.cms

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Zagat

A business rating service purchased by Google in 2011. Zagat ratings on a 30-point scale are currently displayed as a component of local listing data in Google's search results. In March of 2018, Google sold Zagat to Infatuation, the restaurant recommendation website, for an undisclosed amount.

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Zero-Shot Learning

The capability of an AI model to correctly perform tasks it has never explicitly been trained on. This is particularly relevant to models like GPT, which can generate responses to prompts they have never seen before based solely on patterns learned during their initial pre-training.

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Headless BI

Headless BI (business intelligence) is the architectural model where the need to properly define business concepts so all stakeholders can get the same results when querying a database, regardless where they are making the request from.

‘Headless’ simply means ‘without a presentation layer’ —A.K.A, no front-end. In the background, a headless BI essentially separates the back-end (i.e., modeling and semantic layers) from the front-end (i.e., visualization layer). This makes the former available to multiple front-ends through an API, which makes your data more reliable and consistent across all of your business applications.

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